Purpose This study examines how Islamic financial institutions, despite claiming ethical legitimacy, may reproduce spiritual and moral inequalities. Drawing on Muhammad Iqbal's concept of khudi (Self), the study examines how institutional opacity, limited theological engagement and compliance-oriented practices displace moral responsibility onto individuals, forcing consumers to navigate financial choices amid guilt, uncertainty and fragmented ethical agency. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach, drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with UK-based Muslim consumers who currently hold or have previously held Islamic financial products. The data were analysed thematically to explore how individuals experience ethical ambiguity, self-surveillance and clerical authority, and how they resist the commodification of their faith within modern financial systems. Findings Rather than a transparent ethical alternative, Islamic finance asserts moral authority without substantive justification. Facing institutional opacity and limited theological reasoning, participants internalise moral risk through guilt and self-surveillance. This uneven clarity erodes trust in religious authority, intensifies spiritual disorientation, and exposes how institutions can privatise accountability while retaining institutional legitimacy. Research limitations/implications By introducing khudi as a counter-accountability framework to demonstrate that inequalities take spiritual and moral forms, the study offers a new ontological lens for reimagining accountability as a dialogical and emancipatory practice. It urges institutions, Shariah boards and standard-setters to move beyond formal, audit-driven compliance. It repositions accountability as a substantive ethical practice, demanding that claims of Islamic legitimacy be structurally transparent and publicly justified. Originality/value Extending critical accounting scholarship, the study reveals that inequality in Islamic finance is spiritual and moral. By introducing Iqbal's khudi (Self), it provides a novel framework demonstrating how calculative regimes can either fragment or sustain the transcendent Self, repositioning accountability as a site for reclaiming spiritual agency.
Purpose The paper explains how water sustainability becomes governable in fragmented hybrid settings. It shows how accounting and accountability hold together diverse actors, competing obligations and different rationalities, enabling sustainability aspirations to translate into coordinated action. The paper illuminates the fragile character of this process, showing how accounting and accountability partially stabilise tensions without resolving them. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an interpretive case study of an Italian water utility undergoing regulatory and organisational changes. It applies Dean's analytics of government framework to analyse data from interviews, sustainability reports and publicly available documents. Findings The study identifies four regimes of practice through which water sustainability was rendered governable. Across these regimes, accounting and accountability perform “binding” and “orchestrating” roles in governing water sustainability. These practices establish norms, responsibilities and incentives (binding) and align actors and activities (orchestrating), thereby stabilising but not resolving inter-regime tensions. Practical implications The study helps multiple actors, such as managers, policymakers and stakeholders, to understand how accounting and accountability can support the organisation of collective responsibility for water sustainability. Social implications The study shows how accounting and accountability redistribute responsibility for water sustainability across organisations and communities in hybrid public–private settings. In doing so, they can promote collective responsibility for water conservation but may also normalise particular ways of valuing water. Originality/value The paper introduces the concepts of binding and orchestrating to explain how accounting and accountability render sustainability governable in fragmented hybrid settings. Its value lies in showing how accounting enables collective action while leaving unresolved tensions among economic, public-service and environmental commitments visible.
Purpose This paper examines how a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in a Sri Lankan state-owned bank constructed sustainability accounting as a new domain of professional expertise. Extending Baxter and Chua's (2008) conception of accounting expertise as an organisational accomplishment, the paper asks how entirely new forms of accounting expertise are constructed before organisational legitimacy, evaluative criteria and professional jurisdiction have been established, drawing on Bourdieu's theory of field, habitus and capital to explain this process. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a longitudinal qualitative case study of a CFO in a Sri Lankan state-owned housing bank, whose sustainability agenda developed during the country's post-tsunami reconstruction. Data were collected across two phases (2013–2014) using 44 semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, supplemented by field notes and documentary analysis of sustainability reports, policy documents and media coverage. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, proceeding from inductive coding through temporal coding to theoretical interpretation via Baxter and Chua (2008) and Bourdieu, tracing the sequential conversion of cultural, symbolic, social and positional capital. Findings Sustainability accounting expertise was constructed through a cumulative process of capital conversion. An entrepreneurial habitus generated the disposition to recognise emerging opportunities, enabling the accumulation of cultural capital through learning, authorship and reporting innovation. This cultural capital was converted into symbolic capital through managerial endorsement and award recognition, which expanded social capital through strategic alliances, and was ultimately converted into positional authority, redefining the finance function's organisational jurisdiction. However, this expertise construction did not automatically translate into institutionalisation: sustainability expertise remained concentrated in a single individual rather than becoming embedded in organisational systems and routines. Research limitations/implications The single-case design prioritises theoretical development over statistical generalisation; future research should examine whether similar processes of expertise construction occur across different organisational, professional and national settings. The case also centres on an unusually entrepreneurial CFO, and alternative trajectories may emerge where sustainability initiatives are collectively led or externally mandated. The longitudinal design captured the construction of expertise but not its longer-term reproduction following leadership succession, pointing to a need for future research on how such expertise diffuses, evolves or declines once its original architect departs the organisation. Practical implications Organisations should not equate the success of a prominent sustainability champion with the institutionalisation of sustainability capability. Individual actors can mobilise resources, secure legitimacy and accelerate organisational innovation, but sustained transformation depends on converting individually held expertise into collective organisational capability. Building durable sustainability capacity therefore requires deliberate investment in knowledge sharing, succession planning and cross-functional learning, alongside organisational systems that embed expertise beyond the individual who originally constructed it, reducing organisations' dependence on any single actor for the continuity of their sustainability agenda. Originality/value The paper offers a distinctive contribution by reconceptualising accounting expertise as something that must first be constructed, rather than simply organisationally accomplished, in emerging domains such as sustainability accounting. By integrating Bourdieu's theory of field, habitus and capital with Baxter and Chua's (2008) framework, it identifies cumulative capital conversion as the specific social mechanism underlying this process – a mechanism not previously articulated in the sustainability accounting literature. It further offers the original insight that expertise construction and organisational institutionalisation are analytically distinct, showing that individually constructed expertise can achieve legitimacy while remaining fragile and undiffused across the organisation.
Purpose This paper aims to explore how the development and use of the Biological Diversity Protocol render biodiversity impacts calculable and how Protocol-generated information may support organizational decision-making and accountability for biodiversity protection. It also examines the Protocol's relevance to rewilding and de-extinction while distinguishing impact measurement from organizational, stakeholder and ecological outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a qualitative design involving document analysis, a focused, structured review of relevant academic and practitioner materials, and semi-structured interviews with purposively selected stakeholders, protocol developers, biodiversity and spatial-data specialists, participants with experience supporting organizational applications and stakeholder engagement, and an assurance provider. The analysis is informed by sensemaking theory to examine how biodiversity accountability is constructed around the protocol in practice. Atlas.ti software (Version 24) was used in analyzing the data from the second empirical phase, semi-structured interviews. Findings The BD Protocol renders biodiversity impacts organizationally visible through boundary-setting, reference states, impact inventories, and the accounting of gains and losses. Participants reported that Protocol-generated information was used for biodiversity baseline and footprint assessments, value-chain analysis, management reporting, budgeting and disclosure, as well as for evaluating rehabilitation, restoration, offsetting and other conservation actions. Its broader accountability contribution is nevertheless conditioned by data quality, resource and expertise constraints, incomplete value-chain coverage, limited organizational and policy integration and the absence of a Protocol-specific assurance benchmark. The findings, thus, distinguish the Protocol's demonstrated calculative contribution from participant-reported organizational uses and conservation-related outcomes. Originality/value The study explains how a South African-developed biodiversity-accounting protocol converts ecological complexity into organizational accounts and identifies the conditions under which calculative sensemaking may or may not develop into integrated, credible and outcome-oriented biodiversity accountability.
Purpose To analyse poverty-related literature within the field of accounting and outline a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach We identify and collect poverty-related research within accounting before drawing on the writings of Brighenti (2007, 2010), in particular the notion of "field of visibility", to analyse the literature. Findings Drawing on Brighenti (2007, 2010), we identify what exists in the literature as fields of visibility about poverty-related accounting academic knowledge. By analysing these fields of visibility, we also begin to interrogate the invisible - that is, what may be, but is not (yet), an object of attention and consideration. It is through this process of analysing the visible and interrogating the invisible that we discuss knowledge within the field, its implications and propose possible future research avenues. Originality/value Analysing the literature through Brighenti (2007, 2010) enables us to contribute to the poverty-related accounting literature by considering both visibilities and invisibilities. In addition, we contribute to methodological approaches to literature reviews within accounting through outlining an approach that departs from structured literature reviews and their variants, which are becoming increasingly popular in accounting yet are often limited in their potential to provide sufficient relevant insights into some topics.
