This paper examines the possibilities and limits of social accountability, characterized by face-to-face interactions between organizational actors and beneficiary others. We explore how social accountability is produced in and through visibility relations which recognize or may expose the other. We examine the consequences of such changing visibility relations on social accountability in two case studies of acute and chronic refugee crisis in Rwanda. Our study contributes to ongoing debates on accountability and the implications for responsible action towards the other. We argue that social accountability initially presents a way to recognize the other as valid and entitled to assistance, which spurs an important sense of responsibility. Prolonged exposure to social accountability, however, continuously reinforces the other as ‘in need’, which becomes a burden for the exposed as well as for the exposing actor in their response to a situation. We argue that exposure risks organizational actors developing a rather myopic perception of others’ needs, to the extent of becoming irresponsible in their action towards the other. We conclude the paper with reflections on the importance of proper distance for social accountability and outline the potential of our findings to inspire future work on social accountability and visibility relations in other organizational settings.

Reviews the book "Auditing Research: Issues and Opportunities," edited by Anthony G. Hopwood, Michael Bromwich and Jack Shaw.

This paper examines the attempts by the North American accounting institutes to develop a new market in e‐commerce assurance based on their claims to professional expertise through the WebTrust project. Employing actor‐network theory in an in‐depth longitudinal field study, we investigate how WebTrust was originally developed and promoted as a seal of business‐to‐consumer assurance, which largely failed to generate support in the marketplace. Proponents were subsequently able to generate more interest in the eyes of managers of online organizations by reshaping WebTrust as a flexible set of principles and criteria for systems advice and business‐to‐business assurance. Our analysis suggests that attempts to expand the accounting profession's domain of expertise reflect a trial‐and‐error process where the outcome achieved may be far from the vision that motivated the institutes into undertaking the project in the first place. We further show that the initial network of support for such projects can be quite fragile and dynamic as various actors reposition themselves around the shifting meanings attributed to the project.

Reviews the book "The Behavioral Aspects of Accounting Data for Performance Evaluation," edited by Thomas J. Burns.