Amalie Ringgaard, University College Cork

Maude Plante, Université Laval

Michelle Carr, University College Cork

Per Nikolaj Bukh, Aalborg University Business School

Valuations permeate nearly every facet of contemporary organisational and societal life. Whether explicitly or implicitly, actors across domains are constantly engaged in determining what is valuable, which values matter and how value is represented, produced and distributed. In this context, valuations refer to the situated and socially constructed processes through which entities, performances, people and practices are evaluated, ranked, compared and legitimised. Therefore, valuations influence not only decision-making and governance but also fundamental perceptions of what is worth preserving, changing or investing in.

In today's world – marked by environmental crises, geopolitical conflicts, inflationary pressures and rising inequality – questions of how to account for value and worth have gained renewed urgency. Studies have, for instance, demonstrated that commensuration enables engaging with accounting to organise during crises. Accounting, with its calculative and representational accountability tools, is often positioned at the centre of valuation processes. Whether determining the worth of a public service, the value of human life, or trading prices, accounting plays a critical role. Yet accounting is not merely a neutral reflector of pre-existing values, as it also actively shapes, constructs and contests valuations.

This special issue invites contributions that explore how accounting practices intersect with, and contribute to, broader societal and organisational valuation processes. The aim is to further the development of a critical and interdisciplinary research agenda that places questions of value and worth at the core of accounting scholarship. What is at stake is not just how valuations are made, but also who makes them, under what conditions and with what consequences.

Valuation studies have a rich tradition, particularly within sociology and science and technology studies. Drawing on pragmatist thought, Dewey emphasised valuation as a situated practice embedded in everyday life. Boltanski and Thévenot's work on orders of worth highlighted the moral and pluralistic nature of evaluation, while Espeland and Stevens drew attention to commensuration as a powerful social process of rendering things comparable. Accounting has become increasingly central to such studies due to its pivotal role in producing calculative regimes, performance indicators, audit trails and representations of accountability.

Recent work has illuminated how these valuation processes play out in varied settings. Scholars have explored how accounting influences the valuation of art, research quality and cultural heritage as well as how valuations shape intra-organisational performance measures, standards in financial reporting and profit accountability. Further, studies of the intricacies between valuation and accounting have discovered how valuations account for risks, sustainability, investments and nourishment. These studies underscore the performative power of accounting, not just in constructing value but also in enabling, legitimising, or resisting specific outcomes.

Nonetheless, substantial gaps remain. Scholars have been urged to move beyond artefacts and numbers to analyse the social relationships and moral frameworks that underpin valuations. A lack of conceptual integration persists – similar processes are often described with different terminologies, and the potential synergies across theoretical perspectives remains underdeveloped. Method-wise, new approaches such as netnography open opportunities to capture valuation practices within and across online communities. At the same time, methodological choices shape the extent to which the human experience is rendered visible, and questions of value and worth are rich arenas to examine how accounting impacts social life. These gaps signal the need for more integrative, theoretically and methodologically ambitious studies.

This special issue seeks to advance empirical, theoretical and methodological insights into the interconnections between accounting, valuation and value in uncertain times. We especially invite studies that go beyond traditional conceptions of accounting as a passive recording tool and instead interrogate how accounting contributes to the (re)production of value systems. Multi-level and interdisciplinary analyses that link micro-level practices to organisational and macro-level transformations are particularly encouraged.

We welcome studies that illuminate how accounting acts as a valuation device and a site where notions of value and worth are negotiated and contested. What happens when accounting becomes a valuation-producing machine? How do valuations shape, and get shaped by, notions of accountability? How do accounting technologies and professionals participate in constructing regimes of value and worth? What are the audit challenges when it regards value and worth? How does accounting interact with broader political, ethical and epistemic struggles about what ought to be valued in times of crisis, transformation or uncertainty?

Potential topics

• The mobilisation of accounting valuation techniques (e.g., calculation, quantification, classification, ranking)
• Accounting's interaction with processes of commensuration, financialisation, capitalisation, assetisation or monetisation
• Accounting as a moral and performative instrument in the construction of (accountability for) value or worth
• Valuations undertaken by accounting and auditing professionals, and how these intersect with their roles and identities
• Tracking how valuation practices 'travel', cross-boundaries, along with their epistemic and ontological translations
• Accounting's role in shaping and contesting valuations in relation to socio-political objectives (e.g., ESG, diversity, well-being or care)
• Studies on valuation grammars, including reflections on the boundaries between accounting, valuation studies and economic sociology

Timeline

• August 6, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• January 30, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission

Laura Mazzola, Royal Holloway Business School

Leonardo Rinaldi, Royal Holloway Business School

Ileana Steccolini, University of Essex

Martina Linnenluecke, University of Technology Sydney

Resilience studies highlight the capacity of social and ecological systems to adjust, recover, and thrive despite adversity. Recent literature emphasises resilience as a multidimensional construct, covering individual, organisational, and system levels and extending across supply chains, financial management, and leadership dynamics. Resilience is seen as a valuable asset and forms part of a broader trend towards strength-based as opposed to deficit models of development. The concept of resilience has gained substantial traction across disciplines, particularly as we face increasing disruptions from economic, social, and environmental crises.

These disruptions have challenged the ability of our social and economic systems to withstand and adapt to crises, highlighting significant gaps in how they anticipate, respond to, recover from and potentially capitalise on such events. While sustainability research has long played a crucial role in accounting by encouraging positive change and working towards long-term viability, resilience studies offer a complementary perspective. Resilience emphasises the need for long-term sustainability and the capacity to endure, adapt, and transform in response to unexpected challenges. By integrating resilience into accounting, technologies, logic and thinking, we strive for long-term sustainable outcomes and short-term adaptability. In an era shaped by climate change, global pandemics, economic instability, and geopolitical disorder, accounting scholars are well-placed to respond to these challenges by providing alternative perspectives that meet the growing demand for sustainable and resilient solutions.

This AAAJ special issue aims to contribute to the academic debate on the role of accounting in fostering resilience ('accounting for resilience') and understanding and evaluating resilience ('accounting of resilience'). We encourage submissions that explore accounting as a tool for understanding resilience and as a mechanism for fostering adaptation, transformation and resistance in response to social, economic, and ecological challenges. At the same time, we invite research that questions how and why current accounting practices may be inadequate in supporting resilience and, in many cases, may even contribute to the vulnerability of socio-ecological systems.

Accounting for and of resilience holds the potential to illuminate how accounting can be used to empower marginalised communities, promote equity, address issues of inequality and climate adaptation, and inform strategic responses, particularly in times of crisis. However, it is equally essential to scrutinise how traditional accounting practices may exacerbate inequalities and vulnerabilities, potentially hindering the development of genuinely resilient systems. Critical accounting scholars can and should play a role in fostering a deeper understanding of resilience by developing theories and practices that consider both sides of resilience: the mechanisms that help us understand and evaluate resilience in social structures and the actions that contribute to fostering and shaping resilience.

We call for academic work that promotes theoretical and empirical understanding of resilience, explicitly focusing on intersections of accounting and power, the political economy of resilience, the politics of resilience, and the allocation of resources in times of crisis. Topics of interest include accounting's role in sustainable development, the impact of accounting practices on communities during periods of disruption, and resilience in public sector or community contexts. We welcome interdisciplinary research that applies various methodological and theoretical approaches to provide in-depth, novel insights into these areas.

Potential topics

• Accounting for and of Resilience: examining how resilience is constructed, measured, and communicated through accounting and accountability practices and whose interests it serves.
• Interdisciplinary perspectives: integrating resilience thinking from natural and social sciences into accounting frameworks.
• Constructing resilient systems: investigating how accounting defines and constructs the boundaries of 'systems' (e.g., organisational, community, or social-ecological) when conceptualising, calculating and reporting resilience.
• Politics of resilience: deconstructing resilience as a technical concept and highlighting its political and ethical dimensions.
• Accountability and resilience: exploring how accountability mechanisms can be designed to incorporate resilience metrics and their implications.
• Auditing and resilience: questioning whether auditing captures resilience complexities or reinforces narrow compliance-driven views.
• Resilient economy: analysing accounting's role in building sustainable, equitable, and stable economic systems.
• Theoretical contributions: developing critical theoretical models that challenge dominant resilience paradigms.
• Empirical studies: applying qualitative or quantitative methods to examine how resilience is operationalised in practice.

Timeline

• May 31, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• August 31, 2026: Closing date for full paper submissions

Othmar M. Lehner, Hanken School of Economics

Hendrik Vollmer, Warwick Business School

Lies Bouten, IESEG School of Management

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. Its pages have persistently urged scholars to interrogate how accounting and auditing mediate the relationship between economic order, social justice, and ecological survival. Against this backdrop, the contemporary expansion of assurance into the sustainability arena reactivates core concerns about the politics of expertise, the plurality of value, and the search for a more equitable society through accountability. 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.

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. The aim of this Special Issue is 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.

Since the late twentieth century, the audit society thesis 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. 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 are being reconfigured by sustainability assurance regimes, transnational standard-setting, and intensified public contestation.

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.

Potential topics

• 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 reshape 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.

Timeline

• April 1, 2026: Closing date for abstract submission
• June 12, 2026: Online paper development workshop (hybrid) at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki
• September 1, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• December 1, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission