Toward Dialogic Accounting? Public Accountants’ Assistance to Works Councils − A Tool Between Hope and Illusion / When Democratic Principles Are Not Enough: Tensions and Temporalities of Dialogic Stakeholder Engagement / Bringing the Ugly Back: A Dialogic Exploration of Ethics in Leadership Through an Ethno-narrative re-Reading of the Enron Case

Abstract

A consideration of dialogics within management and accountancy research is frequently thought of as a means of broadening narratives and the stakeholder groups who are able to participate in those narratives. Dialogics within social and environmental accounting and accountability research informs a dialogic theory of accounting that seeks to democratise and pluralise accounting (Bebbington et al. 2007; Brown 2009; Dillard and Vinnari 2019). What follows here is a review of dialogics within and across three academic papers. Each paper integrates a unique use of dialogics that offers potential to ‘ … generate more complex awareness of the entwined nature of organisational dialogues’ (Edwards, Hawkins, and Schedlitzki 2019, 748). Although contextually and demographically different, all three papers employ a dialogic analysis to consider accounts by different groups. The papers by Godowski, Negre, and Verdier (2019) and Passetti et al. (2019) explored the dialogic nature of the organisation through interviewing select stakeholder groups. Whilst the third paper by Edwards, Hawkins, and Schedlitzki (2019) takes a different dialogic approach, by re-reading accounts on the organisation, in order to explore constructions of ethical leadership through narratives.