Many stakeholders require some form of post-crisis sensemaking to help them better understand what happened, and why. Through this lens, we review public inquiry oral evidence sessions with the incriminated company leaders from three major business failures in the UK. While the stated objective of these public inquiries was to ‘learn lessons’, we mobilize Harold Garfinkel’s writings on ceremonies of degradation to offer an alternative perspective. We identify and discuss the strategies employed by the denouncers intended to lower the targets’ identities in the social order. We find that the denouncers frequently rely on accounting-oriented challenges. Following this, we explore the company leaders’ responses as they attempt to resist the denunciation. We identify four key resistance strategies: reframing, recalibration, refocusing, and blame-shifting/-sharing. As part of their response, the denounced provide their own accounting-oriented counter-explanations, emphasising that their choices were consistent with professional norms. We discuss the implications of these findings and what they mean for the management and maintenance of social order in the wake of a financial scandal. Specifically, we point to the inherent ambiguity built into established accounting norms which become a key battleground in the fight for the preservation (or ritual destruction) of the target’s identity.

中文翻译：

---

危机后意义建构中的谴责和抵抗

许多利益相关者需要某种形式的危机后意义建构，以帮助他们更好地理解发生了什么以及为什么发生。通过这个视角，我们回顾了英国三大企业倒闭事件中受罪公司领导人的公开调查口头证据会议。虽然这些公开调查的既定目标是“吸取教训”，但我们借鉴哈罗德·加芬克尔关于降级仪式的著作来提供另一种观点。我们确定并讨论了谴责者所采用的旨在降低目标在社会秩序中的身份的策略。我们发现，谴责者经常依赖以会计为导向的挑战。接下来，我们探讨了公司领导人在试图抵制谴责时的反应。我们确定了四种关键的抵制策略：重新构建、重新校准、重新聚焦和推卸责任/分享。作为回应的一部分，被谴责者提供了他们自己的以会计为导向的反解释，强调他们的选择符合专业规范。我们讨论这些发现的含义，以及它们对金融丑闻后管理和维护社会秩序的意义。具体来说，我们指出既定会计准则中固有的模糊性，这些准则成为争取目标身份保存（或仪式性破坏）的关键战场。