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Purpose -The paper examines how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed to preserve such practices over time despite external pressures for change.Methodology/approach -An ethno-methodological field study is employed to produce a text informing the ways in which people engage in social accounting practices. It uses the concepts of 'structuration theory' to understand how indigenous accounting systems are shaped by the interplay between the actions of agents and social structures. Findings -The case study suggests that it is not literacy, social capital and trust, institutional support, or emotional imperatives that tend to 'preserve' and 'sustain' indigenous accounting systems, but the strongly prevailing patronage based political system, as mobilised into the subaltern social structure, which makes individuals unable to change. Social accounting is seen as the common language of the inhabitants in their everyday life, as sanctioned by the unique form of autonomydependency relationship shaped by patronage politics.Originality -This is the first empirical study that focuses on how and why local 'subaltern' communities preserve their indigenous accounting practices over time.This contrasts with previous work that has focussed on the presence or absence of accounting in 'beyond work organisations'.Research implications -The findings implicate that any form of rational transformations in indigenous accounting systems in local subaltern communities first 3 requires a deconstruction analysis of any prevailing and dominant patronage political system.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how the Buddhist and Hindu people in non‐Western societies perceive rational accountability practices in religious organizations, through their respective religious “spirit” and “beliefs” and in combination with broader structural elements of the society.Design/methodology/approachThe interpretive tradition of research, i.e. ethnography based on two in‐depth cases from Sri Lanka (a Buddhist temple) and Mauritius (a Hindu temple) is adopted for the data collection. The data are analysed using grounded theory methods and procedures.FindingsIn non‐Western Buddhist and Hindu societies where people's lives are bound by a high religious “spirit” the accountability system in the religious organisations is largely visible as an informal and social practice rather than a stakeholder‐oriented rational mechanism. It is found that the rational accountability mechanisms are “sacredised” by the Buddhist and Hindu religious “spirit” and subsequently, the accountability systems and religious activities are both influenced by the “structural elements” of trust, aspirations, patronage and loyalty relations, social status, power and rivalries. The accountability practices implemented in these organisations are perceived by the people as being no more than “ceremonial rituals” aimed at strengthening the temple's righteous and prudent image to the religious society.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper raises the issue that accountability practices in community, grassroots‐based non‐profit organisations are not mere reporting of “facts” relating to economic activities and a “neutral system” giving reasons for the conduct of its leaders. Instead, they initiate new forms of accountability systems and reproduce structural conditions.Originality/valueThis is one of the first field studies which examine perceptions of accountability within a Hindu and a Buddhist context, as influenced by the religious “spirit” and internal belief systems of the devotees. Previous studies have mostly focused on Judeo‐Christian or Islamic denominations.

Drawing on Stones' (2005) strong structuration theory, the paper unfolds why and how the key stakeholders of central government accounting in Nepal are involved in the reproduction of routinised accounting practices, resisting the externally-propagated changes. Government accountants (the agents-in-focus) through their capability to control the budget routines have enjoyed a powerful social position in their position-practice relations with the agents-incontext, i.e. professional accountants and international consultants, higher-level officers and administrators, auditors, and politicians. Social position along with historically-imbued dispositions and their conduct and context analysis have enabled government accountants to strategically exercise their agency. Government accountants have articulated duality and a dialectic relation with the agents-in-context, which have resulted in the reproduction of everyday accounting practice and the resistance to the World Bank-led reforms, such as accrual accounting and, more recently, the Cash-Basis IPSAS.