Let's have a relook at accountability

Abstract

2020 Distinguished Accounting Academic Keynote Address presented at the Annual British Accounting and Finance in April 2022, University of Nottingham.This paper examines how Gloria Agyemang, the BAFA Distinguished Accounting Academic award winner of 2020, has studied accountability in her work. It does this by analysing her previous research contributions to public sector accountability, nongovernment organisational accountability, and accountability in other contexts such as social and environmental accounting as well as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It argues that in the study of accountability, context and the need for accountability to several stakeholders is extremely important; but accountability contexts and the stakeholders need to include those who are hidden in the recesses of everyday life. The paper draws on a theoretical framework that Rached (2016) refers to as “coordinates of accountability”, which by providing a minimalist definition of accountability facilitates an expanded analysis to broaden and deepen accountability research. It argues for responsible scholars to be engaged with historical, contemporary, and societally critical issues and to employ counter accounting methods to reexamine accountability.