The preservation of indigenous accounting systems in a subaltern community

Purpose - The paper examines how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed to preserve such practices over time despite external pressures for change. Methodology/approach - An ethno-methodological field study is employed to produce a text informing the ways in which people engage in social accounting practices. It uses the concepts of ?structuration theory? to understand how indigenous accounting systems are shaped by the interplay between the actions of agents and social structures. Findings - The case study suggests that it is not literacy, social capital and trust, institutional support, or emotional imperatives that tend to ?preserve? and ?sustain? indigenous accounting systems, but the strongly prevailing patronage based political system, as mobilised into the subaltern social structure, which makes individuals unable to change. Social accounting is seen as the common language of the inhabitants in their everyday life, as sanctioned by the unique form of autonomydependency relationship shaped by patronage politics. Originality - This is the first empirical study that focuses on how and why local?subaltern? communities preserve their indigenous accounting practices over time. This contrasts with previous work that has focussed on the presence or absence of accounting in ?beyond work organisations?. Research implications ? The findings implicate that any form of rational transformations in indigenous accounting systems in local subaltern communities first requires a deconstruction analysis of any prevailing and dominant patronage political system.