Critical Perspectives on Accounting 23 (2012) 230–243 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Critical Perspectives on Accounting j ourna l ho me pag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa Contesting public accountability: A dialogical exploration of accountability and social housing Stewart Smyth * Accounting group, Queens University Management School, Queen’s University Belfast, Riddel Hall, 185 Stranmillis Road, Belfast, BT9 5EE, Northern Ireland a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 28 August 2009 Received in revised form 5 October 2011 Accepted 1 November 2011 Keywords: Public accountability Critical realism Dialogics Social housing Neoliberalism Social movements a b s t r a c t This paper analyses the interaction between neoliberal inspired reforms of public services and the mechanisms for achieving public accountability. Where once accountability was exercised through the ballot box, now in the neoliberal age managerial and market based forms of accountability predominate. The analysis identifies resistance from civil society campaigns to the neoliberal restructuring of public services which leads to public account- ability (PA) becoming a contested arena. To develop this analysis a re-theorisation of PA, as a relationship where civil society seeks to control the state, is explored in the context of social housing in England over the past thirty years. Central to this analysis is a dialogi- cal analysis of key documents from a social housing regulator and civil society campaign. The analysis shows that the current PA practices are an outcome of both reforms from the government and resistance from civil society (in the shape of tenants’ campaigns). The out- come of which is to tell the story of the changes in PA (and accountability) centring on an analysis of discourse. Thus, the paper moves towards answering the question – what has happened to PA during the neoliberal age? © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction “I think 20 years from now we will realise that council housing was actually quite a good thing with locally owned housing with local accountability and sustainable forms of management.” Colin Wiles, chief executive of King Street Housing Society (Inside Housing, 2007) The past 30 years have seen reforms to the public services across the globe according to neoliberal principles (Harvey, 2005; Saad-Filho and Johnston, 2005); pursued in the form of deregulation, privatisation and the extension of market mechanisms over service provision. This process has been examined from many perspectives in the accounting literature 1 but one aspect has been almost completely absent from these examinations. 2 As the neoliberal reforms have been rolled out, they have also generated resistance in the form of a variety of social movements. These movements have occurred across the globe; for example, the right to water campaigns in South Africa and Veracruz, Mexico or the right to housing in Mombasa or the health campaigns in Cabo, Brazil (Newell and Wheeler, 2006). In the UK the same processes are at work * Tel.: +44 (0) 28 9097 4417. E-mail address: s.j.smyth@qub.ac.uk 1 For example Broadbent et al. (1996); Arnold and Cooper (1999); Broadbent and Laughlin (2003); Edwards and Shaoul (2003); Gill-McLure et al. (2003); Chow et al. (2008). 2 The clash between neo-liberal reforms and resistance has been addressed by Broadbent et al. (1996) and Laughlin (1996) through an ethics framework. 1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2011.12.007