The accountability assembly as a counter-accounting performance

Rebecca Warren, Anne Steinhoff, Konstantinos Roussos and Jason Glynos

Chapter 22 in Handbook of Accounting in Society, 2024, pp 310-327 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores how accountability is performed within Citizens UK’s framework of community organising. Drawing on our experience of community organising, we unpack an important instance of community organising action called the ‘accountability assembly’, in which community leaders secure commitments from powerholders in response to their demands and, in doing so, establish benchmarks against which to hold them to account. We contribute to critical accounting literature by characterising the accountability assembly as a ‘counter-accounting performance’. We do so by appealing to, and developing, the notion of ‘counter-accounting’, as elaborated in critical accounting literature, whose democratic potential we probe by drawing on the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Their political discourse theory furnishes us with concepts such as hegemony and agonistic democracy, which we argue enable us to foreground in a revealing and critical way the transformational, dramatic, and democratic character of accountability assemblies as a form of political practice.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Environment; Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803922003.00037 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21501_22

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().