Accounting and accountability for pandemics: emerging themes and future implications

This chapter provides a conceptual framing to the chapters that follow and identifies the key issues surrounding accounting at times of great crisis, most especially during pandemics. It does so by analysing the main perspectives, themes and theoretical approaches that have been employed by accounting scholars in investigating accounting and accountability matters when humanity had to engage in a fight against the spread of disease. The chapter then focuses on an important emerging theme, namely the biopolitical properties of accounting and the ways in which they have been activated in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy as a state of exception, when unprecedented limitations have been imposed on how individuals could conduct themselves. The chapter also offers potential avenues for future research.