Critical Perspectives on Management, Accounting, and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Accountability

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites contributions that consolidate and extend critical perspectives on management, accounting, and finance by approaching these domains not as neutral, technical toolkits but as social, political, and moral practices that shape organisational realities, public value, and distributive outcomes. In line with critical management scholarship, we foreground how managerial and calculative regimes structure what counts as “good” performance, legitimate authority, and responsible conduct, while also creating the conditions for contestation, resistance, and alternative forms of accountability (Spicer & Alvesson, 2025). We further encourage work that mobilises historically and theoretically informed lenses—particularly those attentive to power–knowledge relations and methods of governance—building on the influence of Foucauldian scholarship in accounting and organisational inquiry (Bigoni et al., 2024).

The urgency of this agenda is amplified by contemporary transformations in governance and accountability: the expansion of sustainability reporting and “planetary” claims; intensified demands for transparency; and the rapid diffusion of digital infrastructures, including AI-enabled monitoring, auditing, and decision support. Yet, as prior research cautions, transparency can be performative and even counterproductive, narrowing attention to what is measurable and shifting accountability away from deliberation about values, consequences, and legitimacy (Quattrone, 2022). At the same time, accounting’s evolving self-positioning across the economic and public spheres, and the planet, highlights the need for scholarship that critically examines how professional imaginaries are formed, stabilised, and contested—and how they shape what organisations consider material, governable, and actionable (Vollmer, 2024). In this context, we particularly welcome contributions that engage sustainability as a governance problem (rather than a disclosure exercise), including research that advances frameworks and agendas for accounting that is in the public interest and aligned with broader societal and ecological objectives (Carnegie et al., 2024).

Accordingly, this Special Issue seeks theoretically ambitious and empirically rigorous manuscripts (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, historical, interpretive, critical, and interdisciplinary) that illuminate how management, accounting, and finance participate in the production of organisational order and social outcomes. We encourage submissions that leverage institutional perspectives to explain how logics, norms, and governance arrangements shape organisational conduct (Eitrem et al., 2024), including in public and hybrid settings where bureaucracy and integrity are central to accountability and performance (Costa Oliveira et al., 2023). We also welcome studies that trace how ethical and social practices are constituted through institutional dynamics within specific fields and communities (Oliveira & Costa Oliveira, 2025).

Finally, the Special Issue is designed to foster debate on pressing tensions and paradoxes: how sustainability commitments become symbolic or substantive (Palea et al., 2025); how auditing and mediated scrutiny shape the construction of fraud, scandal, and accountability in the digital age (Campa, 2025); and how financialisation reconfigures everyday life, vulnerability, and social provision—often through rhetorics of choice, literacy, and responsibility that shift risks and obscure asymmetries (Twyford et al., 2025). Collectively, the Special Issue aims to strengthen critical scholarship that speaks to the core concerns of Administrative Sciences: governance, accountability, institutional change, and the ethical–political consequences of organising.

The scope includes, but is not limited to, the following themes:

• Accounting as a Social and Moral Practice;
• Power and Surveillance through Management Accounting Systems;
• Critical Sustainability Accounting;
• The Politicisation of Corporate Reporting;
• Ethics, Digital Technologies, and Accountability in Accounting;
• Critical Perspectives on Accounting Education;
• Auditing as a Social Trust Mechanism;
• Artificial Intelligence, Power, and Organisational Governance;
• Power, Control, and Resistance in Organisations;
• Bureaucracy and Organisational Integrity;
• Sustainability: Symbolic vs. Substantive Practices;
• Organisational Governance and Social Inequalities;
• Management, Transparency, and Politics of Visibility;
• The Financialization of Everyday Life;
• Critical Perspectives on Financial Inclusion, Exclusion, and Inequality.

References:

Bigoni, M., Maran, L., & Occhipinti, Z. (2024). Of power, knowledge and method: The influence of Michel Foucault in accounting history. Accounting History, 29(3), 344–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/10323732241243088

Campa, D., & Laguecir, A. (2025). The auditors and the media as central actors in accounting fraud and scandal. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 101, 102787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102787

Carnegie, G. D., Gomes, D., Parker, L. D., McBride, K., & Tsahuridu, E. (2024). How accounting can shape a better world: framework, analysis and research agenda. Meditari Accountancy Research, 32(5), 1529–1555. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEDAR-06-2024-2509

Costa Oliveira, H., Lima Rodrigues, L., & Craig, R. (2023). Reasons for Bureaucracy in the Management of Portuguese Public Enterprise Hospitals – An Institutional Logics Perspective. International Journal of Public Administration, 46(5), 344–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2021.1995748

Eitrem, A., Meidell, A., & Modell, S. (2024). The use of institutional theory in social and environmental accounting research: a critical review. Accounting and Business Research, 54(7), 775–810. https://doi.org/10.1080/00014788.2024.2328934

Oliveira, L., & Costa Oliveira, H. (2025). Shaping organizational, ethical and social practices in youth football: an institutional approach. Managing Sport and Leisure, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/23750472.2025.2494543

Palea, V., Gordano, S., & Migliavacca, A. (2025). Do firms practise what they preach? Corporate performance-communication decoupling on environmental SDGs and the impact of sustainability-oriented governance mechanisms. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 16(7), 98–127. https://doi.org/10.1108/SAMPJ-07-2024-0705

Quattrone, P. (2022). Seeking transparency makes one blind: how to rethink disclosure, account for nature and make corporations sustainable. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 35(2), 547–566. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-04-2021-5233

Spicer, A., & Alvesson, M. (2025). Critical Management Studies: A Critical Review. Journal of Management Studies, 62(1), 446–483. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13047

Twyford, E., Rowe, R., & Andrew, J. (2025). Financial gaslighting: The financialisation of care in later life. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 101, 102788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2025.102788

Vollmer, H. (2024). Accounting and the shifting spheres: The economic, the public, the planet. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 113, 101574. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2024.101574 

Prof. Dr. Helena Costa Oliveira
Dr. Amélia Ferreira Da Silva
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• society
• power
• accountability
• moral
• ethics
• politicization
• inequalities
• digitalization
• artificial intelligence
• critical thinking
• transparency
• resistance