Unpacking dialogic accounting: a systematic literature review and research agenda

This article aims to contribute to the critical accounting literature by reviewing how previous studies have addressed the topic of dialogic accounting, synthesizing and clustering the main themes investigated, and discussing potential further developments of the dialogic accounting research agenda. To this end, we present and discuss a systematic literature review of 62 research articles indexed on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar that were published between 1997 and 2018 in 21 different accounting or non-accounting scientific journals. A content analysis of each contribution informs a classification in terms of research methodology, theoretical framework, definition of dialogic accounting, main findings, conclusions, and further research. A comprehensive literature review summarizes the contributions of the included articles based on the following six bibliographic clusters obtained in VOSviewer software using the technique of bibliographic coupling (the larger the number of references two publications have in common, the stronger the bibliographic coupling relation between the publications): 1. A dialogic approach to sustainability accounting; 2. A pedagogic perspective on heteroglossic accounting; 3. Critical dialogic accounting and agonism; 4. Emancipation and critical accounting; 5. New challenges for dialogic accounting; 6. Dialogic accounting and social media. The main contribution of this manuscript is twofold. In addition to providing a systematic and bibliometric review of the evolution of more than two decades of literature on dialogic accounting, the present study intends to collect ideas for further research and discuss how the advent of new technologies and the peculiarities of different institutional contexts can shape the future research agenda on this critical form of accounting.