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Accounting and post-colonial resistance: Affective ambivalence in the international development assemblage

Accounting, Organizations and Society 2025 115, 101607 open access
This paper is concerned with the understanding of resistance in accounting research. Using the case of a Southern Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and its relationships with donors within the international development assemblage, I discuss how the organization, in experiencing mixed feelings towards its donors' managerial discourses and accounting practices, engages in a process of resistance. Such resistance operates amidst a processual interplay of attraction and repulsion towards the colonial opposite. Using Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Theory (PCT) and its emphasis on the affective dimension in colonial encounters, I find that the NGO's actions are nestled within hybridity and ambivalence, which drive the NGO towards balancing opposing forces to move forward in the assemblage. I contribute to accounting literature by offering an affective understanding of the ambivalence produced by postcolonial relations mediated by accounting, and by reconceptualizing resistance in accounting research as a flux of affects with political implications in shifting relationships.