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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a fast-moving pandemic that has brought about calamities and challenges to the human world. In the field of international higher education (IHE), it problematizes and challenges the operation of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales, while generating disruptions and impediments to the flows of globalization. Drawing upon extant research on IHE across spatial and cultural contexts, this essay aims to: (1) unravel the deficiencies of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales in coping with the challenges of COVID-19 to IHE; (2) assess the impacts of COVID-19 on the developments of globalization and internationalization of higher education with particular focus on the complications therein; and (3) explore the possible spill-over effects on and implications for the re-positioning of IHE in the post-COVID-19 era. Albeit the negative impacts of COVID-19 may not last, its spill-over effects are bound to cast a long shadow over IHE’s future development. This essay explores how IHE can persist in spite of deficiencies in neo-liberalism and fluidity in globalization.

This paper aims to examine corporate governance and consequences of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) in the US from a socio‐political perspective.

The author employs neo‐liberalism and its related mentality of governmentality to develop an analysis of how corporate governance and reforms such as SOX are socially constructed through autonomous agents, including managers and accountants, and various power relationships that comprise government.

This paper theorizes that legislative reform, such as SOX, represents pervasive mechanisms of disclosure, surveillance and power, and an insurance rationality designed to manage the new and significant risks of corporate governance. A framework is established which conceptualizes SOX as the intersection of neo‐liberalism, political rationalities and governmental techniques, and accounting practices which lead to the elements of security, quantification and shareholder value. Through this framework a model of risk as governance is developed that examines SOX through technologies of the self, calculation and insurance, designed to act upon managers using knowledge about control or financial statement weaknesses. Such mechanisms identify corporate governance risks, which can be acted upon by outside experts, such as accountants.

The major inference from this paper is that corporate governance research in accounting should pursue new lines of inquiry, which will permit the more profitable extension of existing research. Such inquiry should focus less on empirical corporate governance factors and more on the relationships, and power constructs of corporate governance, as well as how legislative reforms employ tactics to normalize the behaviour of not only managers, but also accountants.

In this chapter, we argue that the practice of electronically monitored “house arrest” is consistent with Foucault's insights into both the workings of “disciplinary power” and “governmentality” and with the self-governing notions of a conservative, neo-liberal ideology, and mentality. Our interpretive analysis of a set of offender narratives identifies a theme we call “transforming the self” that illustrates the ways in which house arrest is experienced by some clients as a set of discourses and practices that encourages them to govern themselves by regulating their own bodies and conduct. These self-governing capabilities include “enterprise,” “autonomy,” and an ethical stance towards their lives.

Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history.

Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas.

Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later.

This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.

I provide an exploration and critique of reflexive research practice, which explores the nature of reflexivity, its relevance to and influence on accounting academic identity formation.

The paper gives detailed explanations of three different approaches to reflexivity dependent on perspectives on reality and exemplifies the chosen approach – intersubjective reflexivity. It draws from three personal experiences to illustrate intersubjective reflexive practice in action and its impact on academic identity, including my own identity as a feminist accounting academic. The examples involve the process of reflexively “being struck” regarding voice and representation; addressing power, privilege and decolonisation in knowledge production; and negotiating insider/outsider academic identities.

I reconceptualise and illustrate reflexivity as academic identity formation that enables transformative experience and more reflexive academic praxis within a turbulent academic context. Reflexive academic identity formation will resonate with accounting academics who are reflecting on the role and purpose of the accounting academy and their identity within it.

The paper provides a significant contribution into understanding intersubjective reflexivity, by reconceptualising intersubjective reflexivity beyond research and applying it to the identity formation of accounting academics. I identify the process of reflexive identity transformation through active engagement in identity work and emotion work, which transforms academic praxis. I argue for a broader more nuanced and power-laden perspective on reflexivity and academic praxis, which moves us to consider the responsibility of our academic identity and actions as accounting academics.

Olga Bain teaches at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University, Washington, DC. Her research interests include educational policies in post-socialist countries, internationalization and globalization of higher education, faculty productivity and women's advancement in academia, and higher education financing. Olga Bain has consulted for the American Council on Education, the Academy of Educational Development, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Council of Europe, the Salzburg Seminar, and others. She authored the book University Autonomy in the Russian Federation since Perestroika (2003, RoutledgeFalmer) as well as book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. She holds a Ph.D. degree in social foundations of education, comparative and higher education from the University at Buffalo, NY, and a candidate of sciences degree in sociolinguistics from St. Petersburg University, Russia.

Large accounting firms lay claim today to a broad focus on staff diversity and inclusion. Related initiatives focus on gender, culture, age and sexuality. This paper aims to seek insight from publicly available discourse provided by the “Big 4” in Australia (Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG and PwC), along with two second-tier firms, into the nature and drivers of diversity initiatives for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) staff.

Web-based discourse provided as at May 2017 is examined and analysed.

All six firms provided a range of related disclosures, suggesting that a cultural shift for LGBTI staff was underway. Detail provided on actual policies and procedures was limited, and a struggle was suggested, between balancing the needs of diverse staff, with concerns for some, perhaps, more conservative clients. Some repositioning of arguments was suggested, focussed on shifting responsibility to staff and on shifting the object of celebration from staff to the firm.

This study is limited to an interpretation of carefully constructed publicly disclosed statements. Further studies could explore the lived experience of these apparent changes with staff.

Recruitment and staff retention continue to be on-going challenges within the accounting profession. This study provides insight into initiatives targeted to support LGBTI staff.

Availing space to bring ‘whole selves’ into the workplace is an important element of creating a pleasant, comfortable and engaging environment for staff. This study provides insight into the perspective of employers on the importance of such initiatives.

Little attention has been directed to exploring sexual diversity in the workplace or to sexuality within accounting studies.

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

This paper is an autoethnography. Applying the autoethnographic method allows us to discuss cultural phenomena through personal reflections and experiences. Our autoethnographic reflections illustrate our struggles and attempts of resistance within discursive spaces where motherhood and our identity as academics intersect.

Our personal experiences combined with theoretical elaborations illuminate how the role of the mother continues to be dominated by such gendered discursive practices that conflict with the work role. Once women become mothers, they are othered through societal and organizational practices because they constitute a visible deviation from the masculine norm in the organizational setting, academia included.

This paper explores how contemporary motherhood discourse(s)within academia and the wider society present competing truth claims, embedded in neoliberal and postfeminist cultural sensibility. Our autoethnographic reflections show our struggles and attempts of resistance within such discursive spaces.

Ideas matter. Thought matters. Thought is a form of doing. Theorisation shapes our sensibilities and determines what we see with incalculable effects on our actions. When ideas are embodied in the often prosaic practices of organisation and management, they determine the personality of institutions and the condition of our lives within them. Social norms have a gritty materiality that belies the classical split between materialism and idealism.