{"title":"Revolt(ing) rituals: Critical accounting and the honesty we owe","authors":"Erin J. Twyford","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102845","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper interrogates the condition of critical accounting scholarship through Albert Camus’s notion of the absurd: the clash between our longing for meaning and the institutional indifference that greets it. I argue that we have become Sisyphean academics, pushing the boulder of emancipatory critique up the mountain of academic legitimacy, only to see it roll back down through metrics, rankings, and performative rituals. This absurdity is structured by impact factors, careerism, and a research economy that both demands critique and disarms it. Drawing on debates within the field, I suggest that critical accounting risks devolving into an ouroboros, endlessly consuming its own critique while retreating into narcissism and ritualised lament. Against this, I propose we engage in ‘lucid revolt’, a posture of honesty grounded in the refusal to look away. In an era where truth has become contested terrain, honesty becomes a form of resistance. This means naming what power seeks to obscure and recognising that even small acts of resistance matter. Revolt here is less about the promise of transformation than about learning to love the boulder. To persist with care and solidarity, to carry its weight together, and to find meaning in the act of pushing even when the summit will never be reached.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102845"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146076972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the enactment of intellectual bridges between epistemic communities","authors":"Yves Gendron, Christine Cooper","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102861","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102861","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This editorial relates to the development of intellectual bridges between two epistemic communities that are geographically distant, but both engaged in the production and dissemination of qualitative and critical accounting research. One community is based in Latin America, self-recognized as a qualitative accounting research epistemic community. The other one is primarily associated with the Global North and is often called interdisciplinary accounting research, of which the journal <em>Critical Perspectives on Accounting</em> is one of the significant institutions. These two communities developed relatively independently from one another, until the mid-2010s. This special issue editorial reflects on the formation and enactment of formal intellectual bridges between these two epistemic communities. This special issue came into being in the wake of this dynamic. We reflect on the nature of intellectual bridges, particularly the benefits and drawbacks arising from the travel of ideas along these bridges. One of our main points is that establishing intellectual bridges between these communities inevitably carries the threat of neocolonialization. In other words, to what extent is it realistic for bridging projects to aim for an ecology of knowledges which is committed to fairness and equality between the communities involved? On the one hand, we maintain that despite their fragility, intellectual bridges may help rejuvenate and enrich the epistemic communities involved. Each community may then be exposed to a web of similarities and differences that provide ideas for introspection. Bridges may also generate a meaningful and sincere dialogue between the communities concerned. Yet, on the other hand, we should not be naïve; while bridges can facilitate the rapprochement of different communities, they may also ironically contribute to their distancing, as neocolonialism can subtly infiltrate intercommunity relations and reproduce long-standing epistemic structures of domination.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102861"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148183632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A ‘Utopia of the present’: MacIntyrean thought as critical accounting theory","authors":"Andrew West","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102824","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102824","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>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.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102824"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145584503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Independent directors in family PLCs in the majority world − insights from a Middle Eastern country","authors":"Souod Alazemi , Shahzad Uddin","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102827","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102827","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper critically examines the concept of board member ‘independence’ by drawing on Max Weber’s notion of traditionalism to theorise its practice in non-Western or Majority World contexts. Using family-owned public limited companies (PLCs) in Kuwait as a case study, we explore how cultural norms, political-economic histories, and kinship-based authority structures shape the recruitment, roles, and influence of supposedly independent committee members.</div><div>Based on qualitative data − including interviews, archival materials, and field observations − we find that independence is largely symbolic. Independent members are often selected through Diwaniya-based social networks and valued more for their loyalty and discretion than for providing impartial oversight. The relationship between family owners and independent members reflects Weber’s chief–subject model, with board processes grounded in personalist logics rather than the institutional rationalities of Western capitalist governance.</div><div>This study contributes to the corporate governance literature by rethinking independence through a cultural-political lens and calls for policies and research that promote context-sensitive, decolonial approaches to governance in the Majority World.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102827"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145584504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reorienting critical accounting scholarship in the era of collapse","authors":"Susan O’Leary","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102846","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2026.102846","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper proposes that as climate collapse accelerates, the normative horizons underpinning critical accounting scholarship – reform, transformation and hope – are increasingly out of step with planetary and political realities. As a result, it argues for a reorientation of critical accounting scholarship in light of systemic breakdown. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary literature in environmental collapse, decolonial theory and climate activism, including those from the Global South and Indigenous perspectives, the paper proposes a collapse-aware framework to rethink the purpose of critique. Through this lens, existing concerns in the accounting literature – for example, those focused on institutional reform/critique or the construction of alternatives to prevailing dominant systems of power – appear in a different light. Rather than being underpinned by temporal assumptions that presume a still-recoverable future, a collapse-aware perspective reframes the purpose of critique, not as a pathway to systemic change but as a form of ethical engagement amidst unravelling. The paper outlines a set of practices for collapse-aware scholarship, arguing that if the task is no longer to save the system, we must remain accountable within its disintegration. This is not a call for despair or disengagement but a proposal to inhabit our scholarship differently: to stay with the trouble, hold space for grief, amplify refusal and act in solidarity with those bearing the weight of collapse. In doing so, the paper offers a renewed vision of critical accounting – one not grounded in hope for transformation but in responsibility to the world as it is.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102846"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146173309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Normalising individual responsibility? A gendered study of retirement planning in a financialised system","authors":"Roberta Adami , Liam Foster","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102839","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The individualisation of risk and responsibility for retirement planning, with the requirement to make ‘good saving decisions’, is an essential feature of the financialisation of pensions. Individuals are encouraged to become active financial subjects to ensure their own economic welfare. Additionally, concepts such as individual responsibility, risk management and financial planning are presented as moral obligations. This narrative has become an intrinsic part of neoliberal policies implemented over the last four decades in the UK, aimed at further privatising retirement. This paper examines the views and attitudes of young women towards individual responsibility and risk, within the context of retirement planning in the UK. The study presents a gendered analysis of financialisation of the pension system. It draws from the concept of ‘individual investor’ to critically discuss its shortcomings, using interviews and a focus group with young British women. The findings show how deep-rooted the idea of personal responsibility is amongst respondents, but also that the concept of managing risk and uncertainty is not adequately recognised, despite its centrality to investment practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102839"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145737279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey , Luis Adrián Mora Rodríguez , Isabel Pedraza Acosta
{"title":"Dynamics of territorialization: calculable spaces and the “coloniality of dwelling” within Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting (1984–2006)","authors":"Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey , Luis Adrián Mora Rodríguez , Isabel Pedraza Acosta","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102826","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102826","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines how accounting devices can emerge from popular political struggles and serve as tools for emancipation in a setting characterized by colonial spatial domination. Based on the concept of <em>coloniality of dwelling</em> (Mansilla et al., 2019), we explore how Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budgeting (1989–2006) enabled social movements to confront the territorial logics imposed by coloniality and thus to produce an accounting territorialisation from below, thereby strengthening their capacities for emancipation. This work complements studies on accounting territorialisation by showing how the spread of calculable spaces can arise from popular struggle and is not solely due to the influence of actors with regulatory authority and expert knowledge (<span><span>Mennicken and Miller, 2012</span></span>, <span><span>Miller, 1992</span></span>, <span><span>Miller and Power, 2013</span></span>, <span><span>Free et al., 2019</span></span>, <span><span>Martinez et al., 2022</span></span>). Furthermore, we show how, in this case, accounting tools became instruments of collective territorial vindication and transformation. Our analysis relies on archival materials and historical data that demonstrate how accounting helped build political territories and reshape geographic space. By situating this case within decolonial thinking and critical accounting studies, we reflect on the conditions of possibility for accounting to participate in emancipatory projects when it is appropriated by social movements that resist colonial patterns of space and power.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102826"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145617323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Accounting for the cartel","authors":"Miguel Gil","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102835","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102835","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While research on accounting in cartel contexts has largely focused on money laundering, limited attention has been given to how accounting both shapes and is shaped by broader organisational and symbolic dimensions. Informed by postcolonial theory, this study critically examines the role of accounting in structuring practices and shaping representations of violence within cartel activities. Drawing on interviews with individuals exposed to cartel activity in Mexico, as well as a wide range of news articles, the analysis reveals that accounting is systematically embedded in cartel activities, delineating the boundaries between legitimacy and illegality through framing and routinising. The findings also show that mimicry is used to adopt and subvert dominant organisational forms, while the blending of formal accounting language and local practices gives rise to hybridity, complicating conventional interpretations of violence and economic order. Adopting a postcolonial lens deepens the understanding of accounting in illicit settings, highlighting its central role in shaping contested identities and selectively determining the visibility or invisibility of violence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102835"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145685030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Morality as performance: Studying the rise of performance measurement in citizen governance through the case of Chinese Social Credit System","authors":"Afshin Mehrpouya , Julien Malaurent","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102837","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, relying on a qualitative study of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), we explore how performance measurement is being mobilized to enact a moral regime to guide citizens’ behavior. Basing our analysis on governmentality studies in general but also studies of governmentality regimes in post-reform China, we conceptualize the techniques of government mobilized in SCS to normalize traditional civic value of trust (Chengxin) amalgamated with market value of creditworthiness. We discuss how under SCS, three visual regimes are at work, the Panoptic, the Synoptic and what we term the Alloptic. The first, the Panoptic gaze involves algorithmic and diffuse surveillance of citizens’ behavior backed by a regime of reward and punishment, the second, the Synoptic gaze is about guiding the gaze of citizens to the stories and images of model citizens, and the third, what we term the ‘Alloptic’ gaze others the “untrustworthy” citizens under the shaming gaze of the mobile, unknown community shadowing them in their physical movements and online. We discuss how algorithmic governance enables such a coming together of the three gazes in a dynamic and highly uncertain nexus of visibility wherein the contours of the regime, and the purveyor of the othering/shaming gaze are changing and unknown. We discuss the implications of our study for analysis of governance in other settings – especially considering the rise of illiberalism in conjunction with new technologies or what has been termed “techno-fascism” particularly in the US, but also throughout the world.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102837"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black tax – stories of familial financial support in Cape Town","authors":"Malilimalo Phaswana, Gizelle D. Willows","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102838","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102838","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Black Tax is a common phenomenon in South Africa, where individuals provide financial support to their family members. This practice is often viewed as being detrimental to Black middle-class South Africans’ financial wellbeing and upward social mobility. This study offers an alternative perspective by examining the cultural and socioeconomic factors that influence the financial support landscape. African values of <em>Ubuntu,</em> which emphasise collectivism and mutual solidarity<em>,</em> play a key role in facilitating familial support and providing fulfilment for those who can provide help. The high levels of poverty and inequality in South Africa are also shown to necessitate familial support where the state does not provide adequate assistance. This study employs the oral history method to obtain the perspectives of familial financial support from five families of the amaXhosa tribe in Cape Town. Through multiple perspective interviews, in-depth accounts of the experiences and events that shaped financial support flows within these families are gathered and presented. Results show that cultural influences and socioeconomic factors shaped each family in unique ways across common themes that are representative of Black South Africans. This study contributes to the literature by providing a South African perspective to the global conversation, which is key because of the country’s notable history of colonialism and apartheid.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":"103 ","pages":"Article 102838"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145790698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}