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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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a response to expressions in the literature concerning the limitations of critical reflection, using Rancière’s exposition of the role of values and reasonableness to examine how forms of negotiated work-based learning can support learners’ pathways to impact in their organisation. The implications for work applied management in terms of enabling these employees to make an impact are considered.

Vignettes illuminate and articulate Rancière’s (1991, 2010) ideas, the vignettes constructed through events experienced and narrated, perhaps imagined, tutorial conversations, assignments and work practices. Such construction of “multiple layers of fiction and narrative imaginings” draws on Sparkes (2007, p. 522). They consider individuals’ negotiation of working practices using ideas developed during their studies, and personal and professional development prompted by unexpected insights into their capabilities, interests, and possible roles.

Negotiated work-based learning appears to offer the individual opportunity to take responsibility for action in his/her learning and in his/her workplace, but effect depends on several factors, and can be perceived in different ways. Students’ encounter with autonomy in their studies resonates with Rancière’s belief in equality. In the workplace (becoming “citizens” alongside “reasonable” individuals) their agency might, at best, lead to “reasonable moments”, as they encounter both negative and positive challenges of work applied management.

Successful utilisation of agency in learning prompts expectations of responsibility and equality in the workplace. Such equality can lead to diverse, unpredicted insights and consequent opportunities for changes in practice.

This is the first paper to utilise Ranciére’s ideas to offer a critical consideration of both learning provision and workplace practice. Consideration of his profound stance on individuals’ freedom and agency provides rich (but challenging) prompts for analysis of one’s own practice, and the potential for impact when the manager is “ignorant”.

This paper explores diverse practices of the giving and demanding of democratic accountability within a case of conflict around deep-sea petroleum exploration in Aotearoa New Zealand. These practices include submissions and consultations, partnership between Indigenous Peoples and a settler-colonial government and dissensus. These are theorised through the political thought of Jacques Rancière.

A single case study approach is employed that seeks to particularise and draws on interview, documentary and media materials.

By examining a case of conflict, the authors find that as opportunities for participation in democratic accountability processes are eroded, political dissensus emerges to demand parts in the accountability process. Dissensus creates counter forums within a wider understanding of democratic accountability. In this case, individuals and organisations move between police (where hierarchy counts those with a part) and politics (exercised when this hierarchy is disrupted by dissensus) to demand parts as police logics become more and less democratic. These parts are then utilised towards particular interests, but in this case to also create additional parts for those with none.

This study privileges demands for accountability through dissensus as fundamental to democratic accountability, rather than just account giving and receiving. That is, who is or who is not included – who has a stake or a part – is crucial in a broader understanding of democratic accountability. This provides democratic accountability with a radical potential for creating change. The study also advances thinking on democratic accountability by drawing from Indigenous perspectives and experiences in a settler-colonial context.

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

The paper aims to examine the potential feminist politics of teaching: is there a clear connection between feminism and teaching, and is there a particular feminist way of teaching? Through notions of engaged political pedagogy (as developed by bell hooks Jacques Rancière), it proposes an intersectional and dissensual approach to teaching, as a primary way of practising feminist politics within academia.

The paper sets out to explore the possibility of a feminist pedagogy of teaching. Drawing on works by social and feminists theorists as well as by radical pedagogues, it negotiates these various standpoints, finding similarities and differences, in order to formulate ways in which we can more fruitfully conceive of teaching as politics.

The paper proposes that the classroom proves one of the most radical spaces for possibility within academia. Through an engaged, dissensual pedagogy, in which both students and teachers work together in mutual recognition of each other's knowledge, the feminist teacher can enthuse political change both within and outside of the classroom.

Teaching is often viewed as a less important part of academic work. This paper, in contrast, proposes the classroom as one of the spaces where we as feminist academics can have the most impact. Providing a theoretical methodology of a potential feminist teaching pedagogy, this paper adds a well‐needed exploration of the relation between teaching and feminism, and a defence of teaching as politics.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an exemplar of post-qualitative “fieldwork in philosophy” research. The paper proposes features of such philosophical fieldwork and adumbrates examples of concepts that have emerged in the process of undertaking the research.

The paper is conceptual, drawing on an abductive approach. Post-qualitative understandings that question the validity of methodology and theory as separable entities are operationalised.

The paper provides insights into how post-qualitative research might be undertaken and what might emerge in the process.

This paper fulfils a need for an example of research that is post-qualitative. Additionally, the possibilities for doing “fieldwork in philosophy” are extended, as is the work of Jacque Rancière with respect to emancipation.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the politics of and in organizational transformations in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and Germany's reunification.

The paper juxtaposes a political‐philosophical perspective informed by Rancière – what we call a dramaturgy of politics – with the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in the Berlin State Library in 2002/2003.

The paper outlines a reading of the event of November 9, 1989 and its aftermath as a dissensual event of politics proper, i.e. the emergence of a new political subjectivity, followed by a consensual process of social organization. In the state library, both the consensual “fantasy of the organizational One” as well its disruption are causing struggles over what is visible and sayable. A dramaturgy of politics thus encourages us to add our voices to the specific time‐spaces in which an excess of words, signs and forms alters the configuration of what is visible and expressible.

The usual disclaimers about the limits of ethnographic research apply. The paper calls for further inquiries into the dramaturgy of organizational politics. It also reflects upon the “Western gaze” and the problematic of “speaking for” the presumably dominated.

It is hoped that the paper contributes to the understanding of the politics of organization (theory) by outlining an alternative conceptual approach and confronting it with ethnographic findings.

By introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. The author argues that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1996 [1970]; Rancière, 1991, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2010) which complement them. In conclusion, the author attempts to synthesize both into the outlines of a pedagogy of the pedagogical turn, based on principles of humanism, institutional critique, and democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise “Learning Jam” as a way of organising space, time and people through arts-based pedagogies in work-based learning. This form of encounter originated in Finland to challenge functional silo mentality by prioritising polyphony. Through the use of a “kaleidoscopic pedagogy”, arts-based initiatives are used to collectively and subjectively reconsider practice.

The research design is grounded in one of a series of Learning Jams co-created by practitioners from the field of arts and arts-based consultancy and academics from the field of arts, arts education, innovation and management, learning and development. The focus was on exploring the value of each participants work-based learning practice through the lens of an Arts Value Matrix. Rancière’s critical theory was used to frame the exploration. The research questions asked; what are the ingredients of this creative, transformative learning space and in what ways can the polyphonic understandings that emerge in it impact on work-based learning?

Findings of this study centre around alternative ways of being in a learning setting where we do not defer to the conventional figures of authority, but collectively explore ways of organising, where the main idea is to lean on something-which-is-not-yet.

A key research implication is that teaching in this context demands reflexive and dialogical capabilities for those who hold the role of organising and facilitating spaces for learning and transformation. The main limitation is in stopping short of fully articulating detailed aspects of these capabilities.

The originality and value of the practice of Learning Jam is that managers and artists explore the potential of operating as partners to develop new ways of working to realise organisational change and innovation.