Self, communitarian self, and personhood: a theoretical account of 'non-compliance' in corporate governance in Africa

Abstract

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework that opens significant opportunities for advancing accounting research in Africa and other Majority World contexts. Critical accounting research has long shown that governance reforms rooted in Anglo-American traditions (e.g. individualism, self-interest, and calculative rationality) often travel poorly to the Majority World contexts, yet explanations typically focus on institutional weakness or strategic resistance. Drawing on Gyekye's (1978, 1987/1995, 1997) conception of personhood, which understands agency as relational, morally constituted, and communally accountable, we argue that such explanations overlook a deeper ontological dissonance between Western governance assumptions and Indigenous understandings of the self. Using evidence from corporate governance practices in Kenya, the paper shows how actors enact agency in ways that are intelligible within communitarian moral frameworks but framed as ‘non-compliance’ through the dominant Anglo-American governance lens. Rather than framing these practices as governance deficits, we demonstrate how they reflect ontologically grounded enactments of moral agency and, in some cases, explicit critiques of the imported corporate governance prescriptions. The paper contributes to accounting scholarship by rethinking agency, legitimacy, and governance beyond universalist framing by centring Indigenous conceptions of personhood as generative theoretical resources.