Cracking a brick in the master's house: counter practices as counter-accounts of difference and survival
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 30 October 2023
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how an alternative accounting system developed by a marginalised group of women enables them to counter oppressive systems built at the intersections of gender, class and race.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on diary notes taken over a period of 13 years in France and Senegal in the context of the first author's family interactions with a community of ten Black immigrant women. The paper relies on Black feminist perspectives, namely, Lorde's work on difference and survival to illuminate how this community of women uses the creative power of its “self-defined differences” to build its own accounting system – a tontine – and work towards its emancipation.
Findings
The authors find that to fight oppressive marginalising structures, the women develop a tontine, an autonomous, self-managed, women-made banking system providing them with cash and working on the basis of trust. This alternative accounting scheme endeavours to fulfil their “situated needs”: to build a home of their own in Senegal. The authors conceptualise the tontine as a “situated accounting” scheme built on the women's own terms, on the basis of sisterhood and opacity. This accounting system enables the women to work towards their “situated emancipation”, alleviating the burden of their marginalisation.
Research limitations/implications
This paper gives visibility to vulnerable women's agentic capacities through accounting. As no single story captures the nuances and complexities of accounting, further exploration is encouraged.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the counter-accounting literature that engages with vulnerable, “othered” populations, shedding light on the counter-practices of accounting within a community of ten Black precarious women. In so doing, this study problematises these counter-practices as intersectional and built on “survival skills”. The paper further outlines the emancipatory potential of alternative systems of accounting. It ends with some reflections on doing research through activist curiosity and the need to rethink academic research and knowledge in opposition to dominant epistemic standards of knowledge creation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to warmly thank the editor and the three reviewers of this paper for their insightful comments that allowed to develop this work. The authors thank them for sometimes even rewording parts of the text; as non-native English speakers, they deeply appreciate this act of care. The authors are also grateful for the space they have been given to express their embodied and relational experiences in the feminist methods. The authors thank the Accounting, Auditing and Control Lab from Toulouse Business School, the CBF community and François- Régis Puyou for their earlier reading of this manuscript. The authors extend warmest thanks to Jane MacKinnon for copy-editing the text.
Citation
Clavijo, N., Perray-Redslob, L. and Mandalaki, E. (2023), "Cracking a brick in the master's house: counter practices as counter-accounts of difference and survival", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-07-2022-5936
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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