Psychoanalytic Approaches to Accountability
Dr David Yates leads this project, with input from collaborators both within Sheffield University and externally. The aims of the project are to add to the knowledge surrounding contemporary notions of subjectivity, understood through accountability relationships and constructions.
![Two people talking to each other.](http://cdn.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mobile_single_column_1x/public/2024-07/DSC03273.jpg?h=4bc06a87&itok=SFXz7V1S)
Project description
With global challenges that threaten the existence of life on Earth, yet the rights to freedom of existence and expression being a core cultural value of many nations worldwide, a tension of social aggregation is present when it comes to responsibility for addressing these global issues. Often, this results in an increasingly privatised approach, where individual consumers and their actions form the focus for scrutiny, and markets expected to ‘contribute towards the solution as well as the problem’.
This project explores accountability in terms of a subject-based approach, utilising aspects of Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and contemporary philosophy in order to understand the social construction of accountability at individual and small group levels.
Key research outputs
- Yates D & Al Mahameed M (2023) This is not an exit: accounting education and attempting to escape the capitalist realist “cage”. Accounting Research Journal, 36(6), 515-538.
- Johnstone L, Yates D & Nylander S (2023) Taking shape within the structural and the personal: sustainability accountability within a Swedish public sector organisation. Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 14(7), 287-312.
- Al Mahameed M, Yates D & Gebreiter F (2023) Management as ideology: ‘new’ managerialism and the corporate university in the period of COVID-19. Financial Accountability and Management.