The Accountability Assembly as a Counter-Accounting Performance

This chapter explores how accountability is performed within Citizens UK’s framework of community organising. Drawing on our experience of community organising, we unpack an important instance of community organising action called the ‘accountability assembly’, in which community leaders secure commitments from powerholders in response to their demands and, in doing so, establish benchmarks against which to hold them to account. We contribute to critical accounting literature by characterising the accountability assembly as a ‘counter-accounting performance’. We do so by appealing to, and developing, the notion of ‘counter-accounting’, as elaborated in critical accounting literature, whose democratic potential we probe by drawing on the work of Laclau and Mouffe. Their political discourse theory furnishes us with concepts such as hegemony and agonistic democracy, which we argue enable us to foreground in a revealing and critical way the transformational, dramatic, and democratic character of accountability assemblies as a form of political practice.