Adam Leaver

Adam Leaver is Professor in Accounting & Society and Director of the Centre for Research on Accounting and Finance in Context (CRAFIC). Prior to that he was Professor in Financialization and Management at the University of Manchester.

Adam’s primary research interest is in the financialization of the firm. His recent work examines the dimensions of time and space in accounting and finance across a number of projects: A first examines the role of the accounting regime in facilitating higher shareholder distributions by allowing managers to pull income forward in time.

A second explores the tension between an accounting regime which discounts the future, and an impending ecological disaster whose costs are exponential; and whether it is possible to reimagine the temporality of financial reporting to bring forward green investments.

A third analyses and visualises the changing social networks within financial services across space and time. A fourth tries to understand the different calculative frames and speeds of accumulation in city-region development.

Adam is interested in novel methodological combinations which allow social-constructivist such as forensic follow-the-money accounting and social network analysis to explore His work appears in leading international peer-reviewed journals including Work, Employment & Society, British Journal of Management, Organization, Economy & Society, Critical Perspectives in Accounting, Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy and The Journal of Cultural Economy.

Adam currently holds an ESRC open call grant to investigate Manchester as a ‘centripetal city’ and a Luminate grant to examine audit failure and audit reform. He was also ISRF Political Economy Research Fellow 2017-18.