TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping Tax Compliance
T2 - Assemblages, Distributed Action and Practices: A New Way of Doing Tax Research
AU - Boll, Karen
PY - 2014/7
Y1 - 2014/7
N2 - Tax compliance denotes the act of reporting and paying taxes in accordance with the tax laws. Current social science scholarship on tax compliance can almost entirely be divided into behavioural psychology analyses and critical tax studies. This article, which presents two cases of how tax compliance is constructed, challenges the explanatory reaches of today's social science approaches, arguing that an alternative approach to understanding tax compliance is worthwhile exploring. This other choice of approach, inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), adopts a more practice-oriented focus that studies tax compliance where it takes place as well as what it is made of. Consequently, this article argues that tax compliance is a socio-material assemblage and that complying is a distributed action. The article concludes by highlighting how an ANT approach contributes to the further theoretical development of social science studies of taxation.
AB - Tax compliance denotes the act of reporting and paying taxes in accordance with the tax laws. Current social science scholarship on tax compliance can almost entirely be divided into behavioural psychology analyses and critical tax studies. This article, which presents two cases of how tax compliance is constructed, challenges the explanatory reaches of today's social science approaches, arguing that an alternative approach to understanding tax compliance is worthwhile exploring. This other choice of approach, inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), adopts a more practice-oriented focus that studies tax compliance where it takes place as well as what it is made of. Consequently, this article argues that tax compliance is a socio-material assemblage and that complying is a distributed action. The article concludes by highlighting how an ANT approach contributes to the further theoretical development of social science studies of taxation.
KW - Accountability
KW - Public sector
KW - Tax compliance
KW - Actor–network theory
U2 - 10.1016/j.cpa.2013.03.002
DO - 10.1016/j.cpa.2013.03.002
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1045-2354
VL - 25
SP - 293
EP - 303
JO - Critical Perspectives on Accounting
JF - Critical Perspectives on Accounting
IS - 4-5
ER -