Governing Futures: Sustainability Assurance and the Reconfiguration of the Audit Society

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Introduction

For more than three decades, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal has advanced a vision of accounting scholarship as a civic and moral project rather than a narrow technical domain (Guthrie & Parker, 2017; Dumay et al. 2018). Its pages have persistently urged scholars to interrogate how accounting and auditing mediate the relationship between economic order, social justice, and ecological survival (Vollmer, 2021; Baker et al., 2023). Against this backdrop, the contemporary expansion of assurance into the sustainability arena reactivates core AAAJ concerns: the politics of expertise (Andon et al., 2015; Lehner, 2025), the plurality of value, and the search for a more equitable society through accountability (Parker, 2011). Yet the present moment also introduces qualitatively new conditions. Audit and assurance now intervene in domains of life, climate, and planetary risk that exceed traditional regimes of verification, raising questions not only of institutional adaptation but also new ethical dilemmas, epistemic challenges as well as questions of ontological design and “pluriversal politics” (Escobar, 2020). To understand these shifts requires a widening of the analytical purview - from the professions and their jurisdictions to the practices through which audit governs futures, enacts moral boundaries, and is translated across institutions, systems, cultures, and ecologies (Lehner, 2024). The aim of this Special Issue is therefore not merely  to reimagine the “audit society” in the age of sustainability assurance: as a plural, contested, and globally uneven field where accountability becomes a terrain of epistemic, value-based and power-related struggles (Bouten & Hoozée, 2025; Harrer & Lehner, 2024; Edgley et al., 2015; Puroila & Mäkelä, 2019; Silvola & Vinnari, 2021).

Since the late twentieth century, the “audit society” thesis (Power, 1997, 2022; Gendron, 2024) has provided a generative lens through which to examine how auditing extends beyond technical verification to the recasting of societal risks and uncertainties into auditable form. Over the decades, this lens has been mobilised to problematise audit’s capacity to stabilise legitimacy in the wake of crisis, reform, and shifting expectations (Humphrey et al., 2009; Malsch & Gendron, 2011). Yet as audit is increasingly drawn into the governance of sustainability, climate risk, and social responsibility, we confront a critical inflection point. The logics of accountability once tethered to financial markets (Parker, 2005, 2011, 2014) are being reconfigured by sustainability assurance regimes, transnational standard-setting, and intensified public contestation (Vollmer, 2024; Lehner, 2025). Audit today is no longer only a ritual of verification but a field in which the boundaries between professional authority, organisational identity, and societal imaginaries are unsettled and, to some extent, renegotiated.

This Special Issue invites contributions that critically examine the audit society in the age of sustainability assurance, probing the shifting identities of auditors, the recursive dynamics of expectation and legitimacy, and the transformations of organisational and institutional processes and structures that follow. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers from all traditions, drawing from diverse methodologies and frameworks, from the sociology of professions to actor-network theory, institutional theory, critical audit studies, audit judgement research, economic sociology, and science and technology studies.

Indicative Topics (but not limited to):

• Planetary and biopolitical accountability: How assurance practices translate planetary limits, biodiversity loss, or climate risk into auditable form; how audit participates in the governance of life and the environment.
• Ethics and social justice in assurance: How the expanding remit of sustainability audit redefines the moral economy of accountability and whose voices and vulnerabilities are recognised or silenced.
• Decolonial, linguistic, and transnational translations: How assurance is localised across global South-North contexts, how linguistic mediation shapes the meaning of "evidence" and "credibility," and how post-colonial epistemologies challenge Western audit rationalities.
• Practice-based and participatory methodologies: How experimental, ethnographic, or action-research designs can reveal the micro-politics of assurance work and the reflexive production of legitimacy.
• Audit Expectation Gaps and Sustainability Assurance: how sustainability engagements reshape traditional distinctions of reasonableness, standards, and performance, and generate new legitimacy struggles; how potential users of assurance are enrolled to shape new forms of audit and audit reporting and how their diverging demands are navigated.
• Boundary Objects, Hybridisation, and Translation Work: The role of concepts such as "materiality," "assurance levels," or "sustainability risks" as mediating devices between professional, organisational, and institutional domains; the blending of accounting and audit practice, the formation of accounting-sustainability hybrids.
• Key Audit Matters and Transparency Practices: how the articulation of KAMs and equivalent disclosures in sustainability reports transform perceptions of audit judgment, credibility, and public accountability, how audits designed to verify whether mission-led companies genuinely implement and monitor their stated sustainability objectives can transform perceptions of audit judgment, enhance credibility and public accountability, and foster meaningful change within the organization..
• Institutional Work: how professionals establish, fail to establish, promote or resist the institutionalisation of sustainability assurance; how sustainability assurance shapes and is itself shaped by the formation of new professional fields, standard-setting arenas, and regulatory infrastructures.
• Auditor Identities and Professional Jurisdictions: how audit firms and individual practitioners navigate competing logics of financial audit, sustainability consultancy, and broader public accountability; how regulatory reporting and assurance reforms (re-)shape the prevailing professional habitus and virtues of independence, ethics and technical competence, and more broadly positions of professional accounting bodies and accreditation processes.
• Surveillance, Traceability, and Digitalization: The effects of platformisation, digital taxonomies, machine-readable accountings, algorithmic verification, and datafication on the epistemics of audit practice, professional authority, and client relationships.
• Public Interest, Value(s), and Materiality: How pluralistic notions of publicness, planetary concerns, and double materiality are constructed, resisted, or institutionalised in assurance engagements.
• Group Judgment and Cross-Professional Collaboration: How auditors coordinate with specialists, regulators, and clients in multi-professional and cross-organisational contexts, shaping assurance outcomes.
• Historical and Comparative Perspectives: How earlier transformations of financial auditing illuminate the present trajectory of sustainability assurance.

Guest Editors 

Prof. Othmar M. Lehner, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, othmar.lehner@hanken.fi

Prof. Hendrik Vollmer, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK, hendrik.vollmer@wbs.ac.uk

Prof. Lies Bouten, IESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR9221 - LEM - Lille Economie Management, Lille, France, l.bouten@ieseg.fr

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

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Author Guidelines

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.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st September 2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 1st December 2026

Closing date for abstract submission: 1st April 2026

The guest editors will organise an online paper development workshop. The hybrid pre-submission workshop, where authors can present their ideas and receive constructive feedback, will take place at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, FI (and online in Teams) on June 12th, 2026 (the day after the CSEAR Meeting in Tampere, FI).

Interested scholars should send an extended abstract to the corresponding guest editor Othmar.lehner@hanken.fi no later than April 1st. The abstracts must not exceed 1.500 words, references excluded, and should address the following points: (a) the phenomenon of interest and its theoretical and social relevance, (b) how existing literature fails to explain the phenomenon, and (c) intended contributions to the literature. Attending the workshops will not have a bearing on the editorial process, and is not a prerequisite for publication in the special issue.