![]() From a sociological point of view, we see that NGO accountability is associated with hegemony because it manifests NGOs’ role and power their relationships with the state, donors, and civil society and reproduces cultural and moral leaderships, political ideologies and organizational discourses. However, challenging dominant hegemonies by developing counter-hegemonies, and how accountability is associated with this is not well explored in critical accounting research, despite interesting related debates within sociological research (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991, Fox, 1989, Kurtz, 1996, Laclau and Mouffe, 2014). These agents motivate and educate subaltern populations to organize themselves as a historical bloc potentially deploying social accountability practices to challenge exploitative practices (Kurtz, 1996). In so doing, ‘organic intellectuals’ develop and exercise their cultural moral leadership and promote inclusive approaches to engage civil society in projects such as poverty alleviation through civil society movements or private associations such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (Gramsci, 1971). Nevertheless, this dominant hegemony may not prevail when civil society, which Gramsci called an alternative state, challenges it. ![]() To this end, they involve beneficiaries through continuous social accountability practices, but due to their desire to be financially independent, they maintain a commercial orientation based on neoliberal ideals being propagated in LDCs.ĭrawing on Gramscian (1971) and neo-Gramscian ideas, critical accounting researchers have examined accounting’s role in constructing a dominant hegemony that legitimates dominant power relations and helps the ruling class gain consent of the ruled (Alawattage and Wickramasinghe, 2008, Cooper, 1995, Girei, 2022, Goddard, 2002, Levy and Egan, 2003, Li and Soobaroyen, 2021). ![]() While functional accountability survives through changing regulations and directions of state apparatuses demanding to see NGO’s accounts for legitimacy purposes and appearing to enact regulation within the dominant hegemony, BRAC has become large conglomerates, and their more effective delivery of social and economic welfare programs give them an appearance of an ‘alterative state’ and reinforces their advocacy. Our approach informs the difficulty large hybrid NGOs such as BRAC face in effectively combining functional and social accountability and pursuing their financial and social goals simultaneously given the political, cultural, and ethical factors paradoxically confronting them. We found that BRAC endeavored to disseminate an ‘alternative’ hegemony and develop a ‘historic bloc’ for waging a ‘war of position’. Based on fieldwork in Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the world’s largest Non-Governmental Organization in Bangladesh, focusing on a Gramscian perspective of hegemony and Gramsci’s military metaphors, this paper examines whether and how BRAC’s cultural and moral leadership helped build a counter-hegemony through a ‘war of position’ and extended its functional accountability into social accountability.
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