Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22 (2011) 396–414 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Critical Perspectives on Accounting journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa Power over empowerment: Encountering development accounting in a Sri Lankan fishing village Kelum Jayasinghe a , Danture Wickramasinghe b,* a Essex Business School, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK b Hull University Business School, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX, UK article info Article history: Received 23 January 2008 Received in revised form 18 November 2010 Accepted 24 December 2010 Keywords: Development accounting Bourdieu Forms of capital Field Habitus Idiosyncrasies Resource allocation abstract This paper focuses on poverty alleviation projects in a Sri Lankan village and examines their changing mechanisms of resource allocation, referred to as “development accounting”. Neo-liberal policy on poverty alleviation prescribes a resource allocation mechanism that empowers the rural poor, enabling them to participate in decision-making, local account- ability and performance evaluation. We found that, rather than empowering the poor, certain competing structural logics (i.e. development logic versus cultural-political logic) have given rise to some idiosyncrasies in these mechanisms, which disempower the rural poor. This paper benefits from a detailed ethnography enriched by oral cultures and engaged observations in six months of fieldwork followed by a short follow-up study, coupled with authors’ life trajectories and reiterated analyses. Data was iterated with Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus, which illustrated how local politics and patronage relations contradict the prescribed mechanism of resource allocation and how, in turn, rural poverty is reproduced. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Accounting research inspired by Bourdieu’s practice theory 1 is now transcending its infancy (Oakes et al., 1998; Fogarty, 1998; Kurunmaki, 1999a,b; Everett, 2003, 2004; Neu et al., 2003; Goddard, 2004; Lounsbury, 2008). Critical accounting research benefits much from this research agenda. In the first thoroughgoing accounting study, using Bourdieu’s practice theory, Oakes et al. (1998) illustrated how the language (as “instruments of power and action”) of business planning (in the provincial museums and cultural heritage sites of Alberta) manifested symbolic violence, a form of domination inflicting suf- fering and misery among the dominated. Researchers then proceeded to explore complex relationships between culture and power in relation to accounting, governance and accounting education practices. Consequently, a considerable number of publications appeared in Critical Perspectives on Accounting (McPhail, 2001; Neu and Heincke, 2004; Gallhofer and Haslam, 2006; Neu and Ocampo, 2007; Murphy, 2008; James, 2008; Boyce, 2008; Oakes and Young, 2010; McPhail et al., 2010; Alawattage, 2011; Tremblay and Gendron, 2010). Avoiding the pitfalls of structure and agency relations (see Shusterman, 2005), most of these researchers relied on “relational thinking”. They examined how accounting practices related to “struc- tured and structuring structures” and analysed how these “structural logics” were embodied in social agents and mundane accounting practices. This alternative theory of practice illuminated accounting’s actual practices in different research sites: * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: knjay@essex.ac.uk (K. Jayasinghe), D.Wickramasinghe@hull.ac.uk (D. Wickramasinghe). 1 Being one of the 20th century’s most challenging sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu has synthesised his practice theory from Marx, Durkheim and Weber and was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss and Althusser. 1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2010.12.008