This essay addresses the urgent need for transformative action in environmental governance and examines how environmental auditing can support diagnostic and transformative agency within social-ecological systems. This requires a radical conceptual reconfiguration of environmental audit. To this end, the essay advances five conceptual foundations for a more impactful and sustainable approach. These include: an overarching commitment to Earth system stability; transcending an organization-centric paradigm; repositioning environmental auditing as a first-order function that drives, rather than follows, accounting; leveraging diverse forms of accounts to generate diagnostic insights into what truly matters within social-ecological systems; and actively coordinating accountability processes. Collectively, these foundations reposition environmental audit as a dynamic practice for nurturing meaningful change in social-ecological systems.
This study investigates the identity work of critical accountants in the face of ecological crises, drawing on 28 semi-structured interviews and an autoethnographic account. Identity work encompasses the mental and physical practices critical accountants employ to sustain their identity in adequacy with their community of scholars. The findings show that critical accountants exhibit a variety of resilience mechanisms but rely heavily on collective practices, challenging previous accounts that focus on individual strategies. The study nevertheless shows that these collectives do not include their non-human relatives. The article argues that this disconnect might explain a relative disengagement from critical environmental accounting research, while attenuating the negative effects of ecological crises on critical accountants' well-being. Based on these findings, the article proposes adopting “more-than-human critical resilience,” which refers to the land-based and ethical collective practices developed by humans and non-humans to resist the neoliberal capture of society.
This paper examines how credential-based unequal pay is justified, criticised, and sustained within a public-sector accounting bureaucracy, the Controller and Accountant General's Department in Ghana. It analyses a dual-compensation regime under which chartered accountants receive higher remuneration than non-chartered colleagues despite substantial overlap in tasks and common appraisal criteria. The paper brings institutional logics into dialogue with Boltanski and Thevenot's orders of worth to explain both the historical emergence of the credential premium and the situated justificatory work through which it is defended and contested. In doing so, it also considers how the postcolonial history of accounting professionalisation has contributed to the institutional authority attached to professionally certified expertise. Empirically, the study draws on more than five years of research engagement in the field, including interviews, participant observation, informal conversations, and documentary analysis. The findings show that chartered accountants justify superior pay through professional logics that emphasise industrial and market principles of expertise, scarcity, professional investment, and external labour-market value, whereas non-chartered accountants advance critiques centred on civic principles of a bureaucratic logic of fairness, equality, and common contribution. The unequal remuneration regime is sustained, however, not because it commands settled legitimacy, but because organisational actors manage critique through fragile compromises, including compensatory allowances, selective accommodations, and deferred administrative and legal reviews, that contain dissent while leaving the differential compensation structure intact, though contested. The paper contributes to critical accounting scholarship by theorising remuneration as a contested technology of valuation through which public bureaucracies classify accounting labour, reproduce professional closure, and manage inequality.
The paper adopts the lenses of reification (the objectification of reality in relation to the way things are perceived and structured at the individual level) and framing theory to explore, at different levels, actors' understanding of performance-measurement systems relating to the quality of teaching within the university sector. Individual reification can be seen as the result of a wider process of social alienation, which explores the inherent dangers of commodifying subjects. In a university setting, this potentially encourages individual striving over collegiality and teamwork. The research draws on comparative case studies of four English universities, document analysis and interviews with government officials. The linguistic framing tasks used at the individual level provide evidence of reification and contribute to reinforce it via the deployment of arguments providing reasons for action/inaction (motivational frames) based on efficacy, and through the use of diagnostic and prognostic frames that articulate concepts only within the prevailing ideology. It is suggested that this can decrease the possibility of contestation (de-reification) at the level of individual responses. The paper contributes to our understanding of current theory and literature by exploring the use of individuals' linguistic framing tasks as cues for reification. It voices significant apprehension about the dysfunctional (and likely mission-damaging) effects of extant (reifying) university teaching measurement systems and calls for a more-cautious approach and more critical reflections of current practices that, arguably, appear to have led the sector to the uncritical acceptance of highly-questionable neoliberal tools and ideas.
