Call for paper: Bruno Latour and Researching Accountability

Bruno Latour and Researching Accountability

This special issue of QRAM is dedicated to Latour’s heritage and legacy: what does accounting become when it embraces the full breadth of accountability, and can it be called upon to account for the earth itself and the very possibilities of continued human existence? For Latour (2018), accountability was an urgent necessity for the defence of the very prerequisites of life on earth. However, to what extent and in what way(s) does Latour’s thinking on relatedness, especially in his later works, open new possibilities for accountability, that can potentially take it beyond the limited nature that is often attached to the languaging.

The task for us humans, as he saw it, then was to become appreciative of the inter-locking reliance that our social wellbeing has with the health of the planet and of society. We are called upon to accept our integral dependence on the environment wherein: “Scientific laboratories, technical institutions, marketplaces, churches and temples, financial trading rooms, internet forums, ecological disputes are [all] quasi-subjects” (Latour, 2005, p. 22). Via a flattened ontology, one can avoid the ‘temptation to jump to the global’, ignoring that existence is necessarily composed of local actants and mechanisms of the social and natural (Latour, 2005, p. 174; 2013).

For the special issue we invite, taking leads from Latour, inter-and intra-relational reflections on, and evaluations of, the manifold perspectives on and dimensions to accountability. Contributions are welcomed that also discuss the links with accounting.

List of topic areas

Does ‘accountability’ retain a single sense or has it been fragmented and/or enlarged into a diversity perspectives and activities?
Are views on being accountable to the non-human necessary, mandatory or perhaps unrealistic?
Does accountability and/or ANT grant to too little or too much influence to ‘power’ and thereby do a disservice to accounting and accountability?
How do we as accountability researchers integrate Latour’s thought into our work and/or do we reject aspects of his thought?
What are areas of further development, and are there perhaps interesting empirical examples related to this?
Why, in what ways, and how does social and environmental accountability demand methodological renewal?
Inspired by Latour (and his changing views), what do we retain and reject of modernism and humanism in our conceptualizations of accountability?
How and to what extent can accountability achieve passionate, empathetic and engaged knowing?
What does Latour’s take on accountability mean for methodological explorations in relational engagement of the researcher and the researched in corporate, non-profit, NGO, or perhaps other contexts?
(How) can accountability and accounting be seen as being part and parcel of a radical turn to Anthropocene activism and Gaia thinking?
How has accountability been covered in interpretive accounting research, and what could be interesting ways forward?

Submissions Information

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Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

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