ABSTRACT In considering the role critical accounting educators can play in social movements, this paper proposes an approach for engaging students in transformative accountability education grounded in community organising methodology and practice. Community organising seeks to build civil society’s relational power for collective action that holds power to account. In this paper, we outline the experiential practices through which we have engaged students in community organising, fostering deep and sustained engagement with transformative accountability. By collaborating with students and community partners on campaigns, we demonstrate how accounting and accountability can be taught differently and how we, as critical educators, can increase the civic impact of the business school and the university by contributing meaningfully to social movements. In this paper, we reflect on our experience developing and delivering community organising education and share the lessons learned for critical accounting education, including the value of co-creating accountability with students, and the impact of adopting a dialogic, practice-based approach to education.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the affective and epistemic tensions that emerge when critical scholars engage in social movements that are organised around care, love and regenerative principles. Situated at the intersection of activist scholarship, critical accounting and feminist affect theory, the paper contributes to debates on activist ethnography by foregrounding the emotional and ethical labour of critique within movement life. Drawing on a reflexive ethnographic account of my embedded involvement in a climate justice movement, framed through Ahmed’s (2004, 2012, 2021) work on complaint and emotional atmospheres, the paper examines how movements committed to emotional cohesion may struggle to accommodate critique, particularly when that critique disturbs a fragile sense of alignment. While traditions of activist scholarship call for proximity, care and political commitment, this paper complicates the assumption that solidarity and critique are always mutually reinforcing. It argues that, in some spaces, the desire to maintain relationality and harmony can foreclose reflexivity, rendering the critical scholar’s presence untenable. In doing so, the paper asks how scholars can remain present in spaces that may not be able – or willing – to hold the tensions their presence reveals and reframes withdrawal not as methodological failure but as a form of accountable disengagement.

ABSTRACT This article critically examines public school board reviews in Ontario, Canada, as tools for accountability, democratic governance, and anti-racist reform. Using qualitative document analysis of four reviews conducted between 2013 and 2019 – Near North, Toronto, York Region, and Peel District School Boards – the study analyzes responses to governance failures, financial mismanagement, and systemic racism. Informed by Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and critical democracy, findings show reviews rely on technocratic, procedural framings that reveal how neoliberal, technocratic accountability reforms fail to address systemic racism, reinforcing inequities. Anti-racist, community-centered, and relational accountability measures are required for critical, democratic transformation in schooling.

Sexual and reproductive health needs and rights continue to be not only unmet but actively deprioritized in humanitarian settings. This disproportionately exacerbates inequities in maternal and newborn health, leading to increased maternal morbidity and mortality. Poor maternal health outcomes often go unnoticed in emergency settings in which competing priorities mean that monitoring maternal morbidity and mortality is frequently excluded from the initial response. The World Health Organization's MPDSR (Maternal Perinatal Death Surveillance and Review) system is a widely accepted standard for monitoring maternal morbidity and mortality; however, it is not recommended for the acute phase-defined as the first 6 months-of a humanitarian crisis because of feasibility constraints. This highlights the need for adapted approaches for surveillance and response during acute humanitarian crises. As part of its focus on reproductive health in humanitarian settings, Médecins Sans Frontières adapted the MPDSR tool for Tigray, Ethiopia, in 2020 and has since implemented the tool in Sudan after war erupted in April 2023. Although doing so has involved challenges, the results have been instrumental in informing programming, even during complex emergencies. This clinical perspective describes the Médecins Sans Frontières experience implementing a R-MDSR (Rapid Maternal Death Surveillance and Review) system in Sudan during the early stages of the escalating 2023 crisis. This commentary offers a reflective and, at times, critical account of the implementation of R-MDSR and demonstrates the feasibility and role of the tool in driving timely, action-oriented interventions to improve maternal health in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

Revolt(ing) rituals: Critical accounting and the honesty we owe

Drawing on theories of secrecy and rituals, this ethnographic study examines how ethnic domination and resistance are organized through accounting and information control in West Malaysia’s fishing trade. We analyze the shift from the traditional bertaukey system, which linked Malay fishermen to Chinese merchants ( taukeys ) via paternalistic credit, to a “whispering market.” We demonstrate how Chinese taukeys used the traditional Tu’a Ledger to stage a ritual of transparency, rendering exploitative arrangements legitimate through ritual features of formality (which provides numbers an aura of objectivity), stereotypy (which uses standardized categories to limit questioning), condensation (which compresses complex relations into simple figures), and redundancy (which reaffirms authority through repeated entries). In response, Malay resistance constructed the “whispering market” as a platform for ritualized secrecy, strategically withholding and circulating information to create bargaining leverage. Taukeys counter this with ‘counter-secrecy’, employing ethnic cartels and gossip to neutralize uncertainty. The paper contributes to critical accounting by theorizing secrecy as a performative technology of power rather than a mere suspension of information. By distinguishing between transparency as a conjunctive ritual (creating apparent order) and secrecy as a disjunctive game (leveraging strategic uncertainty), we offer a framework for how accounting modulates the boundary between control and resistance. Ultimately, we illustrate why subaltern resistance can be both enabling and attritional.

This paper develops a critical accounting theory based on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, that goes beyond his well-known scheme of practices, institutions, internal goods and virtues to incorporate his hostility towards managerial capitalism and his ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’. It proposes that two distinctive aspects of MacIntyrean thought provide the conceptual apparatus for a critical accounting that can move beyond critique of the status quo and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, towards flourishing human communities. These aspects include, firstly, his support for a politics of local communities characterised by Aristotelian questioning and secondly, his commitment to an objective morality associated with human flourishing, that finds expression within well-ordered practices. The paper develops these by asking what the goods of accounting are, and what we can expect from good accountants. Postulating the common good of accounting as ‘transparency aiding understanding’, the paper explores how accounting can contribute by, for example, supporting a distributist political economy and serving the internal goods of other practices. It also draws attention to the very real possibility that our desires may be misdirected and that this may underpin many problematic contemporary accounting practices. The deleterious effects of contemporary compartmentalisation are also considered as a hindrance to the development of accountants as capable moral agents. The paper highlights ways in which these possibilities can be developed through further research.

Bonding with the machine: The empathy-accountability gap in human interactions with LLM-powered artificial therapists

The 1896 Bombay plague outbreak prompted the colonial government to recruit trained British nurses from England to serve the afflicted Indians of the Presidency. Studying this relatively under-explored aspect of British colonial nursing, this paper examines the politics of representation of the Western, non-military nurses serving the colonised Other through nineteenth-century periodical accounts and personal letters of a nurse stationed in Bombay. Owing to the popularity of British periodicals and the significant role they played in shaping public debates in the Metropole, periodical plague literature portrayed Western nurses as spokespersons for the Empire's benevolent rule in Bombay. Contrarily, the intimacy and confidentiality of letter-writing allowed nurses to offer a more nuanced and critical account of life and work in Bombay. The paper contends that the non-military Western nurse's medical career, mobility, and financial stability framed her multidimensional identity, which was further defined by the intersecting issues of race, class, gender and culture she encountered in Bombay. Comparing their varied portrayals in the periodicals and the letters, the paper argues that the politics of representation of women's lives were influenced by both their sociopolitical subjectivities and the narrative forms through which they articulated their experiences.

ABSTRACT This paper develops a critical account of how contemporary forms of territorial authority are being strategically reworked through the spatio-temporal design and deployment of Big-Tech cloud computing infrastructure. Using the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and drawing on archival analysis and interviews with former AWS employees, it traces how AWS developed and coordinated a portfolio of spatial infrastructural products, including sovereign regions, availability zones, local and wavelength zones, and outposts, to operate across multiple jurisdictions. The paper shows that AWS assembles its infrastructural forms into a coherent spatio-temporal strategy that allows it to manage jurisdictional reach, regulatory exposure, and geopolitical risk across its global footprint. In doing so, the paper argues that territory is increasingly performed as an adjustable parameter of infrastructural governance rather than a fixed jurisdictional container. Engaging with scholarhsip across poiltlical geogrpahy and sicence and technology studies, the paper contributes to debates on Big-Tech power, digital sovereignty, and the governance of global digital infrastructures.

Purpose This article investigates the persistence of slavery-like labour control in global supply chains (GSCs) despite proliferating frameworks of corporate accountability, human rights and ethical governance. It argues that the persistence of labour exploitation is not an institutional failure, but a structural feature of global capitalism sustained through despotic forms of power. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Bangladesh garment industry (BGI), the study combines grounded empirical analysis with the theorisation of despotism to reveal how slavery-like labour control is reproduced at the point of production. Findings The analysis identifies four interrelated modalities – market, political, cultural and managerial despotism – that together maintain coercive labour regimes. Market despotism reflects the disciplining force of global buyers' demands for speed and cost compression; political despotism emerges through a shadow state that fuses industrial and political power; cultural despotism normalises gendered subordination and managerial despotism enforces these logics through bodily, spatial and temporal control. These interlocking forms expose the limits of modern slavery disclosure regimes, which function as regulatory fictions that perform accountability while concealing violence deployed against marginalised workers. Originality/value The article reconceptualises despotism as a systemic configuration of power that links global capital to local governance, advancing critical accounting scholarship by demonstrating that eradicating modern slavery from the GSCs is not a reporting anomaly, but an accounting problem embedded in the organisation of production itself.

Abstract Public administration plays a fundamental role in accountability relationships between citizens and the State, but how these take shape in public encounters is remarkably understudied. Analysing relational dynamics within and around public encounters expands the relational perspective on accountability in public administration–challenging core assumptions of the principal-agent model underpinning studies of citizen-State accountability relationships. We conducted a critical-interpretivist ethnography of public encounters in the UK Tax Credits (TC) system and share findings from our Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis of multiple data sources, including 28 open interviews. We discuss four relational dynamics of account-giving–emerging from the interplay of neoliberal discourse, digital technologies, and communicative practices–that ‘reversed the accountability chain’. We demonstrate how claimants experiencing significant financial and emotional hardship, in their encounters with an unaccountable State, became accountable for their TC obligations and welfare. We explain these findings by mobilising interdisciplinary theory from critical accounting research on relational power to offer original conceptual and empirical insight into the interactive, dynamic, and emergent accountability relationships between citizens and agents of the State.

This paper examines the condition of partial development in which infrastructural provision in second-tier cities has become increasingly selective, creating new geographies of inequality for lower-middle-class migrants. The resulting precarity is not a by-product of growth but is state-engineered through a governing logic of infrastructural selectivity. The paper analyses the mechanisms that produce this condition. Findings reveal a bifurcated system where state investment in transport and subsidised housing is channelled towards prioritised New Town Initiatives (NTIs) at the expense of bottom-up self-urbanised peripheral entities. This institutionalised selectivity compels migrants into a range of everyday improvisations, navigating informal housing and transport markets to secure their livelihoods. By centring these bottom-up practices, the study offers a critical account of how partial development is governed and lived, contributing to debates on state entrepreneurialism, infrastructural governance and urban justice in China.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how middle managers in higher education institutions in South Africa and Northern Ireland navigate the complex and often contradictory demands of institutional transformation in post-conflict settings. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the study foregrounds the agency of mid-level leaders as they engage with top-down policies, intersecting identities, and deeply embedded institutional cultures. The concept of destructive interference is introduced as a lens to understand the challenges of promoting transformation in post-conflict higher education contexts. Participants’ narratives reveal that transformation is not a linear process, but a contested, discursive and affective one, shaped by ideological clashes, competing logics, and constraints. Three interrelated tensions are identified as destructive interference that impact middle-manager agency: university discursive structures that reproduce historically sedimented hierarchies; the perverse logic of leadership, in which performative change is rewarded over substantive engagement and stratified legacies of inequality that differentially position actors and (de)legitimise specific identities and experiences, depending on historically situated configurations of power. The study positions transformation as a historically situated and ideologically charged process. By centring the lived experiences of middle-managers, the paper offers a critical account of how institutions reproduce or transform inequality, centring managers' agency for transformation as one that navigates destructive interference while holding open possibilities for substantive transformation.

This article addresses a major challenge in circular economy accounting: assessing the social dimension, particularly social ties, which are often immaterial and difficult to capture. It examines a case study of how a local project managing organic waste and unsold goods fosters social ties in a priority urban neighborhood in France, and how these dynamics can be apprehended through an alternative qualitative accounting approach. The study draws on an ethnographic case of the MatOrGa project, combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews, discourse grounded analysis, and actor and flow mapping. Situated within counter-accounting and critical accounting, the research emphasizes social ties that extend beyond purely economic logic, spanning social, ecological, and economic dimensions. The new concept of counter-accounting utterances is introduced to describe empirical accounts that make visible practices, relationships, and social effects often overlooked in conventional accounting and sustainability reporting. The study shows how ethnography can function as a form of counter-accounting, producing qualitative representations of social impact that resist standardization. The findings advance social and sustainability accounting by offering a situated and reflexive approach to assessing the social impact of circular economy initiatives, while also opening the way for context-sensitive non-financial reporting.

While disability inclusion is promoted in many countries, policy reforms in France have shifted the conversation about anti-discrimination laws toward financial concerns by increasing financial penalties for non-compliance and developing various accounting techniques to reduce these penalties. In this article, we explore the unintended consequences of focusing on accounting in the design of disability laws, specifically, the commodification of disability inclusion. Through a qualitative study of disability inclusion in France, we show how state actors designed and interpreted the law to appeal to businesses through creating legal loopholes and strong financial incentives and explain how this encouraged the commodification of disability inclusion. We show how this commodification is detrimental to disabled workers and prevents substantive compliance with an existing quota. While scholarship has explored how companies managerialize the law, this article demonstrates how the state is complicit in this process. This article contributes to the literature at the crossroads of law, organizations, and critical accounting by showing some of the drivers and consequences of the commodification of inclusion at work. We demonstrate how translating legal mandates into accounting tools can be a central mechanism of managerialization, leading to the commodification of legal ideals.

In their essay ‘Indefinite Detention’, Judith Butler (p. 100) made the point that ‘the question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count ’ (Butler: 91, emphasis added ). This paper considers this vital issue in the format of a discussion between us as co-authors whose work speaks to the concerns of this special issue – precarity, mattering and marginalization. The paper formed in response to a series of questions put to us by the guest editors inviting us to share our respective insights from our different perspectives and backgrounds, drawing from critical management and organization studies, critical accounting, post-colonial and feminist thinking, which we provide below.

This article examines how organizational accountability creates disabling conditions for speech-impaired workers. While accountability is often assumed to be a neutral principle of recognition and responsibility, we show how it privileges fluency and phononormativity, marginalizing those who communicate differently. Using a combination of sensory ethnography, interviews and analysis of technological devices, we explore how speech-impaired workers navigate accountability through assistive technologies, artificial voices, and human-nonhuman coalitions. Drawing on crip theory and its understanding of the cyborg, we identify three crip challenges to accountability: speech crip time (non-normative temporalities of communication), crip organizational selves (hybrid, interdependent subjectivities), and crip phononormativity (the tension between standardized and customized voice technologies). These challenges expose the ableist assumptions embedded in accountability regimes and open up alternative ways of communicating and being recognized in organizations. We propose three crip-informed tactics to counteract disabling conditions in organizational accountability: challenging speech chrononormativity, listening across identitarian boundaries, and denaturalizing social norms of communication. Our findings contribute to critical accounting and organization studies by rethinking accountability beyond ableist paradigms, embracing opacity, interdependence, and non-conformity as organizational values.

In this essay, the author explores the paradox of numbers in the field of business ethics. Although quantitative practices are ubiquitous, they remain poorly theorized as ethical objects. Historically, the French critical tradition has focused on the power of numbers in matters of governmentality, social control, and financialization. However, quantification can also support social justice objectives, as demonstrated by initiatives that promote human rights or the Sustainable Development Goals. The uncontrolled proliferation of indicators (especially for Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG) presents important ethical choices: what to measure, how to do so, and for what purposes? This essay calls for the development of theoretical frameworks adapted to the materiality of quantitative practices and highlights the crucial role that critical accounting can play in the development of these ethical tools.

In this essay, the author explores the paradox of numbers in the field of business ethics. Although quantitative practices are ubiquitous, they remain poorly theorized as ethical objects. Historically, the French critical tradition has focused on the power of numbers in matters of governmentality, social control, and financialization. However, quantification can also support social justice objectives, as demonstrated by initiatives that promote human rights or the Sustainable Development Goals. The uncontrolled proliferation of indicators (especially for Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG) presents important ethical choices: what to measure, how to do so, and for what purposes? This essay calls for the development of theoretical frameworks adapted to the materiality of quantitative practices and highlights the crucial role that critical accounting can play in the development of these ethical tools.