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In this child–parent research study, three adolescents theorize their meaning-making experiences while engaged in exclusive online learning during a three-month stay-at-home mandate. The purpose of this study is to highlight youth-created understandings about their literacy practices during COVID-19 in order to expand possibilities for youth-generated theory.

This child–parent research builds upon a critical dialectical pluralist (CDP) methodology, which is a participatory research method that looks to privilege the child as a co-researcher at every stage of the inquiry. In this research study, the adolescents work together to explore what it means to create and learn alone and then with others via virtual platforms. Research team discussions initially were scaffolded by the parent–researchers, and the adolescents developed their analyses individually and together, and their words and insights situate the findings and conclusions.

The musical form of a motet provides a metaphor that three adolescents used to theorize their meaning-making experiences during the stay-at-home order. The adolescents determined that time, frustration, and space were overarching themes that captured the essence of working alone, and then together, in messy, orchestrated online ensembles.

In this youth-centric research paper, three adolescents create understandings of their meaning-making experiences during the stay-at-home order and work together to determine personal and pedagogical implications.

Early paradox research in organization theory contained a remarkable breadth of inspirations from outside disciplines. We wanted to know more about where early scholarship found inspiration to create what has since become paradox theory. To shed light on this, we engaged seminal paradox scholars in conversations: asking about their past experiences drawing from outside disciplines and their views on the future of paradox theory. These conversations surfaced several themes of past and future inspirations: (1) understanding complex phenomena; (2) drawing from related disciplines; (3) combining interdisciplinary insights; and (4) bridging discourses in organization theory. We end the piece with suggestions for future paradox research inspired by these conversations.

Maturana and Varela (1980, p. 78f) provided the following definition of autopoiesis: “An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.” This definition shows that for Maturana and Varela, autopoietic systems are systems that define, maintain, and reproduce themselves. The notion of machine that they employ in the definition might seem a bit misleading because we tend to think of machines as mechanistic and nonliving, but Maturana and Varela (e.g., 1987) in later publications have preferred to speak of autopoietic organizations.

This paper examines how accounting either contributes to or undermines worker resistance to unfair pay, thereby enhancing our current understanding of the emancipatory potential of accounting.

We apply Jacques Rancière's concept of politics and build on recent calls to introduce Rancière's work to accounting by analysing a case based on workers in an Australian supermarket chain who challenged their employer Coles over wage underpayments.

We find that in this case, accounting is, in part, a means to politics and a part of the police in Rancière's sense. More specifically, accounting operated within the established order to constrain the workers, but also provided workers with a resource for their political acts that enabled change.

This empirical research adds to Li and McKernan (2016) and Brown and Tregidga (2017) conceptual work on Rancière. It also contributes more broadly to emancipatory accounting research by identifying radical possibilities for workers' accounting to bring about change.

Based on critical theory and dialectical thought, discusses and outlines a framework for understanding corporate culture as corporate hegemony. First, offers the relevance of critical theory to the study of corporate culture as a managerial praxis and organizational discourse. Second, examines three aspects of the dialectics of corporate culture: the dialectical tensions between corporate and individual identity; the conflicting pressure for uniformity and diversity; and the dialectics of empowerment and disempowerment. Third, discusses the mechanisms for the hegemonic perpetuation of corporate culture by researchers and practitioners and for resisting a critical stance in the discourse of corporate culture. Fourth, and finally, the article examines possible ways for overcoming the problem of cultural hegemony in organization theory and praxis.

There is evidence of discontent with contemporary university education generally, and accounting education in particular. This paper examines some reasons for the discontent and suggests one way to address it, namely dialectic enquiry. The process of contradiction and reconciliation is at the heart of dialectic enquiry. From two opposing positions, dialectic enquiry requires a third position, or synthesis, to emerge which allows the participants to progress their exploration of an issue. The authors describe the introduction of dialectical enquiry in a university accounting course and discuss the potential learning improvements it can offer. The authors hope this paper will encourage others to introduce dialectical enquiry into their classrooms and report their findings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate accounting and performance reporting practices embraced in the midst of a pluralistic institutional environment of an emerging economy (EE), Zambia. The research is necessitated due to the increased presence and influence of donor institutions whose information needs may not conform to the needs of local citizens in many EEs.

The study draws on institutional pluralism and Ekeh’s post-colonial theory of “two publics” to depict pluralistic environments that are typical of EEs. Primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 33 respondents drawn from the main stakeholder groups involved in health service delivery including legislators, policy makers, regulators, healthcare professionals and health service managers. Data analysis took the form of thematic analysis which involved identifying, analysing and constructing patterns and themes implicit within the data that were deemed to address the study’s research questions.

Findings indicate that Zambia’s institutional environment within the health sector is highly fragmented and pluralistic as reflected by the multiplicity of both internal and external stakeholders. These stakeholder groups equally require different reporting mechanisms to fulfil their information expectations.

The multiple reporting practices evident within the health sector entail that the effectiveness of health programmes may be compromised due to the fragmentation in goals between government and international donor institutions. Rather than pooling resources and skills for maximum impact, these practices have the effect of dispersing performance efforts with the consequence of compromising their impact. Fragmented reporting equally complicates the work of policy makers in terms of monitoring the progress and impact of such programmes.

Beyond Goddard et al. (2016), the study depicts the usefulness of Ekeh’s theory in understanding how organisations and institutions operating in pluralistic institutional environments may be better managed. In view of contradictory expectations of accounting and performance reporting requirements between the civic and primordial publics, the study indicates that different practices, mechanisms and structures have to be embraced in order to maintain institutional harmony and relevance to different communities within the health sector.

The United Nations Guiding Principles locate human rights at the centre of the corporate social responsibility agenda and provide a substantial platform for the development of business and human rights policy and practice. The initiative gives opportunity and focus for the rethinking and reconfiguration of corporate accountability for human rights. It also presents a threat: the danger, as we see it, is that the Guiding Principles are interpreted and implemented in an uncritical way, on a “humanitarian” model of imposed expertise. The critical and radical democratic communities have tended to be, perhaps rightly, suspicious of rights talk and sceptical of any suggestion that rights and the discourse of human rights can play a progressive role. The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues from a radical perspective.

This paper uses insights taken from Jacques Rancière’s work to argue that there is vital critical potential in human rights. There is an obvious negativity to Rancière’s thought insofar as it conceives of the political as a challenge to the existing social order. The positive dimension to his work, which has its origins in his commitment to and tireless affirmation of the fact of equality, is equally important, if perhaps less obvious. Together the negative and positive moments provide a dynamic conception of human rights and a dialectical view of the relation between human rights and the social order, which enables us to overcome much of the criticism levelled at human rights by certain theorists.

Rancière’s conception of the political puts human rights inscriptions, and the traces of equality they carry, at the heart of progressive politics. The authors close the paper with a discussion of the role that accounting for human rights can play in such a democratic politics, and by urging, on that basis, the critical accounting community to cautiously embrace the opportunity presented by the Guiding Principles.

This paper has some novelty in its application of Rancière’s thinking on political theory to the problems of critical accounting and in particular the critical potential of accounting and human rights. The paper makes a theoretical contribution to a critical understanding of the relationship between accounting, human rights, and democracy.