Maintaining and extending hegemony: The politics of accounting standard setting

•This paper unpacks the politics of the IASB’s extension to IFRS for SMEs.•Alternatives and demands threaten the IASB and expose political contingencies.•To maintain and extend hegemony the IASB claimed SME standard setting. This paper offers a critical analysis of the politics of accounting standard setting. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) hold an increasingly monopolistic role in accounting regulation across the globe, and make claims to transparency, neutrality and superior expertise to legitimize their hegemonic position. In 2009 the IASB extended their standard setting beyond listed entities to the International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-Sized Entities (IFRS for SMEs). This paper explores the political antagonisms surrounding this extension, finding that the IASB undertook this project to block counter articulations from several bodies. To unpack the politics of the IASB’s extension this paper draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony and Glynos and Howarth’s political logics, to argue that the IASB maintain and extend hegemony by dismissing and blocking alternatives through the rhetoric of superior expertise, which ultimately enables them to extend ideologies of advanced financial capital and capital markets to new spaces.