Purpose – This paper seeks to examine how auditors sought to establish their trustworthiness as trust providers on the internet; a vision which has remained largely unrealized. The investigation focuses on the WebTrust assurance project, launched by the North American accounting institutes to...

This paper examines the attempts by the North American Accounting Institutes to develop a new market in e-commerce assurance based on their claims to professional expertise through the WebTrust project. Employing actor-network theory in an in-depth longitudinal field study we investigate how...

Purpose – This essay sets out to introduce the special issue. Design/methodology/approach – The essay introduces the focus of the special issue, the manifestation of the phenomenon of online reporting and the issues it engenders in relation to accounting, and briefly reviews the contribution...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to elaborate upon the notion of counter accounting, to assess the potentiality of online reports for counter accounting and hence for counter accounting's emancipatory potential as online reporting, to assess the extent to which this potential is being...

Purpose – Seeks to extend debates about the emancipatory potential of the internet by commenting on Sikka's reflections (in this issue) on the papers by Gallhofer et al. and by Paisey and Paisey (both papers in this issue). Design/methodology/approach – Response to Sikka's reflections, with...