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