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This paper aims to explore how the context in a dynamically developing country affects employee silence in India.

Qualitative design involving semi-structured interviews with employees and managers from different sectors in the Mumbai and Delhi areas. An abductive approach was used to analyze the data.

Two types of social mobility concerns – advancement aspiration and fear of social decline – emerged as salient drivers of silence and can be attributed to a volatile job market, social status markers, transferability of qualification, someone’s socio-economic situation and the overall economic situation. Pathways were specified from social mobility concerns to silence tendencies that are motivated by both low approach and high avoidance.

Social mobility as a specific factor in the Indian distal context and as a characteristic of emerging markets can motivate silence while organization-related concepts like job satisfaction or commitment may have less predictive value. Propositions that were derived from the interview study need to be validated by deductive research. Generalizability of Indian findings across other emergent markets needs to be shown.

To the organizational behavior (OB) scholarship on silence, this research contributes by identifying antecedents of silence that are situated beyond the organizational boundaries challenging the dominant role of established factors at the team- and organizational level. To the human resource management/employment relations (HRM/ER) scholarship, this research contributes by theorizing psychological processes that link environmental factors to silence behaviors.

Despite numerous calls from civil society for mandatory regulation on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the European Commission in its Green and White Paper, emphasised the voluntary character of CSR. This paper tries to go beyond the voluntary / mandatory juxtaposition by reframing CSR as Network Governance. In the paper, we argue that a network perspective is an adequate way to look at corporations, that the European Commission's communications are compatible with that perspective, but that the Commission's role in a European framework on CSR goes further than promoting voluntary actions. Rather, to develop a European mandatory framework on CSR as Network Governance would insure that fair interactions between stakeholders are started up and intensified. However, CSR as Network Governance does leave substantial flexibility for tailoring local integration of business.

This paper aims to argue that the concept of “accountability” has changed and become perverted. Originally the concept meant answerability or the act of rendering an account. Those who were traditionally accountable were the powerful in organisations, public institutions and international bodies. The paper seeks point out that the notion of “accountability” has largely been emptied of its substance, as over the past few decades the concept of accountability has become perverted in discourse and in practice. The powerful are often no longer held accountable and are able to make those to whom they have hitherto been accountable, accountable to them instead.

The analysis is developed at the micro, meso and macro levels, through an analysis of the academic literature, in particular journals dealing with the interface between accounting and organisation studies.

It was found that what happens at the micro and meso levels becomes comprehensible when put into the context of the macro level. Instances of partial or reversed accountability in practice are pointed out and linked with insights from commentators in the fields of sociology and philosophy.

Concepts of accountability have become increasingly important in organisational discourse and practice over recent decades. This is particularly so given the importance now accorded to corporate governance and new public management. This paper is intended to formulate resistance to a particular discursive domination of corporate social responsibility. The paper is also new in the linking of this analysis with the argument that the weakening and reversal of accountability might be all‐pervasive in the current era of advanced capitalism and free market ideologies, and that the subversion of accountability is an instance of politically motivated hegemony.