Moments of resistance: An internally persuasive view of performance and impact reports in non-governmental organizations

This study considers the role of accounting in moments of resistance in day-to-day institutional contexts. It does so by drawing on the perspectives of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) – a Russian philosopher who sought to understand the notion of dialogue in everyday communicative practices. We study these moments of resistance within the context of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – organizations affected by authoritative discourses of accountability that seek representative, tangible and verifiable understandings of impact and performance. Within our empirical study, we show how accounting reports related to performance and impact gradually moved along a continuum from being received in authoritative mode to internally persuasive mode and how, as a result, resistance to an authoritative discourse of accountability was created and maintained. We found that this was enabled through the reception and promotion of accounting’s subjunctive possibilities.