Accounting and Accountability for Value and Worth

Call for Papers – Accounting and Accountability for Value and Worth

Journal: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Submission window: 1 June 2026 – 30 January 2027

This special issue interrogates how accounting and auditing practices shape what is deemed valuable and worthy in organisations and society. It treats “valuation” as a situated, socially constructed process—where calculations, rankings, and performance indicators are actively involved in producing, contesting, and stabilising value systems. In an era of environmental crises, rising inequality, and contested ESG discourses, the SI calls for critical, interdisciplinary work that examines who valuates, how, and with what social and political consequences.

Why this issue matters

• Valuation processes permeate public‑service design, risk management, ESG reporting, and climate‑related disclosures, yet they are rarely neutral: they embed normative, moral, and political judgements about who or what is worth investing in or protecting.

• Recent scholarship shows accounting not as a passive mirror of value, but as a performative practice that shapes what is measured, compared, and justified—whether in art, research, care, heritage, or nature.

• By foregrounding the moral and political dimensions of valuation, the SI aims to deepen critical accounting research and connect it with sociology, economic sociology, and STS‑informed work on orders of worth and commensuration.

Key themes and topic directions

The special issue welcomes empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that trace the interplay between accounting, valuation, and value‑related accountability. Priority is given to work that moves beyond treating accounting as a technical recording device and instead analyses it as a site of value construction and contestation.

Suggested topic areas include:

• Accounting as a valuation device

  • How accounting techniques (calculation, classification, scoring, ranking, dashboards, indicators) are mobilised to construct what counts as valuable in organisations and society.

  • Case studies of valuation‑producing machines (e.g., league tables, ESG scores, performance metrics, audit‑driven rankings).

• Commensuration, financialisation, and assetisation

  • How accounting facilitates commensuration (making heterogeneous things comparable) in crises, policy, and organisational change.

  • Roles of accounting in financialisation, capitalisation, assetisation, and monetisation of public services, nature, care, research, or cultural heritage.

• Moral, ethical, and performative dimensions

  • Accounting as a moral‑performative instrument in debates on ESG, diversity, well‑being, care, and social‑impact.

  • How accounting shapes and is shaped by struggles over who deserves what, and who is rendered “visible” or “invisible” in value‑based decision‑making.

• Audit and accountability for value and worth

  • Audit challenges when accounting for plural, non‑financial, and contested forms of value (e.g., social impact, biodiversity, cultural heritage).

  • How assurance practices translate moral and political claims into “verifiable” metrics, and what risks and distortions this entails.

• Travelling valuations and epistemic translation

  • How valuation practices travel across sectors, institutions, and national contexts, and how they are re‑translated in different “orders of worth”.

  • Boundary‑work between accounting, valuation studies, and economic sociology (e.g., Boltanski & Thévenot, Espeland & Stevens, Callon).

Methodologically, the SI welcomes ethnographic, netnographic, historical, archival, longitudinal, case‑study, mixed‑methods, and survey‑based designs that foreground actors’ practices, discourses, and lived experiences around valuation.

Guest editors

• Amalie Ringgaard, University College Cork, Ireland

• Maude Plante, Université Laval, Canada

• Michelle Carr, University College Cork, Ireland

• Per Nikolaj Bukh, Aalborg University Business School, Denmark

For general inquiries about fit and framing, authors may contact the guest‑editor team at:
sringgaard@ucc.ie; maude.pare‑plante@fsa.ulaval.ca; pnb@business.aau.dk; m.carr@ucc.ie

Submission details

• Submission portal: ScholarOne Manuscripts for AAAJ:
  https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aaaj

• During submission, select the special issue title:
  “Accounting and Accountability for Value and Worth”.

• Key deadlines:

  • Opening date: 1 June 2026

  • Closing date: 30 January 2027

• All manuscripts must comply with the journal’s Author Guidelines:
  https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/aaaj

Papers should explicitly link accounting and auditing practices to broader questions of value and worth, and clearly articulate how they extend the existing literature on valuation, commensuration, and performativity in organisations and society.

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