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This research aims to examine and understand the rationales and modalities behind the use of disclosure before, during and after a corporate governance scandal involving CPA Australia (CPAA).

Data beyond CPAA's annual reports were collected, such as news articles, media releases, an independent review panel (IRP) report, and the Chief Operating Officer's letter to members. These disclosures were manually coded and analysed through the word counts and word trees in NVivo. This study also relied on Norbert Elias' conceptual tool of power games among networks of actors – figurations – to model the scandal as a power game between the old Board, the press, concerned members, the IRP and the new Board. This study analysed the data to reveal a collective and in fieri power balance that changed with the phases of the scandal.

A mix of voluntary, involuntary, requested and absent disclosures was important in triggering, managing and ending the CPAA scandal. Moreover, communication and disclosure fulfilled a constitutive role since both: mobilised actors, enabled coordination among actors, contributed to pursuing shared goals and influenced power balances. Such a constitutive role was at the heart of the ability of coalitions of figurations to challenge and restore the powerful status quo.

This research introduces to accounting studies the collective and in fieri dimensions of power from figurational theory. Moreover, the research sheds new light on using voluntary, involuntary, requested and absent disclosures before, during and after a corporate crisis.

This paper aims to examine the current practice of reporting on translation issues in qualitative, interdisciplinary accounting research. Based on an analysis of the methodological consideration of the translation of quotations from non-English interviews and additional interviews with experienced researchers, the authors aim to develop recommendations for the reporting on such translation procedures in future accounting research relying on interviews not conducted in English.

The analysis is based on papers published in four highly ranked interdisciplinary accounting journals: Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ), Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management (QRAM). The subjects of the analysis are publications of non-English-speaking researchers who conducted non-English interviews and therefore were confronted with translation issues when attempting to get published in these English-language journals. Additionally, to gain deeper insights into reporting decisions on language and translation issues, the authors conducted interviews with experienced researchers in the field of qualitative, interdisciplinary accounting research whose mother tongue is not English. The authors combine these empirical insights with current developments in translation studies.

As suggested by translation studies, translation is an act of sense making and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore is a complex task that needs to be carried out with caution. However, the findings suggest that in current interdisciplinary, qualitative accounting research, the reporting of language and translation issues, especially with regards to the translation of quotations from interview data, have so far received only limited attention. The authors therefore call for more awareness of and sensibility toward dealing with language and translation issues, which should be reflected in more transparent reporting on translation processes to support the credibility and authenticity of qualitative accounting studies based on non-English interviews.

This paper is limited to the reporting on the methodological consideration of translating quotations from non-English interviews in papers published in AAAJ, AOS, CPA and QRAM between 2004 and 2015. For future accounting research that relies on such interviews, the authors call for more transparency and provide specific recommendations. This in turn should strengthen the awareness that language and translation are factors to be considered and reported.

This paper is the first to develop recommendations for the reporting of translation processes in accounting research studies, which are based on interviews not led in the English language.

The main purpose of this research is to figure out the most effective determinants that play a vital role in enhancing the effectiveness of the internal Sharīʿah audit in the Islamic banking industry.

This paper reviews the existing literature to build comprehensive knowledge that would assist in determining the main factors that impact on the effectiveness of Sharīʿah audit in Islamic banks.

This research proposes a conceptual framework of factors that impact on Sharīʿah audit effectiveness in IBs based on previously published studies. The proposed framework includes external and internal factors as well as internal Sharīʿah audit structure, process and requirements.

First, the regulators need to provide a detailed framework for Sharīʿah audit which covers the main requirements for effective Sharīʿah governance. Second, Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) need to pay more attention to following the Sharīʿah audit process in order to achieve the objective of effective Sharīʿah governance. Finally, the dearth of empirical research on the role and effectiveness of Sharīʿah audit in Islamic banking highlights the need to develop an appropriate methodology to enhance the study of the effectiveness of Sharīʿah governance practices.

The Sharīʿah ensures compliance with its rules and regulations and enhances the soundness and credibility of the Islamic finance industry. This study identifies a number of issues that require further investigation in order to establish a better system of Sharīʿah audit and to identify the factors that affect Sharīʿah auditing practices. This paper is unique in covering the main elements that have influence on the effectiveness of Sharīʿah audit and proposes them in one framework.

While women are increasingly in senior positions in accountancy firms, a century after gaining entry to this once exclusively male field, they are still struggling to achieve career success. The concept of possible selves and a model of career crafting are activated in an analysis of how a set of New Zealand professional accountants have pursued their careers. This paper aims to focus on how people actively craft career selves in the context of organisational and gendered constraints, some of which are self-imposed, and therefore, can be modified and revised.

Interviews with 36 male and female accounting professionals in New Zealand – 21 working in private firms and 15 in academia identify how careers are shaped by contexts, cultural understandings of gender, organisational structures within which accountants are located and wider environmental factors.

Women accountants in this study are both agential and responsive to a range of constraints they encounter. These women challenge the notion that professional achievement requires single minded allegiance to a career; their strategic career crafting demonstrates how career and family commitments are not irreconcilable but can be skilfully integrated to nurture multiple selves. Their strategies are considered alongside those of a comparable set of male accountants.

This paper contributes to the literature on possible selves and the complexity of gendered lives through the application of a career crafting matrix to explore how accounting professionals forge careers and construct multiple selves.

The purpose of this polyphonic paper is to report on interdisciplinary discussions on the state-of-the-art and future of public sector accounting research (PSAR). The authors hope to enliven the debates of the past and future developments in terms of context, themes, theories, methods and impacts in the field of PSAR by the exchanges they include here.

This polyphonic paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach. It brings into conversation ideas, views and approaches of several scholars on the actual and future developments of PSAR in various contexts, and explores potential implications.

This paper has brought together scholars from a plurality of disciplines, research methods and geographical areas, showing at the same time several points of convergence on important future themes (such as accounting as a mean for public, accounting, hybridity and value pluralism) and enabling conditions (accounting capabilities, profession and digitalisation) for PSA scholarship and practice, and the richness of looking at them from a plurality of perspectives.

Exploring these past and future developments opens up the potential for interesting theoretical insights. A much greater theoretical and practical reconsideration of PSAR will be fostered by the exchanges included here.

In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the interdisciplinary research community interested in PSAR in various contexts. The discussion perspectives presented in this paper constitute not only a basis for further research in this relevant accounting area on the role, status and developments of PSAR but also creative potential for practitioners to be more reflective on their practices and also intended and united outcomes of such practices.

This paper aims to examine the existing practices and pertinent issues affecting Islamic banks and their customers in abandoned housing projects (AHPs) to ensure compliance with Sharīʿah and statutory requirements.

This study employs the qualitative research method using the inductive approach to analyze both primary and secondary data and sources. Data collection involved a series of semi-structured interviews with five volunteering Islamic banks and a representative of Abandoned Property Owners Association Malaysia (Victims). Statutory acts, regulatory policies, guidelines, directives and standards were also analyzed.

The result indicates developer’s default, underlying contracts, regulatory arbitrage and bureaucracy, attitudinal disposition of customers and sell-then-build approach as major factors of AHP’s conundrum.

This study has suggested both short- and long-term solutions based on the principles of justice, public interests and removal of hardship to resolve and effectively manage financial hardship indebtedness arising from housing abandonment. Further, part of the proposed solutions would also reshape housing development policies and home financing transactions.

The quest for this research demonstrated Islamic banking industry’s initiatives to find lasting solutions to perennial issues of AHPs.

In this paper, the authors explore racialisation through human-centric counter-accounts (counter-stories) to bring together critical race theory (CRT) and counter-accounting.

The authors utilise CRT to demonstrate the emancipatory role of counter-stories in (re)telling racialized narratives, specifically the narrative of asylum seekers who arrive by sea and are subjected to the inhumane and oppressive nature of the Australian government's policy of offshore immigration detention.

Counter-stories, as tools of accountability, can make visible oppressive forces and the hidden practices of racialized social practices and norms.

This paper emphasises that we are not in a post-racial world, and racialisation remains a fundamental challenge. We must continue to refute race as an ontological truth and strive to provide a platform for counter-stories that can spark or drive social change. This requires allies, including academics, to give that platform, support their plight, and offer avenues for change.

The authors introduce CRT as a theoretical tool for examining racialisation, opening space for a more critical confluence of accounting and race with potentially wide-reaching implications for our discipline. The paper also contributes to the limited accounting literature concerning asylum seekers, particularly in the use of counter-stories that offer a way of refuting, or challenging, the majoritarian/dominant narratives around asylum-seeking.

Motivated to know more about the internal means through which accountability for sustainability takes shape within organisations (in what ways and by whom), this paper aims to explore how accountability for sustainability is constructed within an organisation during a process of establishing a control system for sustainability.

This paper adopts a qualitative case study approach of a decentralised industrial group, operating mainly in Scandinavia, between 2017 and 2020. Both primary and secondary data are used (e.g. document analyses, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and site visits) to inform the findings and analysis.

The findings reveal a multi-faceted path towards accountability for sustainability that involves several concerns and priorities at organisational and individual levels, resulting in a separate sustainability control systems within each subsidiary company. Although hierarchical structures for accountability exist, socialising accountability activities are needed to (further) mobilise sustainable accounts.

Successful sustainable control systems require employees making sense of formalised accountability instruments (e.g. policies and procedures) to establish their roles and responsibilities in organisations.

This paper proposes socialisation processes as important for driving forward sustainability solutions.

This study elaborates on the internal accountability dynamic for the construction of sustainable accounts. Its novelty is built upon the interaction of hierarchical and socialising accountability forms as necessary for establishing a control system for sustainability. It furthermore illustrates the relationship between the external and internal pathways of accountability.

Current accounting practice tends to split environmental complexities into quantifiable, codified elements, producing codified simplifications of the “complex” in pursuit of environmental externalities. This has led to standardization, but has done little to motivate organizations to engage in more environmentally-aware behavior that transcends the coercive dimensions of codification. The work of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) can bring new insights and perspectives to social and environmental accounting (SEA). In discussing Humboldt's philosophy of understanding the interconnectedness between people, their contexts (cultures) and their environment, the authors contribute to the emerging SEA literature on notions of interconnectedness and the web of accountabilities. The authors also explore how a Humboldtian approach may help break through the current epistemological boundaries of SEA by combining accurate measurement with imagery to make the “complex” manageable whilst embracing interconnectedness and hermeneutics.

In this conceptual paper, the authors humbly draw on Humboldt's legacy and explore the underlying philosophical assumptions of Humboldtian science. The authors then contrast these with current SEA approaches in the literature and derive new insights into their intentionality and practical use.

Re-examining Humboldt's pioneering work enables us to pinpoint what might be missing from current SEA approaches and debates. Humboldt upheld an “ethics of precision,” which included both measurement accuracy and qualitative relevance, and combined hands-on scientific fieldwork with the aesthetic ideals and interconnectedness of the age of Romanticism. Drawing on Humboldtian science, the authors propose focusing on the interconnectedness of nature and humanity, embracing the qualitative and hermeneutical and including aesthetics and emotion in environmental visualizations.

The paper elucidates why and how Humboldtian science might inform, guide and enhance the emancipatory potential of SEA in the 21st century. Specifically, the authors discuss Humboldt's approach of linking accurate measurement with imagery to convey a sense of interconnectedness.

Looking at the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) and controlling based on complexity and system-theoretical deliberations, the authors aimed to derive a future outlook of the possible applications and provide insights into a future complementary of human–machine information processing. Derived from these examples, the authors propose a research agenda in five areas to further the field.

This article is conceptual in its nature, yet a theoretically informed semi-systematic literature review from various disciplines together with empirically validated future research questions provides the background of the overall narration.

AI is found to be severely limited in its application to controlling and is discussed from the perspectives of complexity and cybernetics. A total of three such limits, namely the Bremermann limit, the problems with a partial detectability and controllability of complex systems and the inherent biases in the complementarity of human and machine information processing, are presented as salient and representative examples. The authors then go on and carefully illustrate how a human–machine collaboration could look like depending on the specifics of the task and the environment. With this, the authors propose different angles on future research that could revolutionise the application of AI in accounting leadership.

Future research on the value promises of AI in controlling needs to take into account physical and computational effects and may embrace a complexity lens.

AI may have severe limits in its application for accounting and controlling because of the vast amount of information in complex systems.

The research agenda consists of five areas that are derived from the previous discussion. These areas are as follows: organisational transformation, human–machine collaboration, regulation, technological innovation and ethical considerations. For each of these areas, the research questions, potential theoretical underpinnings as well as methodological considerations are provided.