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This paper aims to report on subalterns' emancipatory accounting (SEA) embedded in transformation of governance and accountability structures (GAS) in Ceylon Tea.

The paper draws on James Scott's political anthropology to examine how subalterns' resistance and emancipatory accounting triggers structural transformations.

An attempt is made to theorise subaltern resistance as a form of emancipatory accounting. Concerning the commentaries that accounting has been to suppress or hegemonise the subalterns and appreciating the analysis of indigenous resistance implicated in emancipatory potential, this paper examines how a distinct subaltern group in Ceylon Tea deployed their own weapons towards the changes in GAS.

The accounting literature neglects how subalterns reconstruct governance and accountability structures: this paper introduces a social accounting perspective on resistance, control and structural transformations. Also, it introduces to accounting researchers James Scott's political anthropology as an alternative framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how academics resisted and accommodated changes towards the reform process in higher education institutions in Indonesia which has introduced market-driven principle of new public management and the principle of Neo-Weberian model. Using the theory developed by Scott concerning the resistance patterns by powerless or subordinated groups through “weapon of the weak”, this study aimed at mapping the resistance exhibited by Indonesian academics.

This study was a case study using semi-structured interviews conducted with 30 academics in three state universities in Indonesia.

The results of this study demonstrated that academics in Indonesian universities resisted and accommodated the policy reform using their discursive, unobtrusive tactics of resisting.

The method of data collection used in this research was based on the interview alone. It would be useful to consider to deploy other forms of data collection such as, observation to allow the building up of strong trusthworthiness of the findings of this research.

The authors believed that this study may be useful to give better understandings for policy makers on implementing policies by considering aspects of behaviours of academics as street level bureaucrats in accepting, interpreting, and implementing policy imperatives. These results might also be beneficial for policy makers from other sectors outside higher education in effectuating policy imperatives.

The authors argued that, academics actively responded to external pressures which contradicted their own values and beliefs with their unique intellectual strategies by which have been overlooked in the formulation of policy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which the nature of a particular work activity – cleaning – changes across organizational contexts, considering specific industry characteristics and working conditions in urban settings in Portugal.

The paper draws on the qualitative analysis of data collected between 2010 and 2013 using open-ended interviews with employees and direct observation in two shopping malls.

The empirical evidence illuminates how the contexts under study shape the behavior of actors and their power relations. By placing the perspective of employees at the core of the analysis, the paper demonstrates that workplaces provide a major site of conflict and negotiation regarding dignity in cleaning work, but this dispute takes on different contours and sources of tension across organizational contexts.

The seminal comparative analysis of commercial cleaning and housecleaning undertaken in this paper sheds light on the varying distribution of roles and authority at work. Differently than in earlier studies, the actual modes of service interaction in this industry are documented in a detailed and critical manner.

Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s global sex industry, this paper complicates our understanding of human trafficking in two ways. First, introducing the term perverse humanitarianism, the paper extends work on carceral feminism by offering concrete examples of interagency commitments between NGOs and the police. Second, my ethnography reveals that women framed their relationships with male clients as mutually beneficial because the men provided them with alternate pathways to economic mobility outside of sex work. Drawing on the same tropes of victimhood employed by the NGOs, sex workers elicited sympathy from male clients that they leveraged into gifts of money. Using men’s charitable gifts, many women became small entrepreneurs who opened local businesses and empowered other sex workers far beyond what NGOs were able to provide.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how taxi drivers understand the customer service relationship as “dirty work” by examining the strategies they use to manage the taint associated with their work.

An innovative qualitative approach is taken that focuses upon the analysis of metaphors elicited in interviews with 24 taxi drivers.

Four different metaphorical understandings of the customer service relationship are provided: heroes, confidante, the unworthy, and predator. These metaphors are explained through a series of “hidden transcripts” (Scott, 1990). The impact of these different metaphors and hidden transcripts as sensemaking devices is addressed.

The paper uses an innovative qualitative method to argue that the construction of work as “dirty” or otherwise is located within the customer service interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the different ways in which experiences of marginalisation within organisations are named and acted upon. Of particular interest is examining the ways in which the visibility of gender discrimination and the invisibility of ethnic discrimination indicate what the professionals in the study identify as horizons of possible individual and collective resistance.

The paper takes as its point of departure Cho et al. (2013) notion of “intersectionality as an analytical sensibility” (p. 795). The material consists of qualitative semi-structured interviews with 15 chief medical doctors employed in two Swedish hospitals.

The findings indicate that while there is an organisational visibility of gender inequality, there is an organisational invisibility of ethnic discrimination. These differences influence the ways in which organisational criticism takes place and inequalities are challenged. Female Swedish identified doctors acted collectively to challenge organisations that they considered male-dominated, while doctors with experience of migration (both female and male) placed more responsibility on themselves and established individual strategies such as working more or des-identification. However, they confronted the organisation by naming ethnic discrimination in a context of organisational silence.

The paper does not explore the different forms of racism (islamophobia, racism against blacks, anti-Semitism). In addition, further research is needed to understand how these various forms of racism shape workplaces in Sweden.

The paper offers new insights into the difference/similarities between how processes of ethnic and gender discrimination are experienced among employees within high-status professions. The value of the paper lies in its special focus on how forms of resistance are affected by the frames of the organisation. The findings stress the importance of intersectional analyses to understand the complex patterns of resistance and consent emerging within organisations.

Within societies in the 21st century, individuals who are embedded in a controlled context that impedes their political actions deal with the tensions they are experiencing through attempts at resistance. Several studies that examine individual infrapolitics in organizations explain how the subtle mix of compliance and resistance are constructed at the level of individual identity in a complex mechanism that both questions the system and strengthens it. However, the interplay between managers' identities and management accounting tools in this process is a topic that deserves more investigation. The aim of this article is to understand how the subtle resistance of individuals constructs neoliberal reforms through management accounting (MA).

The authors conducted a case study on three health and social organizations two years after major reforms were implemented in the health and social services sector in Québec, a province of Canada. These reforms were part of a new public management dynamic and involved the implementation of accounting tools, here referred to as New Public Management Accounting (NPMA) tools.

The authors’ findings show how managers participate in reforms, at the same time as attempt to stem the dehumanization they generate. Managers engage in subtly resisting, for themselves and for their field professional teams, the dehumanization and identity destruction that arises from the reforms. NPMA tools are central to this process, since managers question the reforms through NPMA tools and use them to resist creatively. However, their subtle resistance can lead to the strengthening of the neoliberal dynamic of the reform.

The authors contribute to both the literature of infrapolitics and MA by showing the role of NPMA tools in the construction of subtle resistance. Their article enriches the MA literature by characterizing the subtle forms of resistance and showing how managers engage in creative resistance by using the managerial potential flexibility of NPMA tools. The article also outlines how NPMA tools play a role in the dialectic process of resistance, since they aid managers in resisting reform-induced dehumanization but also support managers in reinventing and reinforcing what they are trying to fight. The authors’ study also illustrates the dialectic dynamic of resistance through NPMA in all its dimensions: discursive, material and symbolic. Finally, the authors contribute to management accounting literature by showing that NPMA tools are not only the objects of neoliberalization but also the support of backstage resistance to neoliberalization.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute with knowledge about how resistance to the neo-liberal agenda is made possible, especially through renewal and reproduction of collective communities.

Using two ethnographical studies, one of a chamber orchestra and one of a shipping company for illustrating resistance.

It is resistance through distancing and creation of a “hidden script” that prevents the collective community from be broken down by individualization. However, resistance through distancing needs to be combined with resistance through persistence in order to become intelligent.

The paper makes use of ethnographic studies to investigate possibilities of resistance. The study has also found it fruitful to combine James Scott's (1990) notion of collectively created hidden scripts with Collinson's (1992, 1994) notion of resistance through distancing and persistence.

This chapter describes a course in recent U.S. history that uses a pedagogy of “praxis” to help students understand themselves as both products of and actors in history. The twin centerpieces of the course are the students’ own personal histories in relation to five systems of domination, and a historically informed political action project that reflects the students’ values, assumptions, and goals in relation to one or more of the systems of domination. A key dissonance for students is between their expressed values and their relative positions within each system of domination.