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The purpose of this paper is to advance a critical realist perspective on performativity and use it to examine how novel conceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have performative effects.

To illustrate how the authors’ critical realist understanding of performativity can play out, the authors offer a field study of an Australian packaging company and engage in retroductive and retrodictive theorising.

In contrast to most prior accounting research, the authors advance a structuralist understanding of performativity that pays more systematic attention to the causal relationships that underpin performative tendencies. The authors explain how such tendencies are conditioned by pre-existing, social structures, conceptualised in terms of multiple, intersecting norm circles. The authors illustrate their argument empirically by showing how specific conceptions of CSR, centred on the notion of “shared value”, were cemented by the interplay between the causal powers embedded in such norm circles and how this suppressed alternative conceptions of this phenomenon.

The findings draw attention to the structural boundary conditions under which particular conceptions of CSR can be expected to become performative. Greater attention to such boundary conditions, denoting the social structures that reinforce and counteract performative tendencies, is required to further cumulative, yet context-sensitive, theory development on this topic.

The paper is the first to adopt a critical realist perspective on performativity in the accounting literature. This perspective strikes a middle path between the highly constructivist ontology, adopted in most accounting research concerned with performativity and realist criticisms of this ontological position for de-emphasising the influence of pre-existing, objective realities on performativity.

This paper aims to review the literature on the use of the notion of performativity and its related concepts in accounting research. The literature uses the term performativity in almost diametrically different ways, yet most papers assume that the meaning of the term is self-evident. We build on recent reviews of the notion of performativity and explicate the implicit tensions in the accounting literature, discovering a need to clarify how the accounting literature has explored the processes – how accounting becomes performative – and effects – what is performed – of accounting performativity. The paper develops suggestions for future theoretical and empirical research.

The authors have searched in six leading accounting journals (Accounting, Organizations and Society, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Management Accounting Research, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management) for the terms “performativity” and/or “performative” and/or “performable”. This yielded 289 results from which we distilled a core sample of 92 papers which substantially draw on the concept and explicate their use of the term.

The authors find that the accounting literature has paid almost equal attention to the conforming and amplifying effects of performativity but has mostly explored how conditions of performativity are built. Less attention has been paid to how accounting generates multiple worlds and how differences in these worlds are coordinated by accounting. Building institutions and searching for accounting incompleteness have been developed as the two main processes where accounting is made performative.

The paper develops avenues for future research, highlighting the potential for a deeper understanding of how the notion of performativity can be used. We do not advocate homogenizing the literature, instead exploring its fruitful tensions to discover a renewed interest in how accounting is constitutive of existing and/or new worlds. We illustrate this potential by reflecting on the debates about accounting incompleteness and the boundaries of accounting. The authors also suggest the potentials for concepts of performativity in studying emerging phenomena such as big data and sustainability and revisiting the ethics of using accounting as a social and organizational practice.

The literature review explicates differences in the use of the term performativity, which usually remain implicit in the literature. The study develops a framework that attends to both the processes – problematizing the conditions for performativity or not – and effects – conforming and amplifying – of performativity accounting studies have drawn upon, which clarifies how the accounting literature has mobilized the notion of performativity and the contributions the accounting literature has added. Further, the authors extend Vosselman’s (2022) review both in scope and nuance.

The purpose of this paper is to extend research on boundary making and breaking through alternative football clubs. These entities have borne out of the disappointment caused by the neoliberal turn of the football industry, which excluded traditional fans from being active actors and therefore call for study and generalization of specific forms of alternative accountability.

The study looks at emerging trends in the accounting and sport literature by drawing on two concepts that emerged in critical scholarship: critical performativity and critical dialogical accountability, with the aim of better understanding how these elements are developed and shaped within an alternative form of football organization. The focus on Football Club United of Manchester drives the ethnographic approach with data collected via participant observation, field-notes, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews.

The research shows that the pillars of the club's ethos, pushing its critical performative interventions toward setting new boundaries, are democratic governance and accountability, favoring participation and inclusion, and strictly linked to this, a responsibility to local communities. However, the study also highlights the difficulties of maintaining these boundaries when core values are threatened by degeneration.

The study makes a novel contribution to the field of accounting and sport, showing how an alternative football club adopts inclusive accountability systems that go beyond mainstream neoliberal practices. Such an inclusive approach can stimulate critical performativity, moving away from means-end rationality.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

The paper traces different foundational conceptions of performativity and then articulates and substantiates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. It advances one of these conceptions by producing a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

Seven conceptions of performative accountings are articulated: accounting as a (counter)performative illocution; accounting as a performative perlocution; accounting as a self-fulfilling prophecy; accounting as an overflowing frame; accounting as a controlled relational agency; accounting as a mediator; and accounting as an exclusionary practice. It is argued how a posthumanist understanding of accounting as an exclusionary practice turns accounting from a world-knowing practice into a world-making practice. As such, it should be called to account.

Posthumanist qualitative accounting research that conceives of accounting as an exclusionary practice focuses on how accounting is a material-discursive practice that intra-acts with other practices, and on how there is a power-performativity in the intra-actions that locally and temporarily (re)produces meaningful positions for subjects and objects and the boundaries between them.

A posthumanist understanding teaches practitioners to be attentive to and accountable for the exclusions that come with accounting or, more generally, with measurement. Accounting raises ethical concerns.

This paper articulates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity and makes the case for empirical non-anthropocentric examinations of accounting as an exclusionary practice.

This paper examines the influence of the normal science tradition, epitomized by the notion that “theory is king”, on contemporary accounting research and the epistemological tensions that may emerge as this idea is applied to particular ways of studying accounting. For illustrative purposes, the authors focus on research informed by actor-network theory (ANT) which can be seen as an “extreme case” in the sense that it is, in principle, difficult to reconcile with the normal science aspirations.

The paper offers an analysis based on a close reading of how accounting scholars, using ANT, theorize, and if they do engage in explicit theorizing, how they deal with the tensions that might emerge from the need to reconcile its epistemological underpinnings with those of the normal science tradition.

The findings of this paper show that the tensions between normal science thinking and the epistemological principles of ANT have, in a few cases, been avoided, as researchers stay relatively faithful to ANT and largely refrain from further theory development. However, in most cases, the tensions have ostensibly been ignored as researchers blend the epistemology of ANT and that of normal science without reflecting on the implications of doing so.

The paper contributes to emerging debates on the role of the normal science tradition in contemporary accounting research, and also extends recent discussions on the role of theory in accounting research inspired by ANT. The paper proposes three reasons for the observed blending of epistemologies: unawareness of tensions, epistemological eclecticism and various political considerations.

This paper aims to address the relationship between critical and mainstream international business (IB) research and discuss the ways forward for the former.

The paper empirically maps critical IB scholarship by analysing more than 250 academic articles published in critical perspectives on international business (cpoib) from 2005 to 2017. The paper also includes a citation analysis that uncovers how critical IB research is recognized and discussed in mainstream IB studies.

The extant critical IB research can be broken into five main topical clusters: positioning critical IB research, postcolonial IB studies, effects of international business activities, financialization and the global financial crisis and “Black IB” and corporate social responsibility. The citation analysis demonstrates that critical IB research is rarely recognized in mainstream IB academic outlets.

This paper is the first to empirically map critical IB research and to measure its impact on mainstream IB research. Based on these insights, as well as discussions of the more critical voices within mainstream IB studies and the debate over critical performativity in critical management studies, ways of developing critical IB research are examined.

Project studies analyse either managing practices or the temporal nature of project management, which leaves open a research gap: the temporality of managing practice. The paper demonstrates that performativity theory with a temporal perspective helps us to understand how managing a project organises limited temporal resources by aligning activities, deadlines or milestones to reach a goal in a given time.

The article utilises empirical data and grounded theory methodology. Ten interviews with project managers from two companies support empirically guided theory building and conceptual reasoning.

The article extends John Law's “modes of ordering” to a project-specific mode of temporal ordering. This mode of temporal ordering describes the underlying rationale of project managers who assign, order and materialise time to generate the temporal structure of the project.

The conceptual nature of the paper and its limited empirical data restrict the generalisation of the findings. The article's goal is to initiate further research and to offer a set of tools for such research.

The contribution links managing practice and temporality in a performativity approach. This link focusses the actual actions of the managers and contextualises them in the temporal flow of the project. Managing projects as a mode of temporal ordering describes how project managers enact temporal structures and how they themselves and their activities are temporally embedded.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how three core elements of critical management studies (CMSs), “de-naturalisation”, “reflexivity” and “(non)-performative intent”, can help expand the current debate in the supply chain management (SCM) field.

The authors used a systematic literature review to select 103 articles published in 12 high-ranking journals in the SCM field based on the Academic Journal Guide of the Chartered Association of Business Schools.

The findings of this study suggest that SCM studies can be narrowed down into four major CMSs themes: “power”, “ethics and environmental issues”, “diversity” and “working conditions”, but even these themes are still under-discussed and undertheorized in SCM. The literature the authors reviewed is more concerned with explaining these phenomena than questioning them and proposing new agendas. This paper, therefore, will discuss how these three core elements of CMS can help transform the “hidden” issues of SCM, which it will do by illustrating it in the context of buyer–supplier relationships and lean manufacturing.

This research will encourage SCM scholars who are interested in conducting more critical studies and teaching the harmful effects of global supply chains.

This paper highlights that a combination of SCM and CMS approaches is important when we decide to adopt a more critical “constructive” view of supply chain challenges and engage practical and critical views, respectively, to generate knowledge that not only increases (corporate) performance but also highlights social needs and values.

This paper aims to provide multinational corporations (MNCs) with a portfolio of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) responses that help curbing the exacerbated negative environmental externalities caused by their business activities in emerging and developing economies.

This paper transposes the market-related concept of institutional voids to the context of CER, that is, to the context of exacerbated negative environmental externalities as result of absent, weak or incoherent institutions.

This paper proposes that the transfer of products, processes and business models from developed to emerging or developing economies often gives rise to exacerbated negative externalities because of institutional voids in environmental protection. Thus, it suggests a portfolio of CER responses – circumventing, coping and compensating – that allow MNCs to mitigate the exacerbated negative environmental externalities caused by them.

The authors present an analytical framework for identifying and navigating environment related institutional voids, which serves as a starting point for an action research approach. In tune with recent calls for critical performativity in critical management studies, the action research approach aims at tackling the real-life problem of exacerbated negative environmental externalities caused by MNCs’ activities in emerging and developing economies.

This paper sensitizes scholars, policymakers and managers to exacerbated negative environmental externalities within the context of international business activities in emerging and developing economies. The contribution provides stakeholders with a better understanding of the causes as well as alternative responses to the problem.

This paper transposes the market-related concept of institutional voids and the strategic responses to dealing with them to the non-market context of CER. The authors argue that institutional voids can be seen as the absence or poor functioning of formal and informal institutions for environmental protection, resulting in exacerbated negative environmental externalities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how rhetoric of cooperation is expressed and constructed during rituals of consultation and how this rhetoric is integrated into the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness that incorporates both impression management and the expression of self.

This paper uses a discursive approach and semi-structured interviews with directors and consultants working in the healthcare sector, a sector that routinely employs consultants to accompany directors in organizational change management. Rhetoric is constructed around four narrative lines that also constitute the four ritualized phases of the consulting process.

The mantra of “respect rituals of passage and avoid breaking frames” is an integral part of the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness throughout the process, so as not to infringe upon the order of the interaction established with the directors. Moreover, the development of cooperative relations with other members of the organization is based largely on a rather vast repertoire of action resources that the consultant will have to deploy to face four areas of uncertainty in the rites of interaction; namely, anticipation, interpretation, delegation and adherence. Furthermore, this cooperation is far from definitively acquired and must be reflected upon along the way to maintain control over the definition of the situation. This study expands upon the interrelations between the strategic actor and the reflective practitioner in a consultant’s dramaturgical awareness.

Practical implications are highlighted using the notion of reflective contract (Schön, 1983) for managers as clients, the transcendental precepts of authenticity put forward by Coghland (2008) for consultants as practitioners, and progressive forms of critical theory performativity as suggested by Spicer et al. (2009) and Wickert and Schaefer (2015) for researchers.

The concept underlying this study is dramaturgical awareness. It is a concept but sparingly explored in the literature, yet nonetheless present among advocates who promote organizational dramaturgy based on the work of Goffman. This concept is linked to Crozier and Friedberg’s theory of the strategic actor and Schön’s theory of the reflective practitioner.