Bruno Latour and Researching Accountability

Introduction

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 that is necessary for more traditional forms of accounting and accountability (e.g., see Bassenet et al. 2018), and beyond other limiting factors related to the construction of the self and other(s) (e.g., see Boland & Schultze 1996; Roberts 2001, 2012, Yates & Difrancesco 2022).

For Latour, accountability was an urgent necessity for the defence of the very prerequisites of life on earth. This special issue is dedicated to investigating and discussing assumptive forestructures to accountability. Accountability, in the broadest sense, means being accountable for something to some Other (see also: Roberts and Scapens, 1985; Roberts, 1991). The researching of accountability cannot be without assumptions about life itself and existence. To whom or what; when and why, is one accountable? Who or what is the ‘being’ that ‘being accountable’ assumes, and how is it constructed (Letiche et al 2024)?

Latour began his research career arguing for a primacy for symmetrical research, arguing that a mutuality of regard, respect, and awareness are necessary for accountability to develop (see also Latour and Woolgar, 1979). Researchers have no ethical justification for seeing themselves as enlightened and those who they study as primitive. Following this, Latour researched at the La Jolla biological laboratory, describing how science can be seen as a human enterprise that never follows purely rational procedures. His involvement in STS (Science and Technology Studies) later ANT (Actor Network Theory) (together with others such as John Law), insisted that
‘research subjects and objects’ were ‘objects’ that needed to be accounted for. He stretched the scope of accountability as he went; for instance, he wondered under ‘modes of existence’ (2013) if there were legal, theological, sociological, artistic, etc. forms of accountability, each with a different perspective, logic and domain. In his final work, he adopted an Anthropocentric perspective (Steffen et al., 2011) and Gaia theory (Lenton and Latour, 2018), focusing on ‘terrans’ - that is, accountability to the earth itself. 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.

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