On the giving and receiving of accounts

Research Background: In this creative prose, I meditate on David Abram’s (1996) sense of communication between the human and non-human, and on Brown and Dillard’s (2015) conceptions of critical dialogic accounts. Dialogic accounting and arts-based research are growing areas in accounting research, particularly that which examines social and environmental accounting. This work answers McGuigan and Ghio (2019), Barter and Tregidga (2014) and Gallhoffer (2018) who articulated a call for creative approaches to accounting, including storytelling and arts-based research. Research Contribution: ‘On the giving and receiving of accounts’ addresses the call for autoethnographical studies (Haynes 2018), and for more creative responses to the ways accounting as a discipline and practice can better address social and environmental problems. It is a creative prose, with photographic imagery which prompts new ways of considering accounting’s role in climate change, through a personal account of my experiences during the 2020 Melbourne lockdown. Contributions are conceptual, through the theories of Dialogic Accounting (Brown & Dillard 2015; Morrison & Lowe 2021) and cross disciplinary, expanding the boundaries of accounting through arts-based research and radical autoethnographical methodologies (Haynes 2018). Research Significance: The significance of this work lies in its radical expansion of accounting. The editors are leading scholars in critical accounting, and created the book for the purpose of breaking the boundaries of accounting. The list of editors includes Yves Gendron, Cheryl Lehman, Greg Stoner and Diane-Laure Arjalies, leading scholars in critical and unconventional accounting scholarship. It was peer reviewed in the process of selection for the book, which also featured the work of McGuigan, Parker and Quattrone amongst other contributors from around the world. Although yet to be cited, according to PlumX Metrics it has been used 1432 times as of 15/10/21.