ABSTRACT
Thirty or so years ago, critical-interpretative accounting research emerged at a time when social theory itself was undergoing an exciting revival in grand theory. Those leading the movement took accounting research away from normative, historical and market-based analyses and into understanding accounting in its social, organisational and institutional contexts. Most importantly, an alternative reading of accounting practice was established that challenges the notion that financial statements and other outputs of accounting practice offer an absolute picture of some economic reality. Accounting as a social practice allows us to see how relationships in society are affected by the way in which accounting is performed, communicated and interpreted. Social theory has allowed accounting researchers to investigate how
accounting communications become a resource for those in power to maintain and legitimate their positions; a technology for the construction of individuals as measurable, governable objects; steering, control and surveillance mechanisms; vehicles for ideology, moral values and critique and a
means of creating order in society (see also Macintosh and Hopper, 2005). Accounting needs to be seen from all aspects that encompass social theory – structure and action, time and space, power and inequality, political on a global scale through to everyday life. Theorisation of accounting, as Ezzamel (2012) points out, is still at its early stages. He identifies accounting as performative ritual, myth, sign, signifier, time and space ordering device, violence, archive and memory, noting that these have received ‘at best, scant attention in the literature’. My own view is that accounting is now very well established as social,
organisational, political and institutional practice but that critical-interpretative research is in danger of falling into a number of traps. These are not unique to accounting research and the wider context of social science research needs to be taken into account. The risks involve forgetting the core of accounting research, institutionalisation of writing and insularity. As an academic discipline in the UK, accounting and sociology have
several things in common. For much of the twentieth century, where they were taught in universities it was as vocational and professional training: for sociology, this meant social administration and policy, and social work, and for accounting, either applied economics or training for one of the professional bodies. In the 1970s and 1980s, both emerged more as academic disciplines with research becoming more of an imperative. There were researchers and writers in both areas but not necessarily in all universities. In the last 30 years, both have been finding their way as research led disciplines whilst also being subject areas which usefully attract large numbers of students. Both have drawn on social theories developed outside their discipline. Accounting has also moved away from economics and towards a business school base, where management, organisation and related research areas have grown significantly at the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries. O’Reilly (2009) explores the conundrum of a discipline. The history of
the subject is multi-disciplinary and many of its best known writers (and founders) are not from that discipline but have embraced it. It can be described as a close stranger to several other disciplines but is more often pilloried, even from within, as parochial, imperialist and reductionist. The discipline has been described as a parasite feeding on other bodies of knowledge, and has lost its core – and its professionalism. She is talking about sociology but it could just as easily be a riddle about accounting research. In sociology, there has been a running debate (‘the coming crisis in
sociology’) in the last decade about the nature of sociology and its
interactions with other disciplines. The problem with interdisciplinary work could be that it ‘contributes little to advancing disciplines, their paradigms and methods’ which in turn ‘undermines the standing of sociology among stakeholders and the public at large’ (Božic´ and Pohoryles, 2009, p.144), although others argue that a pragmatic strategy for research draws on theory outside the discipline will strengthen the discipline. O’Reilly (2009) follows Scott (2005), who addresses the epistemological status of sociology when so many other subjects (including accounting though not mentioned by name) have shown a greater concern for social phenomena than sociologists have themselves. Scott (2005) called for professional sociologists who had a vocation for ‘the study of society’, keeping this as a core tenet of any research or writing. For O’Reilly (2009) this means a ‘scientific emphasis on the complex interrelationship between actions and structures’. The danger is that in considering the conditions of British migrants, as she does, there are so many directions to take on social, economic, environmental, historical, psychological broader patterns and structures, that a sense of perspective is lost unless the core conception of sociology, disciplined and professional, is maintained. Interdisciplinary work needs to be based on strong disciplinary foundations. With a few minor word adjustments, much the same could be said of
accounting. There are enough laments in the literature about the lack of interest in critical-interpretative work in accounting from other disciplines and the accounting profession to match those in sociology. However, this does open a couple of areas for thought around avoiding the traps of forgetting central tenets and insularity. Anthony Hopwood, a very influential scholar who was one of those initiating the study of accounting as behavioural and social practice, stated clearly at toward the end of his life that:
The net result of all these pressures [on researchers] is that accounting is currently left with a research community whose members are, in my view, too conservative, too intellectually constrained, too conformist, and insufficiently excited by and involved with the changing practice or regulation of the craft. But what, if anything, can be done about this? That is a very big and difficult question.
