ABSTRACT
The analyses of this book point to relevant insights for the project to better align accounting and emancipation today. Nevertheless, ending here would feel like leaving the train too early. We hope we can advance a little further or make more emancipatory progress. Maintaining engagement in the struggle, we seek here, informed by the insights of the above theoretical and empirical discussions and analyses, to reflect further upon the possibilities of an emancipatory praxis implicating accounting today. Our elaboration upon accounting, emancipation and praxis here builds upon our theoretical intervention in Chapter 1 where we were concerned to elaborate the possibility of a positive alignment between accounting and emancipation. Indeed, it helps us to see that theoretical intervention, the interventions in the form of historical analyses that followed it (Chapters 2-4) as well as the intervention of this chapter itself, as all instances of praxis. Our commentary can only be partial and unfinished, raising questions and encouraging further work rather than providing final answers. What we offer is a kind of sketch (Bronner 1994) of a notion of emancipatory praxis implicating accounting rather than a blueprint. As a sketch, it can, we suggest, encourage others to engage in a ‘differentiated universalist’ and emancipatory struggle and can restrain tendencies towards an approach that is at once problematically universal, dogmatic and over burdened by the even detailed prescriptions of a ‘privileged knower’. It is a sketch that speaks to our concern, in summary terms, to advance accounting and its context along the continuum towards a more emancipated state.
