Postcoloniality in corporate social and environmental accountability

Using a discourse analysis of interviews with corporate managers and their published corporate sustainability information, this paper argues that corporate social and environmental accountability (CSEA) in a postcolonial context (Sri Lanka) is a textual space wherein local managers create a hybrid cultural identity through mimicking. It examines how local managers embrace and appropriate global discourses to reimagine their local managerial circumstances. They deploy a set of textual strategies imitation, redefinition, innovation, and codification to translate CSEA into a hybrid 'textual(real)ity' (i.e., inter space and duality between accounting text - textuality - and material practices - reality) whereby the global context is textualized as local and the local is contextualised as global. Nationalism, cultural ethics, and poverty enter this textual(real)ity as discursive elements that reactivate locality. A cultural notion of philanthropic giving, dana, gives local cultural authenticity to this textual(real)ity while the national politico-economic identity of poverty textualizes CSEA as a national development strategy. The paper also critiques whether these postcolonial dynamics can promote agonistic accountabilities. It contributes to the accounting literature on postcolonialism, imperialism, and globalization discourses. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.