ABSTRACT
Is society possible without accounting? Accounting artefacts dating from over 3,000 years ago are thought to show the origins of writing. Valuing, allotting and classifying food stocks and other goods, and distributing them, underpin the organisation of all societies. Those in power use accounting to control and manage other groups, as well as their own affairs. Therefore, as social theory is concerned with systematising knowledge about the structural relationships in society and the place of the individual in society or the role of humans as social beings, then understanding how and why we engage in, and might be affected by, accounting practices can be explored using social theory. As Ritzer (2007) says: every aspect of the social world, from the most exalted to the most mundane, can be the subject of social theory. Living in Europe in the early twenty-first century, in the midst of
financial crises and austerity drives, it is easy to see that accounting, and the language of accounting, permeates society. League tables and performance measures invade public and private lives. Nearly all transactions, even illicit ones, are captured electronically. Forensic accountants can ‘follow the
money’ across continents. Information, or the lack of it, forms part of political and media discourse. Taking one UK daily newspaper at random, the front page has a continuing saga of alleged over-claiming of expenses by Members of Parliament, statistics about employment and the costs of unemployment to the economy, the value of a gift by the Pope to the Royal Family, the lack of data on a missing airplane despite sophisticated information technology, and financial corruption in sport. Are we a society that ‘weighs, counts and measures everything’, and if so, why? Even if the newspaper in question is aimed at a particular middle-class segment of a particular Western society, why does this pre-occupation with knowing about monetary transactions exist at all? The epigraph for each chapter in this book is taken from Charles Dickens’
1857 novel, Little Dorrit. The novel is a sustained satire about money, how it shapes society and affects relationships, and how people are changed by excess or want of money. It contains an accounting scandal. The writing is shot through with accounting analogies and metaphors, and Dickens has a keen ear for how accounting infiltrates everyday speech. The main character, apart from Little Dorrit herself, is Clennam, the business partner who keeps the books and spends his days with the ledgers and accounts. Within the one story, Dickens manages to bring in characters representing almost every degree of financial security, from poorhouse inmates to the aristocracy, from those for whom jobs have all but dried up to those who are handed a sinecure in government regardless of merit, and from debtors to the obscenely rich. He also manages to bring in virtually every type of financial transaction possible. Money is begged, borrowed, stolen, exchanged for goods, promised in credit, inherited, invested, bequeathed, earned, accounted for, hidden, extorted, speculated, lost, gifted, squandered, paid in usury and owed to people who can send you to a debtors’ prison. As his biographers point out, by 1857, Dickens (who was born in Portsmouth in 1812) had experienced the extremes of poverty and wealth, was a businessman as well as a writer, had seen his family in debtors’ prison (and spent much of his later life keeping them out of it) and was acutely aware of the role of money in his life and in society. One writer observed that Little Dorrit made nineteenth century authority very nervous – particularly the depiction of the civil servants in the ‘Circumlocution Office’ whose task is to make sure that nothing ever gets done by government (‘How not to do it’) – and the book got less accolades than some of his other masterpieces. George Bernard Shaw famously observed that reading Little Dorrit made him a socialist.
