Banal Accounts: Subaltern Voices

In this review essay I argue that accounting research as it is currently constituted can be viewed as a banal practice in that the majority of research is largely insulated from and irrelevant to the majority of the world’s population. Starting from prior research on “subalternity” I propose that accounting research is primarily a practice of the center, that the institutional field of accounting contributes to the unoriginal and partisan nature of accounting research, and finally that a consideration of the social location of accounting scholarship provides a tentative vantage point for decreasing the insularity and increasing the relevance of accounting research.