Beyond intentionality in accounting regulation: Habitual strategizing by the IASB

•Accounting regulatory texts exhibit subconscious rhetoric.•All deliberate persuasion is built on the foundations of our rhetorical subconscious.•Regulators operationalize taken-for-granted discursive rationalizations and styles.•Pre-reflexive discursive legitimation strategies enact regulators’ habitus.•Habitual strategizing could inhibit innovation within the regulatory space. Adopting critical discourse analysis and Bourdieu’s theorization of dispositional use of language, the present study challenges a common assumption in the accounting standard-setting literature, namely, that regulators’ discourse is purposely and deliberately deployed. I draw on cognitive sociolinguistics to empirically explore the specific manifestations of habitual, that is, pre-reflexive legitimation rhetoric in IASB regulatory texts. My analysis shows how taken-for-granted discursive rationalizations and linguistic forms are operationalized. I then argue that the language observed in regulatory texts, which can be considered as examples of ‘collective thinking artefacts’, enacts standard setters’ institutionalized patterns of reasoning associated with their social position. This critical perspective on the subconscious use of rhetoric generates a series of further questions regarding the lack of reflexivity in accounting regulatory processes.