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This paper aims to explore the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic practice in accounting research. This paper focuses on shame as an emotion that lingers on, despite the efforts to work through those emotions.

The authors conducted a collective autoethnography to make sense of the fieldwork and after-fieldwork emotions and their consequences. This autoethnography began with the three authors discovering their shared feeling of shame.

Building on Hochschild’s theory (1979, 1983) on emotional labor, the authors demonstrate how shame emerged as a central and lingering emotion of the ethnographies beyond an emotional labor process. The authors show how a double shame appeared toward the field participants and the academic accounting community, affecting the writing and the work.

The authors demonstrate that the perception of the research community’s rules of feelings gives rise to emotions that ultimately change the work. The authors show how collective autoethnography can help accounting research to acknowledge and give room to emotions.

This study aims to examine auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance (SA) work.

The authors collected ethnographic data over a nine-month period from two small firms offering SA services in France between 2018 and 2019.

Auditors’ experiences of meaningfulness are facilitated by shared sustainability values among colleagues, social acknowledgement of like-minded profiles and the feeling that working in a “small firm” provides a more fulfilling and committed-to-sustainability environment than conventional assurance work in large accounting firms. The search for meaningfulness collapses when auditors realize not only the limits of their agentic and transformative capacities but also their unintended complicity in certifying the reports of companies with poor sustainability performance. Because they struggle to reconcile the assessment of their professional practice with their value system, the participants are tempted to disengage from their work by giving up a sustainability career and/or by reframing SA work as an advisory rather than a control function.

The authors approach SA not as an organizational project of professional expansion, through which accounting firms attempt to expand their scope of practice, but as an individual and reflexive search of aligning assurance work to their value system. Auditors’ search for meaningfulness is a strong counterpoint to the financial auditing literature, which portrays auditors as professionals with a low sense of purpose at work, but also to the literature criticizing accounting firms’ discursive processes of “depoliticization” (Malsch, 2013) and “de-emotionalization” (Rodrigue et al., 2022) of socio-environmental issues.