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Direct democracy by citizen initiatives is often heralded as the avenue for the true will of the people to be heard. While scholars have debated whether this leads to a form of Madison's “tyranny of the majority,” the debate over the concrete impact of such initiatives on racially marginalized groups remains unsettled. We examine a different question about racially marginalized groups' interests in this process: the symbolic assertion of white supremacy expressed through this mechanism of majority will. We develop the concept of “racial spectacles” to describe the narrative vehicles that serve to symbolically reassert and reinforce real existing racial hierarchies and inequalities. We explore the creation of these spectacles through the initiative process because it is a state-sanctioned vehicle that enables white dominance. Paradoxically, these campaigns that purport to be colorblind depend on the enactment of these racial spectacles. Through an analysis of five statewide anti-affirmative action initiative campaigns from 1996 to 2008, we explore both macro and micro political dynamics: public displays of these campaigns as well as individual, private agency expressed in the public and private act of voting; court decisions in initiative litigation as well as individual and interest group participation in these cases. Ultimately, we argue that this form of racial spectacle further inculcates the public in the postracial ideology of colorblindness.

Since Karl Marx fashioned his theory of capitalism in the nineteenth century, scholars have continually updated Marxian theory to capture the pervasiveness of commodity relations in modern society. Influenced by Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, the members of the French avant-guard group, the Situationist International (1957–1972), developed an intransigent critique of consumer capitalism based on the concept of the spectacle. In the spectacle, media and consumer society replace lived experience, the passive gaze of images supplants active social participation, and new forms of alienation induce social atomization at a more abstract level than in previous societies. We endeavor to make two theoretical contributions: First, we highlight the contributions of the Situationist International, pointing out how they revised the Marxian categories of alienation, commodification, and reification in order to analyze the dynamics of twentieth century capitalism and to give these concepts new explanatory power. Second, we build a critical theory of consumer capitalism that incorporates the theoretical assumptions and arguments of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School. Today, critical theory can make an important contribution to sociology by critically examining the plurality of spectacles and their reifying manifestations. In addition, critical theorists can explore how different spectacles connect to one another, how they connect to different social institutions, and how spectacles express contradictions and conflicting meanings. A critical theory of spectacle and consumption can disclose both novelties and discontinuities in the current period, as well as continuities in the development of globalized consumer capitalism.

This paper analyses the establishment and evolution of a public oversight body (POB) – the Egyptian Audit Oversight Unit (AOU) – and its implications for local auditing firms and practices.

Primary data were gathered from 34 semi-structured interviews (including follow-up ones) between 2014 and 2020. Secondary data was obtained through publicly available documents and internal memos. Drawing on Debord's (1967) Society of the Spectacle, the insights focus on the POB's conception, materialisation and evolution in a context characterised by weak regulatory structures.

Through a series of acts, the findings reveal how the AOU first accepted the image of “international best practice” oversight (the “metaphorical”), followed by the construction of the local structure and décor replicating a United States (US) style POB archetype (the “transformational”) by primarily relying on visible processes/procedures. Yet, these mechanisms emphasised the spectacular nature of oversight, with little improvement for practice and limiting itself to “cracking down” on smaller local firms. A final stage (the “performative”) reveals how the AOU seeks to expand its activities beyond its original mandate without challenging the image-driven nature of its oversight.

The paper offers two key contributions. First, it reveals how actors, through a combination of symbolic and tangible measures, create a new performative reality of public oversight. Second, it advocates Debord's “spectacle” to complement other theoretical lenses, with a view to illuminating the materialisation stages that bridge the gap between proclaimed oversight policies and actual practices (including conscious and unconscious omissions) within a given political economy context.

In this paper, we concentrate on the use of research assessment (RA) systems in universities in New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK). Primarily we focus on PBRF and REF, and explore differences between these systems on individual and systemic levels. We ask, these days, in what way(s) the systemic differences between PBRF and REF actually make a difference on how the two RA systems are experienced by academic staff.

This research is exploratory and draws on 19 interviews in which accounting researchers from both countries offer reflections on their careers and how RA (systems) have influenced these careers. The stories they tell are classified by regarding RA in universities as a manifestation of the spectacle society, following Debord (1992) and Flyverbom and Reinecke (2017).

Both UK and New Zealand academics concur that their research activities and views on research are very much shaped by journal rankings and citations. Among UK academics, there seems to be a greater critical attitude towards the benefits and drawbacks of REF, which may be related to the history of REF in their country. Relatively speaking, in New Zealand, individualism seems to have grown after the introduction of the PBRF, with little active pushback against the system. Cultural aspects may partially explain this outcome. Academics in both countries lament the lack of focus on practitioner issues that the increased significance of RA seems to have evoked.

This research is context-specific and may have limited applicability to other situations, academics or countries.

RA and RA systems seem to be here to stay. However, as academics we can, and ought to, take responsibility to try to ensure that these systems reflect the future of accounting (research) we wish to create. It is certainly not mainly or solely up to upper management officials to set this in motion, as has occasionally been claimed in previous literature. Some of the academics who participated in this research actively sought to bring about a different future.

This research provides a unique contextual analysis of accounting academics' perspectives and reactions to RA and RA systems and the impact these have had on their careers across two countries. In addition, the paper offers valuable critical reflections on the application of Debord's (1992) notion of the spectacle society in future accounting studies. We find more mixed and nuanced views on RA in academia than many previous studies have shown.

This paper aims to focus on building an interpretive framework for understanding accounting practices and changes, drawing on the situationist concept of the “spectacle”.

The paper reviews the existing accounting and management literature in light of the concept of the spectacle. The paper presents empirical illustrations of participatory budgeting as a form of the spectacle and the role of donor agencies in local government reforms in Uganda, based on interviews and observations.

It is argued that the transformational – rather than just metaphoric – dimension of the spectacle has the potential to provide a better understanding of accounting practices and their transformations in the context of ever‐changing capitalism, and to further contribute to the critical accounting literature. Drawing on Debord's work, the paper also extends one's understanding of why donor agencies export ideas, including accounting practices and technologies.

The paper further enriches the possibility of critical consciousness and praxis in transforming and shaping the spectacle. By understanding the construction of the spectacle and its transformations, as Boje et al. argued, avenues for resistance are opened up.

The paper provides a perspective for the understanding of accounting changes, and it should open up avenues for further research regarding various forms of the spectacle that involve accounting techniques and practices.

This study examines the controversial success of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) accrual implementation, using the case of Tanzania.

Interviews, documentary reviews and observations were used for data collection. This study draws on the spectacle theory for data analysis.

The findings demonstrate that IPSAS accrual was a spectacle during its production and consumption. The features and forms of the spectacle were revealed in IPSAS accrual during its production and affirmed by actors during its consumption. Further affirmation of IPSAS accrual as the spectacle was revealed through communication of good news and the hiding of bad news. The outcome was the alleged roles of IPSAS accrual.

The study is limited as it was conducted in only one country. The controversial success is global and calls for further research in other parts of the world.

The International Monetary Fund should stop recommending implementation of IPSAS accrual along with cash basis as the two systems are incompatible. Moreover, government officials should have alternative thinking presenting a different view of the world, so as to avoid being passive, and focus on reality rather than appearance.

This study is the first to explain the controversial success of IPSAS accrual implementation. It demonstrates the usefulness of spectacle theory in the field of accounting research, especially in the context of reform implementation. Moreover, this study confirms that IPSAS accrual is a spectacle (Uddin et al., 2011).

Purpose – This chapter examines the role of the media, guns, and violence in the social construction of masculinity in today's mediatized American culture.

Methodology – The chapter draws on critical theory and cultural studies to address crises of masculinity and school shootings. It applies and further develops Guy Debord's (1970) theory on spectacle in the contexts of contemporary violent media spectacles.

Findings – In the chapter it is argued that school shooters, and other indiscriminate gun killers, share male rage and attempts to resolve crises of masculinity through violent behavior; exhibit a fetishism of guns or weapons; and resolve their crises through violence orchestrated as a media spectacle. This demands growing awareness of mediatization of American gun culture, and calls for a need for more developed understanding of media pedagogy as a means to create cultural skills of media literacy, as well as arguing for more rational gun control and mental health care.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter contributes to the contemporary debate on mediatization of violence by discussing it within critical theory and cultural studies. The theoretical framework is applied to analysis of a range of different empirical cases ranging from school shootings to the Colorado movie theater massacre at the first night of the latest Batman movie in the summer of 2012.

This paper investigates how members of ethnic minorities perceive ethnic-themed retail spectacles staged by mainstream marketers.

The data was collected in the North of France, through ethnographic methods combining in-depth interviews with French-Moroccan consumers, field observation of their shopping behavior in supermarkets, and online discussions on the subject.

The consumers’ responses reflect perceptions of dystopia, articulated in two interrelated types of discourses: inclusion versus exclusion on the one hand, and consumerism and the commodification of religion on the other. Spectacles aimed at being a cosmopolitan utopia into a spectacle become thus perceived as dystopic, alienating consumers who belong to ethnic minorities, some of whom will as a result oppose or boycott the supermarkets.

Given its phenomenological focus on consumers’ perception, this study provides an emic perspective on the phenomenon of ethnic retail spectacles. Further research should therefore study these contexts from multiple angles, in order to consider the role of other market actors such as retailers or the larger socio-political context.

This paper contributes to existing research by providing an understanding of ethnic minorities’ perceptions of product cross-over, understudied until now when it comes to mainstream marketplaces. Moreover, it highlights the importance of studying retail environments such as supermarkets, where ethnic spectacles enter consumers’ everyday life.

This paper argues that contemporary executions by lethal injection represent spectacles of death. This spectacle of death upholds the sovereignty of the liberal state by evoking a sense of fear among the citizens. The State uses the apparently “painless” and “humane” form of execution by lethal injection to legitimize the death penalty in the U.S. I take the example of McVeigh’s execution to suggest that spectacles of execution continue in modern society, along with disciplinary processes that the liberal state depends on for its legitimacy. This paper, thus, aims to contribute towards a rethinking of a Foucauldian notion of power.