Problematising the role of reflexivity in critical accounting scholarship: The case of a Northern ethnographer in the Global South

Within critical accounting scholarship, we are beginning to understand that the enduring coloniality of our academic field limits its possibilities and potential, inflicts harm on the very people it seeks to understand and alienates critical accounting researchers hoping to use their research to impact the world. Implicitly, as a community of critical scholars we have both collectively and individually turned the gaze on ourself, our discipline and the structures and constraints it operates under that has done little to escape coloniality and, at times, serves to perpetuate and extend it. Yet this paper contends that while we use this reflexive sensibility for objectivating ourselves, our research and the structures we operate within, we have struggled to show what difference this makes to our study of accounting. The author’s experience, as a Northern ethnographic researcher within the Global South, is used to illustrate these limitations to current modes of reflexivity used in critical accounting. It concludes by offering some tentative suggestions based on Knafo (2010, 2016; Knafo & Teschke, 2021) on how we might put reflexivity to better use in the project of decoloniality.