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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

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 Critical Perspectives on Accounting
(This is a translation from Swedish to English, Chapter 12 Kritiska Perspektiv på redovisning, pp.
177-206, in Rimmel Gunnar and Jonäll Kristina (2016) Redovisningsteorier: viktiga begrepp och
teorier inom redovisning, [Theorising Accounting: important concepts and theories (author’s
translation)] with the permission from the Publisher Samona Utbildning and editors)

Ann-Christine Frandsen

Assuming you have read the book in linear order, you should by now have a good grasp of
some of the complexities related to research in accounting. The title of this chapter is perhaps
straightforward but the topic includes a spectrum of different ways of approaching research in
accounting. This chapter can only brief in defining and describing what Critical Perspectives
on Accounting ‘is’, in two ways. First it is worth keeping in mind that it is only one definition
among many (Puxty 1998; Chua 1986, Norman and Quattrone, 2010). Second, there are other
approaches which are used and cannot be covered here (for instance sociological and
institutional theory ones). Still, in defining the topic in writing, I will suggest how research
about accounting can be done differently and hopefully understood differently. Finally,
reading this chapter comes with a warning. I will try to challenge what you know about
accounting, from its definition up. Definitionally, I treat accounting as a powerful practice
which constantly and simultaneously ‘names and counts’, and through its naming and
counting presents or constructs things to see and to know about our-selves and the world and
offers pathways to act upon both (or not).

The chapter is structured as follows: first there is a brief discussion of the three main words in
the title: ‘Critical’, ‘Perspectives’ and ‘Accounting’. In this way a complementary
background (see chapter 1 and 2 in this volume) is provided for understanding the critical
research field as such, and its dilemmas and possibilities. Against this background the
chapter will then continue by providing thee short presentations of the three CPA approaches
selected: Marxism, Phenomenology (particularly as developed by Merleau-Ponty), and
Foucault’s ‘practice’ approach. These three approaches are chosen because they share
common features and hence useful to discuss key similarities but also differences on how the
human is taken into account in CPA research. They also represent common approaches used
as CPA.
Learning Objectives

When you have finished reading this chapter and done some of the exercise you should
have

 Gained some insights on what key philosophical issues are under consideration when
adopting Critical perspectives on accounting (hereafter CPA) approach.
 The key means in analysing any research approach, i.e. ANT, PAT or Marxism, based
on how the human - as conscious, reflecting and meaning-making being - is taken into
account in research
 A general understanding of three theoretically important approaches adopted in doing
CPA work, and their main characteristics.

Three words: Critical – Perspectives – Accounting

Critical

The word ‘Critical’ is from the ancient Greek krino. There are two different but linked
meanings to that word: one is ‘to judge’ – as in ‘doing a critique’, and the other is ‘to decide’
– as in choosing what to do in a ‘crisis’. Both meanings involve ‘judging’ what matters and
what doesn’t, and also ‘deciding’ what needs saying/doing about ‘what matters’. Today
students in Higher Education are encouraged to develop their critical skills as part of their
degree programmes, and in studying for and writing their assessments. This makes sense
since such skills are integrally required in the knowledge professional today (Anderson-
Gough and Hoskin, 2004). In developing a critical approach a good start is the act of reading
– not least as most of our knowledge production and acquisition today is based on silent
reading of various types of writing. In seeking to become a ‘critical reader’ you can start
judging and deciding in relation to any text. It could be this chapter, this book, textbooks,
newspapers, government official documents or academic articles. This may sound obvious if
doing a dissertation but texts also include everything from adverts, medical records, and fairy
tales for children to a form such as the tax return. The amount of text that can be read
critically is therefore huge and growing (especially in the era of the internet).

More specifically critical engagement with a text can be thought of as including the
following: the authorship (including with a ‘deauthored’ text like a form or questionnaire)
and on the other hand about its readership (implied or actual); these are just two ways of
beginning to reflect on the readings we do. Asking questions about a text’s authorship and
readership helps set you up for judging and deciding about the content and ‘what matters’
within the text. For instance a perhaps obvious question is to ask who the author is and where
does s(he) come from? Some authors are not easy to find such as the author of the tax return
form or a medical questionnaire, but such forms and their authors can be an interesting
subject of research in themselves, even if time-consuming and hard work (McLean and
Hoskin 1993; McGoun 2004). For each (good) question asked, if investigated, new material
will be related to the text you are reading so that you can understand it differently. For
instance imagine reading your daily newspaper and finding an interesting article about
smoking and the new e-cigarettes. The article refers to research that claims that the new e-
cigarettes are less damaging and very useful for people who want to stop smoking. Later you
find out that this news article is actually an advert that looks like a news article as it has the
same structure, the same format and fonts, and the same kind of ‘fact’ based narrative as the
other articles in the paper (except perhaps for a ‘disclaimer’ in small print which you did not
notice at the top of the page). You also discover that the ‘news article’ is authored by a PR
firm acting on behalf of the cigarette industry. With this new reading you may judge and
decide differently about what has been said (although it may of course be empirically robust
‘information’).

Other useful questions to address to any text are: What is the author’s background? How does
their background affect what they write and how they write – i.e. the style of writing, use of
different pictures, the style and organising of the text? What motivations may the author have
in writing this text? Where do they come from institutionally? Is s/he an academic, a
journalist, politician, bureaucrat or a business guru? For academic texts you might add: what
knowledge field or fields is or are the author(s) coming from, given how much work is co-
authored. So are the authors in disciplinary terms in Economics (if so in what sub-area)? Or
in orientation terms are they (in today’s typical labels) ‘Positivist’, ‘Interpretivist’ or even a
‘Critical Theorist’?

By answering questions like these a ‘con-text’ starts to emerge around a ‘text’ which can
shed new light on what is said. Again the terms are interesting: a ‘con-text’ is derivationally
from the Latin ‘contextus’, where ‘con’ means together and ‘texere’ means ‘to weave’), so
context is in a real sense about weaving a web of relations around things, events and people
located in a text, and then more generally in the world around us. If new relations are added,
and/or a new ‘perspective’ generated, this can and often does change our understanding of
what we read or see. So for instance we might wish to ‘weave a web’ around, or contextualise
Positive Accounting Theory (PAT) (Tinker et al. 1982; Whitley 1986; Zeff, 2013; Macve,
2015). To do so the following questions might be useful: How and when did PAT emerge and
why? How is PAT related to the development of accounting standards and the shaping over
recent decades of accounting practice (e.g. IFRS)? Or to the selection and intellectual
horizons of their decision makers (e.g. IASB)? Who are the decision makers of IASB? What
kind of organisation is it? Where is its headquarters and are there any particular reasons why
it is there?.

Reading is also about you as reader of texts and how (or how far) you engage in reflecting
on the readings you do. Am I too easily impressed by the facts given, have I checked other
‘independent’ sources (please not Wikipedia or if so then with care!), do I have a critical
distance as a reader, meaning can I question an argument which is close to what I already
believe? Am I as a reader willing to think twice? And do I try to do this by reading a piece
twice or more (which is often very helpful as new insights and questions emerge each time, or
old ones get modified)?

It is clear that being critical, to judge and decide what matters, is hard work. It may often be
controversial and sometimes even dangerous (depending on the field you work in and those
who your work challenges or critiques). Being critical requires a lot of reading, thinking, re-
reading and re-writing. And in being ‘critical’ as defined here, we are often de-stabilising
what ‘we’ or significant intellectual, professional, economic or political people know (or
think we/they know).

Perspective or Perspectives

The reading and writing of texts, and the asking of questions, are always from a position
where certain relations are in view or in focus. One inevitably comes to an area with a
perspective, on the basis of which the initial reading, writing, questions and knowledge are
formed, even if the nature (and questionability) of that perspective may escape our
awareness, as the famous quote from John Maynard Keynes suggests:
 ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any
intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct
economist’ (Keynes J.M, (1936) General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money, ch 24)

Insights and knowledge are about relations to the world and us; or as Hoskin (1995)
expresses it ‘the viewing self and the world we view’, as always intertwined. For instance we
learn to represent part of the world as in figures, graphs and charts often presented as clear
and all-in-focus representations (e.g. on the model of pictures made using geometrical
perspective first developed in Western Europe from 1200s): even double-entry bookkeeping
is often presented this way (Thompson 1991; Hoskin 1995; Quattrone 2009; Hoskin et al
2012). However, if I was to stand in front of you, facing forward, and you were looking at my
face, my face would be in focus and what is behind me, e.g. a tree, and the rest of me would
not be. Yet we are used to ‘seeing’ and knowing the world as if all-in-focus via our 2D and
now 3D ‘perspectival’ visual representations. We may even (particularly if we are studying in
fields like accounting and economics which use charts, graphs and figures like this a lot) be
rewarded with good numerical grades on our written exams if we demonstrate this kind all-
in-focus skill effectively and ‘forget’ it is just one position from which representing, knowing
and talking about the world is made to happen. We may get do, and are positively celebrated
if we can graduate with top a grade. So, usually without being aware of it, we are today
shaped towards ‘replicating’ this particular position for (and way of) knowing the world
through a specific way of ‘learning to learn’. ‘Accounting and the Examination’ were linked
in the title of a much-cited article by Hoskin and Macve (1986). Becoming aware of this kind
of connection is one way of becoming critical concerning accounting, not only in the past but
also today, while at the same time becoming more aware of one’s own ‘perspectives’
concerning what accounting is. Perhaps you had noticed all this before – or perhaps not….

In research it is especially important to bear in mind what perspective we adopt. Writing a

dissertation (at BSc, MSc or PhD level) is often defined as making a ‘contribution to
knowledge’, whatever your approach is, and the contribution, to be genuine, needs to be
‘true’ in the sense that for each perspective chosen for conducting research a set of ‘rules’
needs to be followed. If the procedures are not followed you cannot claim your statement and
you will fail to pass the dissertation. In the Introduction to this volume you were presented
with definitions of different perspectives in doing research. To use Heidegger’s term (1975)
they are all dominant ways of establishing truth since Plato and Aristotle’s as ‘truth as
correctness’. But is that all to ‘truth-telling’? Follow the rules and you have truth? Heidegger
makes another observation while conducting his etymological (origin and evolution of words)
investigation into the ancient Greek for truth ‘aletheia’. He describes ‘aletheia’ as being
formed from the Greek verb ‘lanthanein’ (which means to avoid detection through concealing
oneself) and the particle form ‘a’ meaning ‘not’. So ‘a-letheia’ is what stops avoiding
detection, or ‘what comes out of concealment’: as in one of those ‘a-ha’ moments when you
suddenly find yourself having some insight (and so thinking some ‘truth’), which from your
given perspective had been un-thought or unseen before. These ‘a-ha’ moments are also part
of ‘truth-telling’, things that are not seen and thought about before suddenly are visible

One key aspect in all ‘truth-telling’ research perspectives in the social or human sciences is
how the human - as conscious, reflecting and meaning-making being - is taken into account
in research. This has two aspects. It can be that the human is explicitly and directly taken into
account in these respects as one object of research. This is typically the case in Psychological,
Sociological and Critical approaches while other approaches such as positivists in Science
and Business studies do not as they choose to ‘ignore’ humans as meaning makers in their
research. However the meaning making humans, is implicitly or explicitly the case in all
research. This choice of ‘excluding’ the meaning making researcher requires however that the
researcher, you, to systematically re-making yourself to allow for an all-in-focus perspective
and set up. You need to move from a researcher as a meaning making ‘subject’ and become
the ‘objective’ dispassionate researcher and where you can ‘stand’ and ‘observe’. Becoming
aware of how the subject, we humans, is to be studied and or as researcher, is acknowledged
in all forms of research, albeit in different ways, will provide you with a better understanding
of what questions are asked in critical research and why.

Positivism, from both a truth-as-correctness and an ‘aletheia’ perspective, applied to Natural

or Social sciences, is about seeking to control subjective human interference (e.g. ‘observer
biases’) by focussing on what is given ‘out there’ in its ‘positivity’, and captured and
recorded (as discussed in chapter 3 in this volume). The methodological procedures for
ensuring ‘objectivity’ are the means employed for stop ‘subjective’ interference from or by us
as researcher, as we undertake the process of truth establishment. This choice is the
‘perspective’ adopted by Positivism. With the human out of the way so to speak it is possible
to establish an ‘authentic’ truth so long as adherence to the procedures and methodologies
involved is rigorous. This constitutes positivism’s main claim to ‘objectivity’ 1 , since as
through this process the ‘all-in-focus’ perspective is preserved. This entails adopting a
position where there appears to be a divide between the world out there and us but it is
methodologically guaranteed. We operate from a position that looks at ‘objects’ from a
perspective that is a ‘view from nowhere’, as in Thomas Nagel’s famous book title (Nagel,
1986). At the same time, this is nothing new in western thinking, but arguably has its roots
from Plato.

However, the conscious thinking human being is implicated in this approach as well. One
crucial point I have tried to make here is not so much about ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’
research or the research procedures as such. It is about how do we make different perspective
to happen? One key issue is about deciding whether and how the human as conscious
meaning maker are included or not. In answering this question the rest will follow. With this
insight you can analyse all the different approaches present in this volume by answering this
key question.

It is also important to point out in this context that all social science ‘truth telling’ includes
both numbers and words, and so has both ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ aspects. It is a
misunderstanding that dissertations are either ‘quantitative’ or ‘qualitative’. Yes, positivistic
research does have more numbers and calculations in their research in order to keep the
‘perspective’ stable and claim the objective researcher intact as discussed above. However a
division like this which defines these as two distinct ways of articulating ‘truth-telling’ is not
helpful if it becomes a strait-jacket limiting what you can include in your research with the
effect of ignoring what key issues which may be at stake, e.g. concerning the human or the
subject. Positivism’s calculations clearly require words alongside the numbers generated,
whether this is in the form of first data, second information, or third interpretation. The same
will be the case where any mathematical devices are incorporated, e.g. formulae, equations,
statistical models and tests, plus any tables, graphs or charts generated utilising such devices;
it will also be the case in the abstract summarising the findings and claims, and in the
citations and/or links connecting a given piece of research to its research field. Finally even
the most ‘quantitative’ approach uses the ‘objective’ author position to articulate appropriate
forms of words to develop a convincing argument within the appropriate discursive frame.

1
An entertaining way of saying the same thing is to watch the film Kitchen Story
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323872/
There has never been a social science research paper where there are no words in sight but
instead each page is just filled with numbers as if these could self-evidently tell the ‘truth’.
The authorial style may well adopt an impersonal voice in order to keep a distance between
researcher subject and the research2 (and the reader). My advice is, do not be afraid of using
numbers in any research as long as you know from what ‘perspective’ you are including and
using them.

What then about the critical perspective? Can one pursue an all-in-focus form of analysis
which does explicitly include the human, or the subject? Up to a point, this is both possible
and potentially desirable, e.g. in generating and presenting one’s own quantitative data, but it
is not clear that this one ‘subject position’ is feasible throughout a whole critical narrative all
of the time. At some point you have to adopt in a self-aware way some form or ‘reflexive’ or
‘self-reflective’ perspective where the human is included and acknowledged, as conscious
and meaning making. Such perspectives include their versions of ‘truth as correctness’ and
‘aletheia’. However there are many ways to acknowledge and include the subject and I have
no possibility to cover them all here. Examples of such critical approaches are Marx’s labour
theory of value, Phenomenology, Structuration Theory, Critical Realism, New Institutional
Sociology Theory (NIS)3, 4, and Foucault’s theory of practices (and its Historical Ontology of
the self or subject).

Accounting

What then are ‘critical perspectives on accounting’? Following the line of argument above, an
answer to this question might now be expressed as; it is to judge (as in critique) and to decide
what matters, from a perspective that includes and acknowledges us as conscious and
meaning-making beings, as the basis for seeking to investigate and understand accounting.
Given this definition any one of the range of approaches set out above might be adopted, so
long as it engages reflexively or self-reflectively with humans (including the author) as

2
Ruth Hines (1988) uses a very different style of writing when discussing Financial Accounting. Compare this
style with a FA textbook or article in any main stream accounting Journal such as British Accounting Review or
Accounting, Organization and Society.
3
Institutional Theory is not one theory. There are many Such as New Institutional Economics (Coase, 1937;
Williamson 1975; Walker 1998) and Old Institutional Economics (Veblen 1898; Scapens 1994), New
Institutional Sociology (Scott, 1994) (as discussed above). See Burns and Scapens (2004). ANT and Action Net
could also be seen as a form of institutional theory (Sevon and Czarniawska 1996).
4
For a useful different view of the individual and human agency see also New Institutional Economics (e.g.
Agency Theory)
conscious and meaning-making beings, as a ‘critical’ way of investigating and understanding
accounting. What they all have in common is the view that accounting does not just reflect
what is out there in the world.

Depending on how we as meaning makers are included, different questions can be asked,
different research methods followed to answer these questions and different explanatory
categories used to guide the collection and theorising of material. There is not one single
Critical Perspective on Accounting. However, I will briefly point to some common ‘objects’
or ‘focuses’ of research’ which CPA approaches have been used and where these approaches
may differ in studying such ‘objects’. Finally I will discuss in more detail 3 types of approach
which have been defined as CPA as set out in the initial outline of this chapter.

A focus on accounting as ‘language’ or ‘discourse’ (things we talk and argue about) or on

how language or discourse constitutes accounting ‘objects’ is often found in CPA. Such
approaches typically seek to emphasise how humans express their meanings by talking,
writing and reading and thereby both seek to understand the world, and to influence or shape
the actions of others and of their selves. Hopwood is a good example when he asks the
deceptively simple question ‘who has ever seen a cost?’(cited in Quattrone, 2009, page 25).
This brings out how we give names to categories which then become important or central
accounting ‘objects’; meanwhile we see accounting as making things and relations visible:
but this visibility implicates something stubbornly ‘invisible’.

Beyond this, approaches with this focus typically accept how accounting is integral to most
organisations today, and if accounting can be seen as language then this can open up a range
of possibilities for understanding how accounting ‘communicates’ as a way of making sense
of a world which is complex and uncertain (e.g. Boland, 1989; Hines 1988; Williams 2004).
It also offers possibilities to investigate how accounting may operate the linguistic category
of ‘rhetoric’ in the allocation of resources and positions, in other words as a powerful way of
‘directing’ meaning and understanding (e.g. Thompson, 1991; Quattrone, 2009).
Furthermore accounting as ‘literate’ form of language has a particular interest in a ‘mass
literate’ world where reading and writing have become integral parts of thinking and acting
effectively as ‘subjects’ in the world. Our lives today are intersected by these aspects of
language in multiple ways. So one emergent focus is investigation into how and why some
people have more or less access to shape the writing, talking and reading of accounting such
as members of boards like that of the IASB and the texts they issue as IFRS. The writing of
other texts becomes open for questioning, e.g. the accounting textbooks used in Higher
Education (e.g. in terms of a US dominance, or co-authorship of US authors with those in
other parts of the world for ‘local’ versions of such texts). As CPA typically does not accept
that there is just one interpretation of a text or that texts are made up of simple or
unambiguous statements, it does not assume that there is a perfect ‘translation’ of ‘meaning’
from one person to another, as one aspect of our all being thinking meaning-makers. Neither
is there a perfect ‘copying’ from text to thinking or vice versa. Who has not read a book or
seen a film more than once where different things suddenly ‘pop out’ or ‘strike you’ (i.e.
come out of concealment), the next time you read or see it. Accounting as a form of language
makes way for a range of possible linked areas where things may ‘pop out’. At the same time,
researching the way in which accounting statements are framed textually or located
institutionally may also enable the researcher to show how certain views are privileged and
others are silenced (and perhaps to indicate why as well).

In following this focus, there are certain things to keep in mind. Starting from language
means that some reflection on what language is, and how it operates, is required before such
research can start, particularly with respect to accounting. The status of ‘words’ in accounting
is a particular issue here, since accounting is so often assumed or seen as being about
numbers or calculation, so that the words that we can see there in any accounting text are
seen as secondary, e.g. forming rhetorical decoration or just attention-directing to ‘what the
numbers say’ in texts such as Annual reports. Ezzamel & Hoskin (2002), considering the
earliest known form of accounting, the token accounting which exists from c 8000 BCE and
so ‘before writing’ (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992), argue that this misunderstands what
accounting is: Accounting, from the token accounting on, always simultaneously names and
counts. Hence all accounting statements, whether in financial or management accounts, have,
as a counterpart to the numbers and calculations, named categories within which the numbers
and calculations are made. Starting from this assumption, one may see such shifts in
accounting practice as that from historical cost accounting to ‘fair value’ not just as a new
form of calculation but a form of re-naming, and one which has an impact not just on what
numbers are focused upon, but upon the whole discourse in which accounting operates,
where ‘value’ rather than ‘cost’ is the focus (Macve, 2015). This approach still sees
accounting as a form of ‘language’ or ‘discourse’ but an emphasis on how it both names and
counts may have significant implications for how one goes about making a ‘critical analysis’
and so what insights may emerge.
It is also not unusual that studies from a language point of view accept that speech and
writing are distinctly different from each other, but at the same time they assume that sense
and meaning can be interpreted (in what is sometimes called a ‘logocentric’5 or Eurocentric
assumption) in terms of modern ‘alphanumeric’ sign systems. As systems they operate with
alphabet and Arabic numerals and with forms of grammar and logic built up within those
systems from the time of the ancient Greeks. But the big problem is that it is often assumed
then language as derived from the alphabet, syllabus and grammar, and will look no further in
problematising language.

However all such starting points are now widely questioned, and it is also more widely
recognised that accounting has been long practised without such sign systems, even though
double-entry bookkeeping as such seems to have appeared only with the development of the
zero and textual lay-outs developed in medieval western Europe (de Sainte Croix, 1956;
Hoskin & Macve, 1986). Just as writing long predates alphabetic and alphanumeric systems,
so within those systems new flexibilities are developed (whether at the level of the 0,1
computer code or in the new written forms circulating via mobile short text forms and the
new words and terms developed both in technical and informal discourses).

This short briefing on accounting as ‘language’ may perhaps also highlight another aspect of
CPA, a focus on accounting as practice and form of knowledge. How accounting operates as
a form of expertise and ‘truth production’, and is linked to other expert ways of making sense
of and also transforming selves and the world are important issues that connect to accounting
as language. Accounting as practice also implicates learning, since it has to be developed to
become a ‘reflective practitioner’ in Schön’s sense, (1984) and has to be ‘passed on’ to
successive generations. Investigations into strengths and weaknesses of accounting as
knowledge and professional practice, and forms of accounting education and training, are
becoming addressed from ‘critical perspectives’. Often these describe themselves as analyses
of the ‘power’ of accounting. Alternatively, research sees itself as looking at accounting as a
practice in practice, and perhaps considering how accounting practices is linked to a range of
connected practices, including the managerial, the medical, the environmental, the pedagogic,
and the governmental. Many studies are contemporary, but some also link contemporary
analysis to past developments, taking into accounting how accounting as language or practice

5
Logos is a Greek term. In its noun form it means (i) ‘the word or outwards forms by which the inward thought
is expressed’ and (ii) ‘the inward thought itself’ (p.824). Its verb form Lego (p.804) means ‘lay in order, arrange
and so to gather, pick up’ (Liddell & Scott’s Greek – English Lexicon, 1854). These are the terms are central to
all strands of European philosophy.
changes over time and relates to systematically different ways of thinking and acting.
Historical analysis can therefore play an important part in CPA research, across a number of
specific approaches.

Critical Perspectives on Accounting – Three approaches

It is now time to be more specific on how three ‘critical’ approaches take into account the
human in research - as conscious, reflecting and meaning-making being - and how these
perspectives make way for a specific critical questioning of accounting as discussed above
not least through practices and experiences,

Karl Marx and Marxism

Marx’s ideas on the interrelations between the economic and the political continue to have a
major influence, either directly or indirectly, on CPA work. From political texts such (as The
Communist Manifesto (1848) to the three volumes of Das Kapital (1867-1894), Marx, as
philosopher, economist and historian, has had a shaping influence on critical ways of
understanding accounting and specific critiques of modern accounting practice and theory
(e.g. Fleischman 2000; Thomas et al, 2004; Tinker 2005) and as one important technology in
supporting Capitalism in creating and sustaining in-equalities of wealth, assets and life
opportunities. In other words accounting is seen as a tool for the privileged to stay privileged
as will be discussed below and for impact more widely on the social and economic life.

As with all critical perspectives as defined here, meaning making is in play, with a particular
focus on groups or ‘classes’, and most importantly in the interactions between ‘labour’ and
‘capital’. Marx articulated a theory of what is called dialectical materialism. Dialectical
analysis works through investigating an idea (as thesis), its ‘opposite’ (as antithesis), and then
seeking to resolve the differences between these opposites via reasoning to constitute a
‘higher’ or deeper understanding (as synthesis). While the dialectical method can be traced
back to Plato, the more immediate reference point for Marx was Hegel who sought to re-
develop the dialectical method as means of philosophising.

For Marx, however in doing dialectic analysis, in order understanding the truths of our
material world, and the material conditions under which people live, was on the economic
relations between land, capital and labour, and how capital extracted a ‘surplus value’ from
labour, and increasingly took over the economic lead from the old ‘landowning’ rentier class.
This meant that Marx’s transformed Hegel’s reasoning in that the dialectic does not leads to a
synthesis of harmony, Marx but on ‘dis-harmony’. Looking at the cities and states of his era,
he identified a modern form of ‘political economy’ which constituted a world of un-
equalities, where increasingly a few capitalists owned the means of production, and by
extracting the ‘surplus value’ from labour became increasingly wealthy at the expense of
labour, who were the primary means of generating that value. This was the basis for Marx’s
‘labour theory of value’. Marx’s analysis had significant application to his own era. At the
same time, it has increasingly been seen as having at least some relevance today, given how
many surveys and analyses see a similar pattern of inequality, where (Oxfam report 2015)
that the worlds 1% richest own 48% of all wealth6.

At the heart of capitalism’s attempts to capture wealth lies the tendency of the rate of profit to
fall. Thus the dialectic leads to ‘disharmony’ for the capitalist system, or a synthesis where, in
the last analysis, class conflict is overcome in the triumph of ‘labour’, in the form of the
proletariat. This is a major point as it means that the starting point of analysis is conflict
(between capital and labour) and its resolution is system disharmony and collapse. So for
Marx it is of special importance to investigate these conflicts at the level of groups, and
especially between capital and labour, where the former exploit the latter. Such ideas invert
most of modern economic theory, which tends to assume a tendency towards or a normal
condition of equilibrium and balance, with disharmony as a rare condition or anomaly which
tends to lead back towards an ‘equilibrium condition’. This is to Marx is to get the nature of
the economic world upside down. Within CPA, Marx’s influence has arguably been as much
for this insight as for its generating a specific stream of Marxist analysis, although there
remains an important stream of such work, often generating vigorous disagreement over how
to interpret and work with Marx’s oeuvre (e.g. Macve, 1999; Tinker, 1999; Bryer 2005; Toms
2010).

Marx’s is a very powerful way of looking at the economy and central to the analysis is the
focus on the interwoven aspects of the political and economic. CPA work drawing on Marx
has focused on such themes as how accounting facilitates the exploitation of labour and
drives workers but also whole peoples into poverty (particularly as the threat of the falling
rate of profit leads to closing industries in whole cities or states and exporting them
elsewhere, or to boosting profit through tax avoidance and evasion). Here more specifically

6
See also a previous report from World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations
2006.
study is also made of how tax laws, and forms of transfer pricing, can facilitate tax avoidance
(Sikka and Wilmott, 2010) and make it a global fact that multinational firms such as
Starbucks, Google and Amazon pay no or little tax to the states where they carry on their
trading activities7

As seen here Marx does put the subject in play, but not so much at the individual level as at
that of groups and classes, and most importantly with a focus on the interrelations between
labour and capital, and usually with a focus on the economic ‘base’ as determining, while
ideas and knowledge operate as perhaps the determinable, at the level of a ‘superstructure’,
particularly in the form of ‘ideology’. Ideology becomes what Capitalists and their supporters
keep promoting as truth to stop the proletariat from rising in revolution. The term’s
continuing fascination show in the extent to which claims of ‘ideology’ may be made today
well beyond a Marxist frame of analysis. One media source often criticised (by the ‘liberal or
socialist left’ for instance) for a ‘right wing’ bias and ‘ideology’ in the USA is Fox News,
where both its newscasts and its opinion programmes are on the whole explicitly (and
proudly) supportive of ‘patriotic’ attitudes and ‘neoliberal’ views. Now with global news
channels, there are media sources from other political regimes, which are equally criticised
for a ‘left wing’ bias and ‘ideology’ (by mainstream as well as ‘right-leaning’ commentators),
such as Russia Today; one of its most-viewed opinion programmes is presented by an
American who worked on Wall Street, Max Keiser, who is far from Marxist, but still
condemns the ‘ideology’ and practices of Wall Street as the work of ‘financial terrorists’.

I mention these extremes just to make the point that both of these are intellectual choices,
both are contentious and neither is a ‘revealed truth’. But it is fair to say that the latter kind of
‘economic’ or ‘accounting’ view, at least, is a virtual if not total silence in conventional
accounting and finance textbooks. Insofar as Fox News is located at the right-wing end of a
US status quo, its economic or accounting views are contentious, but they are contentious
within a framework which is closer to the assumptions typically held in such textbooks. This
is an issue for critical reflection insofar as US-authored or co-authored texts or US-developed
accounting techniques and concepts are studied so widely by students across the world: and
also insofar as these students treat these texts as sources of right answers, and can define
themselves as ‘good at accounting’ if they score high marks in the tests and exams they sit
based on these textbooks, concepts and techniques. From a critical Marxist perspective this

7
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-47bn-corporation-tax-lost-through-evasion-and-avoidance-as-
royal-mail-is-sold-for-650m-less-than-it-is-worth-8874873.html - accessed 2014-10-19
can be read as ensuring that ‘ideology’ continues to masquerade as truth, through promoting
among students the kinds of understanding which will help to prevent any disturbance for the
privileged and the wealth and positions they have acquired under Capitalism. Similar
critiques are made against the conceptual discourses of Markets Based Accounting Theory
and of standards setters, insofar as their framing of accounting as being concerned with ‘fair
value’, or as serving the interests of investors or as needing to operate in light-regulation
regimes work ideologically to support the wealthy and privileged. Critiques of FASB and
IASB as ‘captured’ bodies, and of GAAP and IFRS as ‘standards’ which are partial, continue
as an important Marxist stream of analysis, alongside other continuing work into the roles
played by accounting in the exploitation of labour and in producing the recurrent crises of
capitalism (compare with chapter 2 in this volume).

Finally one issue that constantly recurs is how far the concept of ‘ideology’ is defensible
given its uneasy relation to ‘truth’. For how far (as in the issue of Fox News vs Russia Today)
is my ‘truth’ your ‘ideology’ and where do we find a criterion to differentiate truth from
ideology? Additionally, if Marx’s dialectical materialist analysis is correct then does that
make Marx or the modern researcher conducting Marxist research some form subject outside
the base/superstructure dynamic? If not, then where does the theorist stand in order to ‘see
through’ ideology on behalf of the truth, if trapped within the economic base. Nevertheless
thinking and praxis (as reflexive thoughtful action) remain of major importance as essential
concepts in Marxist theory as it seeks to understand how, focussing on practice and action,
the relations between capital and labour play out. The analysis applied is a form of bottom up
analysis (starting from practices and actions) but has as its main focus a group/class focus
rather than the individual as such. Both accounting practices and statements (and their
documentary formats) play key roles, in general in support of capital, but not necessarily so,
insofar as accounting statements and practices properly thought through do not automatically
serve the needs of capital. Thus one last line of research is into how better forms of
accounting may be developed to work against the exploitation of labour and its ideological
mystifications.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is concerned with the ‘rational’ study (again within the tradition of the
Logos), of what I encounter as an embodied being at the level of my ‘lived experience’. Thus
it is a matter of what ‘appears’ to me (the ancient Greek word for ‘what appears’ is ‘to
phainomenon’) in experience, and of how I make sense of this, through some form of
reflective engaging with what appears to me, which will involve a ‘whole body’ engagement
which includes but is not exclusively driven by my mental reflections.

As developed by the ‘father’ of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, such engagement entailed

a form of self-reflective and constantly self-aware ‘holding oneself at a distance’ (epoche’)
(e.g. see Matthew 2006; Hass, 2008). As such it is a way of reasoning and knowing the
world. What appears to me is not just the immediate event of experience, since ‘lived
experience’ also includes the reflection from a ‘the outside’ position (since this is also part of
my experiencing and of what the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, would
later call my ‘being in the world’. Thus, acknowledging that all seeing is always from a
certain point of view, but also that this point of view is not fixed but subject to thoughtful
revision through further engagement in ‘lived experience’ is fundamental for this approach.
Lived experience is seen our access or opening to ‘being’, and so as the ground of ontology
itself. But a point of view, even where it makes use of ‘perspectival’ or ‘all-in-focus’ ways of
knowing (Merleau-Pont,1968) a scientist for instance is bound to do in undertaking
laboratory work), remains ‘a point of view’. As already discussed when something is in focus
and in view other things are the background or made invisible. As for Merleau-Ponty’s
scientist, is the world outside the lab, so long as she is working within it. But at the end of the
day, she can get in her car, negotiate that world, and go home. This is how lived experience
‘is’. The world is never all-embracing all at once.

The form of phenomenological reasoning is different from deduction, induction and also
‘abduction’. It focuses on how we are as humans capable of seeing and understanding,. To
undertake each person’s lived experience analysis can then consider the inter-subjectivity of
lived experience between people and explore what things stand out as possible similarities of
experience without reducing the lived experience of one to that of the other. What
expressions and modes of reasoning are in play in making something visible? In other words
it is the passage from ‘from non-seeing to seeing, from non-understanding to understanding’
that interests Phenomenology. A question like this is again necessarily both reflective and
reflexive: this passage applies to the researcher as subject as well as the subjects who are
researched. Some aspects of our seeing and knowing may be common: for instance the
physiologically unavoidable condition of the blind spot in our vision, which is given since the
optic nerve has to exit through the back of the retina. But reflectively and reflexively we may
become aware of other blind spots. For instance Merleau-Ponty uses the ‘illusion’ where one
horizontal line has at its ends two inward-facing arrow heads (i.e. >---<) and immediately
below it there is another line which has at its ends two outward facing ones (i.e. <--->). The
naïve subject is asked ‘which is the longer’, and after visible inspection declares that the one
above is. The arrow heads are removed and that line no longer appears longer. The naïve
subject then says that ‘they are really the same length’. Merleau-Ponty observes that this is to
privilege the objectively measured over the subjectively perceived as ‘the real’. In perception
they are, equally ‘really’, ‘not the same length’. Phenomenology does not privilege one
experience over the other.

The big point, in terms of doing research as reflective and reflexive subjects, is here that we
cannot do any kind of research or understanding if we do not first of all live in the world and
experience it, including through our reflexive reflections. Phenomenology’s starting point
therefore in a sense renders it as a critical project in itself, by raising to a point of principle
what is either simply set to one side or treated as non-problematic in many other
philosophical approaches and ways of knowing, i.e. the need to be aware of one’s own
reflexivity and equally that of the subjects who are the objects of your research. They cannot
be assumed to be pure passive ‘respondents’ to stimuli or information provided, or a
population who will be distributed in a pattern that reveals ‘true’ regularities that are stable
across time. [For instance the subject who ‘gets’ the parallel line illusion will not ‘respond’ to
it in the same way at all in future.]

One key area of where phenomenology is used to undertake critical accounting research is in
that of teaching and learning, particularly though not exclusively where there is an interest in
developing the ‘critical thinking’ of students, or promoting pedagogic practices and models
which will engage them in active or reflective learning. It may also be used to consider how
texts (possibly educational ones but also others such as accounting standards, financial
reports, management accounting techniques etc.) make sense more or less successfully as
they seek to engage us whether for instance as learning subjects or accountable workers or
managers or as analysts or traders in financial markets, Phenomenological research can move
between texts and how they are understood or reacted to by subjects who are in one of the
above relations to a given text, e.g. as professional auditors seeking to apply standards,
analysts working with ‘rhetorically rich’ financial reports, nurses or doctors engaging with
management accounting targets. In all these cases, accounting texts are no longer seen as
‘representations’ of accounting realities, but as aspects of lived experience, subject to
reflective and reflexive action by those experiencing them (Thomkins and Groves,1983;
Boland 1985; Chabrak, 2005; Jayasinghe and Thomas 2009). When one thinks of how in
management accounting, we now recognise the force of ‘Goodhart’s Law’ – namely that
‘every measure that becomes a target becomes a bad measure’ – then the potential value of
phenomenological research is clear. Only through some method which begins by treating the
subjects of the research as reflexive and reflective, and seeks to follow their lived experience
closely and with respect, can we expect to generate thoughtful understandings of how this
happens as part of ‘lived experience’.

Since the first strands of Husserl’s first line of thought as a distinct philosophical approach
there are now many versions of phenomenology developed. We have focussed here on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty8 (1908-1961) since his approach is particularly rich conceptually and
as a form of research practice. His focus on our embodiment as the central starting point for
analysing our lived experience and being in the world offers connections to more recent
research approaches. For instance embodiment is integral to Bruno Latour’s studies of
laboratory work, as he notes how scientists process all their data derived from the world
through the two-dimensional space of the sheet of paper, on the way to constructing finished
narratives full of charts, equations, logical connections and quantitative and qualitative
evaluations. Doing accounting involves similar forms of embodiment and relations to two-
dimensional space, whether in paper or screen format. Phenomenology as developed by
Merleau-Ponty can help make visible how the body occupies different positions to see, feel,
touch, smell and know, and how the body is both ‘I’ and ‘me’, as in the case where ‘I touch
myself’. Aspects of embodiment and their relation to how we ‘do accounting’ or how we act
over time as subjects rendered ‘accountable’ via accounting are one potential field for critical
analysis. For as Merleau-Ponty argues, to express and visualse the world to be seen and
known is a constant and never ending effort (Hass, 2008 p.9): not least because what is in
sight simultaneously keeps other things out of sight and invisible, or renders them into things
that never or rarely get said.

It goes perhaps without saying that conducting a phenomenological research inquiry requires
meeting people and talking to them about their lived experiences and what ‘appears’ to them,

8
Émilie Bréhier supervised his doctoral dissertation Phenomenology of Perception (1962) one of his major
work along with The Visible and the Invisible (1968). He was contemporary with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir. He was especially influenced by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson, Gabriel
Marcel, Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Descartes. Descartes become one of his main target of critique due to his
ontology often expressed in the famous quote ‘ I think therefore I am’ (dualism) and a critique of
representations. Given that many accounting theories adopt accounting as representation this approach gives
scope for a solid critique.
both at first sight and reflexively over time via reflection and (and as) further experience.
Researchers also follow people around in situ while they are actually in the process of
‘making’ (or not making) sense of things as an aspect of their living in the world. Typically
the researcher’s own sense-making as the project progresses is incorporated as part of the
‘experience’ of the project which is for intersubjective sharing (without any presumption that
other subjects will see this experience as the researcher herself does); but this is all part of the
‘showing’.

Not all aspects of a phenomenological study will be ‘live’ following of subjects making sense
and living in the world; and even those aspects that are will not necessarily generate any
simple understanding of what is going on, either for the researcher or the subjects. The world
often resists making things visible, as do we in it. We have to work at finding forms of
language or expression that can enable or provoke new ways of seeing and understanding; we
have to recognise too that current understandings may constantly be on the way to future
ones, or even to a whole reorientation of how either we as researchers or the subjects we
research (or both) understand aspects of our lived experiences. We may see projects therefore
as more or less successful attempts in making us see. But as we are always ‘on the way’ to
becoming what we ‘are’, the categories of success and failure may themselves be misleading.

Overall, phenomenology recognises that language is the most expressive and resourceful way
of articulating what we think, but that it never proceeds to do so except through
‘embodiment’. Therefore we engage in ‘languaging’ but only alongside other embodied ways
of showing our truth to others and ourselves, e.g. through gesticulating, the gaze and the use
of all the senses. And necessarily, in doing research, we translate whatever we have observed
and participated in as ‘lived experience’ into various forms of written text, from fieldnotes to
plans, data analyses, drafts, reflections and finally some extended form of prose, as in our
dissertation. This too is part of lived experience, in this case, seeking to present our own
understandings and the material upon which they are based in ways which will enable others
either to recognise a truth in what is written or to challenge it, on the basis of their lived
experience and reflection, or perhaps to find for themselves ways beyond it. In this way what
may have come out of concealment for us as an ‘A-ha’ moment may generate other such
moments for others in turn.
Michael Foucault

Michael Foucault (1926-1984) described his work as a ‘critical history of thought’, where
thought is conceived as ‘the act which poses in their diverse possible relations a subject and
an object’. His work was fundamentally historical, in that he considered that we live, as
beings, in specific eras. We are born into a world where knowledge is constituted in a
particular set of forms and ways of knowing, where the exercise of power and rules operates
in certain ways, and where we may therefore have a particular kind of ‘relation to the self’.
For instance in a purely oral tradition you will have only spoken words in which possible
subject/object positions forms can be thought about, used, memorised, strategized etc. Born
into a world like this means that you will learn to learn, think, act and strategize differently
compared to a world where you read and write (and today where virtually everyone else, at
least in the so-called developed world, does). There are today very few, if any, ‘just’ oral
cultures. Thus he conceives his work concerning our ‘being’ as necessarily having to be a
‘historical ontology’. In this respect his work arguably forms a break from the whole western
tradition of thinking from the time of Plato and Aristotle on.

Foucault also describes his later work consistently as both ‘archaeological and genealogical’
that is: analysing what gets said and how things that get said get repeated in a given era
(archaeological) (where power as acting on the actions of others is very significant) and also
how power-knowledge regimes, from having seemed ‘eternal’, suddenly give way to wholly
new ranges of things said, or ‘discursive regularities’(genealogical) (e.g. from purely oral
culture to a culture of writing and reading).

In certain respects his approach builds on key great thinkers of the 19th century, including
Marx, Nietzche, and Freud, all of whom he sees as ‘founders of discursivity’. From Marx he
has a concern with the interplay between the economic and the political, and a refusal to
begin from the subject as such as ‘constitutive subject’ (meaning there is no ‘pure’ being with
certain given essence and capacities): from Freud he picks up the importance of not
restricting ‘thought’ to purely ‘rational thinking’ or a philosophical thinking which assumes it
can be self-grounded in reason (or Logos, as that form of reason articulated by Plato and
Aristotle). From Nietzsche he picks up on the importance of analysing the operation of
power, which he defines not as a possession of some (the powerful) and so something which
others (the weak) cannot posses, but as a relation which only ever functions through ‘acting
on the actions of others’, and so is something to which we all have access, even though some
will be in relational positions where they can exercise power more than others9.

However, even if there is no ‘constitutive subject’, for Foucault analysis has to begin from
the bottom up, from ‘thought as the form of action’. Hence in undertaking a ‘critical history
of thought’ he does not find it feasible to begin, as does Marx, at a ‘social’ level of analysis,
where the struggle is between classes, nor at a material level where the economic relations
(the ‘base’) dominate or shape those of thought, the ‘superstructure’ that is ‘ideology’. Nor
does he find it feasible to begin from a ‘pure’ lived experience as in phenomenology. Since
we are born into a world which already exists, there is no ‘pure experience’, although the
category of ‘experience’ remains central to his analysis. Instead our ‘experience’ is
constituted out of the ways of knowing, plus the rules and regularities of ‘conduct’10 (which
form the ground for what he sometimes calls the ‘conduct of conduct’), plus some historically
specific ‘relation to self’. Thus Foucault has debts to both Marx and phenomenology, but
seeks to develop a form of analysis which works up via the subject, but as product of
‘experience’ as he defines it, and which recognises that the social (and the institutional) are
aspects of how we live, but which does not give them the explanatory status of social or
institutional forms of analysis.

Instead Foucault’s work is about the ‘subject and truth’. The way he has approached this is
neither via positivism (which excludes the subject in favour of the object (-ivism) to solve the
problem with the subject and transcendental) or via the social/institutional. Instead he begins,
he says, at the level of ‘practices’, understood not as ‘social practices’ but those ‘more or less
regular/regulated, more or less reflective/reflexive, more or less finalised/goal directed’
practices through which in a given era certain objects are constituted as ‘real’ for a given
subject and the subject seeks to know, analyse and eventually modify the ‘real’ of those
objects (Maurice Florence (1994), Foucault entry, translation modified).

In this respect Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002) claims that he is a

‘positivist’ since he stays at the surface of what we think and do, through analysing how the
above practices shape both what is produced by us, in a given era, as ‘statements’ forming the
different forms of ‘discourse’ (what we talk and argue about and what is silenced, see also

9
For Foucault;s analysis of power, collapses like that of the Soviet Union, which came after his death, are
explicable because the dominant ways of ‘acting on the actions of others’ suddenly lost their hold. Those
resisting suddenly found that they could act effectively on the actions of those ‘in power’, and the existing
regimes imploded.
10
Conduct may be translated into ‘The way a person responds and behaves in a specific situation’.
chapter 8 in this volume) of that era, and what is produced non-discursively as the
technologies and apparatuses out of which entities such as institutions, businesses and states.
This is an ontological position just as the two former are, but it is one that argues that there is
no ‘pure being’: our whole experience reveals a historical ontology, for us and our world.

How may we do critical accounting work drawing on Foucault, and starting from thinking as
a form of action which produces historically specific human subjects.. One major approach
has been to draw on work like his book Discipline and Punish (1977) which analyses how
from the late 18th century new types of ‘disciplinary practices’11, increasingly implemented in
institutional spaces (such as the prison, but also the school and the workplace), emerged to
coordinate human thinking and acting via ‘micro-technologies’ for the ‘conduct of conduct’.
These included daily training of mind and body, undertaken in specific institutional spaces to
prescribed timetables, and followed by a regular examining and judging of performance
through a ‘penal accounting’ of numerical merit and demerit marks, entered into ledgers to
form a continuous record of ‘performance’. Measured excellence would lead to rewards,
measured failure to punishment (graded to the level and type of failure) but potentially ending
either in promotion to the top of the institution or in exclusion or removal from it.

From the 1980s much work has drawn on Foucault’s analyses of this kind of ‘disciplinary
power’ (and modern form of knowing, ‘disciplinary knowledge) and has seen many
connections to accounting. ‘Penal accounting’ is an extension of financial accounting (for
objects and assets, including ‘costs’) which includes an explicit and regular accounting for
human performance (something not found in earlier forms of accounting, including double-
entry bookkeeping). Early and influential Foucauldian analyses traced how such accounting
can constitute ‘the governable person’ (Miller & O’Leary, 1987) and enable ‘the genesis of
(human) accountability’ (Hoskin & Macve, 1988). Miller & O’Leary noted how the

11
The The etymology of ‘discipline’: it is a Latin term, and a shortened form of ‘disci-pulina’, where ‘discere’
is the Latin term for ‘to learn’ (or ‘to teach’) and the ‘pu-’ aspect is from the Latin ‘puer’ or ‘puella’ (‘boy’ and
‘girl’). So discipline is about ‘getting learning into the boy/girl/child’: which involves both a relation to
knowledge (by teacher and learner) and a regularity of conduct (by both as well). So discipline etymologically is
a term involving a reciprocal (or ‘correlative’) interplay of power and knowledge relations. So this may help
understand a famous Foucault quote from Discipline and Punish (1977: 27): “there is no power relation without
the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute
at the same time power relations’.
emergence of ‘standard costing’ (as a norm that actual costs then have to ‘measure up to’)
takes place alongside the IQ tests, as a numerically measured distribution of a human quality
which has a norm, set at 100, with standard deviations on either side, leading to ‘the genius’
at one end and ‘the imbecile’ at the other. One further extension of this work has been to
investigate how what Foucault called ‘governmentality’ is made up of disciplinary
technologies and apparatuses which are then deployed to govern and manage modern entities
from states to corporations to schools (Miller & Rose, 2008). Other accounting research
which adopts the archaeological-genealogical work and the bottom up approach, we find
focus on what accounting ‘statements’ say in a given era, as well as on how accounting helps
discipline our ways of thinking and acting, and perhaps constitutes a key aspect of the genesis
of modern management. There is also a growing range of work concerned with how the
accountant, and also the manager, may constitute herself as some form of ‘ethical and
disciplined’ subject using Foucault’s late work on the ‘relation to’ or ‘care of’ the self (e.g.
Munro et al, 2014; Hoskin 2015; Neu et al, 2015).

One thing that tends to hold constant across all these Foucauldian approaches is his focus on
practices as his ‘domain of analysis’. Study, as noted above, “the practices – ways of doing
things – that are more or less regulated, more or less conscious, more or less goal-oriented”
(Florence/Foucault, 1994: 318). Here Foucault is particularly interested in (and interesting
on) those practices that establish subject/object truth positions. In analysing practices that
establish such positions there are some practices that seem to have more ‘purchase’ than
others practices, especially those pedagogic practices perhaps recommended by a
philosopher/teacher, which shape how we ‘learn to learn’. Texts and talk are signs of human
thinking (and in modern times these very much include accounting and management texts
since so many now study these fields, whether in formal education or in work-based learning
and training). In thinking, acting and strategizing we create different forms of subject and
object positions in creating truth, lies, acceptance of rules or not, and deceptions etc. about
others, ourselves and myself.

Learning to read and write is one key distinguishing aspect of ‘learning to learn’ which
defines you, female or male, as a genuine ‘subject’ within our given historical a priori.
Access to validation in terms of ‘exam grades’, or to acquisition of high ‘human capital’, is
impossible without successful engagement in these practices. These are different
‘regularities’ setting up the conditions for what gets said, and what remains unsaid as a
silence, from those in previous human eras. Accounting also forms an integral aspect of the
‘regularities’ of what gets said and also what gets done in settings from business to the public
sector to medicine to prison to schooling. It is inside us as our ‘measured worth’ and
disseminated publicly in ratings of states, businesses, hospitals and medical practices,
universities and schools, and of course sports and music performers. ‘We’re Number One’, or
‘in the Top Ten’. This is new and exceedingly strange, in historical terms. But in Foucault’s
analysis the way we think and act still follows patterns for thinking and acting which operate,
in their distinctive relational ways, across all human settings. This is why for him it makes
sense to seek to understand how humans in a given era ‘generally’ and distinctly engage with
knowing via the rules of conduct and the practices for knowing, and to seek to discover how
they will set the limits or horizon of what gets said and admitted as knowledge in the
dispersed range of ‘statements’ which make up the ‘discursive regularities’ of the era.

Hoskin & Macve (1986;2012) identify the pedagogic dimension of how we come to think and
act as particularly important for understanding how our way of knowing has become
grounded in the disciplines. They focus particularly on how Foucault identifies the
‘examination’ as the key technology (1977) and argue that it is not the examination as such
(for formal examination in the West begins in the medieval university, and in China has a
history going back to at least 200 AD). Instead what is new is the technology of examining
which combines constantly getting students to write, examining them and putting numerical
grades on the outcomes. This is the beginning of accounting for human performance and
‘penal accounting’, and is the basis on which modern management can be developed in the
USA from around 1840, not by businessmen, but by those who were the first in the US to
‘learn to learn’ under such practices, which was at the US Military Academy at West Point
(Hoskin and Macve, 1988; 1990). These writing, examining and grading practices were also
internalised by those (first in Europe) studying in elite higher education institutions there,
who are the pioneers from around 1790 of the disciplinary forms of knowledge (across all the
sciences, maths, and the humanities) that we see in Universities today, now also including
Economics and even Accounting. What we learn and reflect on becomes part of our archives,
in terms of what is inside us and what is out there as texts, at the same time. However these
‘archives’ are never stable and are played out differently in each era.

A ‘positivity’ approach is to take texts, and talk and practices (what is said and done) in order
to analyse these shifting and floating subject/object truth positions and how they are
dispersed and are made to create truth/falsehood, acceptance or refusal or rules, analysing
different ‘subject’ positions that never tells us who we really ‘are’. By analysing the subject
/object positions like this is to unfold any given claim about the ‘other’. It is also about not
give you a special subject position (e.g. rational self) in doing so where you knows best,
putting you in active subject position and the others as just passive objects. It is about you
giving all subjects an active position, in your analysis and in your writing about them. That is
also way it is important the way you write about your research to adopt a similar approach to
everything you write in the thesis. These subject and object positions/relations of what ‘is’
the real and in truth games matters. This is what is under scrutiny in the research and its
apparatus/technologies of dissemination. Accounting and management is today very much
part of subject and object positions/relations of what ‘is’ the real and in truth games as
claimed by Foucault. Accounting as ‘truth teller’ and interplay of subject and object positions
are important areas found in CPA.

Summary
You should now have a fairly good overview of CPA and how these many perspectives are
different from other ‘main stream’ perspectives when doing accounting research is to do with
one key aspect: the conscious reflecting meaning making human being and especially how
the researcher is accounted for as meaning maker. You should also be able to appreciate
differences between CPA approaches hence in a good position in starting your own
explorative journey into CPA and what these perspectives have to offer you in carry out
research and hence things coming out of concealment. I wish you the very best of luck on
your journey. Enjoy!

Review Questions

1. Describe the major features of the Phenomenological, Marxism and Foucault

approaches to undertaking research and critically evaluate how you might use the
selected approach in undertaking your own research. In your answer, consider the
following. In your answer, consider the following:
a. what kind of research questions would you expect to formulate using this
approach?
b. what kind of methods would you use to operationalise your research
questions?
 c. what kind of findings or conclusions might you expect to reach?

2. Drawing on the ‘Critical’ Accounting Perspective readings:

a. Identify at least one way in which accounting can operate as a management
tool.
b. Critically evaluate how this form of accounting may shape the thinking and
actions of managers paying attention to its possible intended and unintended
consequences.
c. Critically discuss how is PAT related to the development of accounting
standards and the shaping over recent decades of accounting practice (e.g.
IFRS and fair value)

3. Drawing on the ‘Critical’ Accounting Perspective readings how far do historical

studies help us understand accounting’s roles in management in organisations and
society today. For instance:

a. In managing people and organisations today, how important, in your view, is

management accounting?
b. In management accounting, how important, in your view, is attaching numbers
to human performance alongside the tracking of materials and products costs?

4. In adopting CPA critically discuss why is it important in research to include reflective

what role you as researcher had?
5. Critically discuss to what extent, in your view, all-in-focus perspective is applicable in
carrying out CPA kind of research and why.
6. Critically discuss the relation between ‘truth telling’ and ‘perspectives’ and how we as
researchers ‘make’ different perspectives happen
7. Critically discuss how and why analysing non-typical texts, such as the tax return
form’s, ‘authorship’ and ‘readership’ can provide insights in research?

References:
Three words: Critical-Perspectives -Accounting:

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Boland, Richard. (1989) Beyond the objectivist and the subjectivist: learning to read
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Chua, Wai-Fong (1986) Radical developments in accounting thought. Accounting,

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Section: Karl Marx and Marxism

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Special Issue on Corruption (forthcoming).

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Other:

Oxfam Report (2015)

World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations (2006)

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