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Purpose-The UN Guiding Principles locate human rights at the centre of the corporate social responsibility agenda and provide a substantial platform for the development of business and human rights policy and practice. The initiative gives opportunity and focus for the rethinking and reconfiguration of corporate accountability for human rights. It also presents a threat: The danger, as we see it, is that the Guiding Principles are interpreted and implemented in an uncritical way, on a "humanitarian" model of imposed expertise. The critical and radical democratic communities have tended to be, perhaps rightly, suspicious of rights talk and sceptical of any suggestion that rights and the discourse of human rights can play a progressive role. The aim of this paper is to explore these issues from a radical perspective. Design/methodology/approach-This paper uses insights taken from Jacques Rancière's work to argue that there is vital critical potential in human rights. There is an obvious negativity to Rancière's thought insofar as it conceives of the political as a challenge to the existing social order. The positive dimension to his work, which has its origins in his commitment to and tireless affirmation of the fact of equality, is equally important, if perhaps less obvious. Together the negative and positive moments provide a dynamic conception of human rights and a dialectical view of the relation between human rights and the social order, which enables us to overcome much of the criticism levelled at human rights by certain theorists. Findings-Rancière's conception of the political puts human rights inscriptions, and the traces of equality they carry, at the heart of progressive politics. We close the paper with a discussion of the role that accounting for human rights can play in such a democratic politics, and by urging, on that basis, the critical accounting community to cautiously embrace the opportunity presented by the Guiding Principles. Originality/value-This paper has some novelty in its application of Rancière's thinking on political theory to the problems of critical accounting and in particular the critical potential of accounting and human rights. The paper makes a theoretical contribution to a critical understanding of the relationship between accounting, human rights, and democracy.

This paper analyses what is seen as a crisis of authority in financial reporting. It considers the view that an element of authority may be restored to accounting through communicative reason. The paper argues that the justice-oriented rationality of traditional, Habermasian, communicative ethics is incapable of providing a solid foundation for the re-authorisation of financial reporting. The paper argues that a more adequate foundation might be found in an enlarged communicative ethics that allows space to the other of justice-oriented reason. The inspiration for the enlargement is found in Ricoeur's analysis of narrative, his exploration of its role in the figuration of identity, and in his biblical hermeneutics which reveals the necessity of an active dialectic of love and justice.

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