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Ethical and Accountable Management Accounting: Mission Impossible?

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Strategic Management Accounting, Volume III

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Abstract

This chapter questions the conditions of possibility of ethics’ happening. In answering this question, it builds on Alain Badiou’s approach to ethics, showing that discourses on the subject are characterised by intrinsic unresolved contradictions making ethics impossible. Ethics appears as the negative response to problematic situations and not as positive and performative programme. Such can be the case, probably because such discourses on contemporary ethics and associated issues (governance, accountability, trust etc.) are grounded in one particular cultural and political context, that of North American democracy. Ethics is mission possible, provided discourses on its nature are adapted to the situation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Depending on the institution, the Higher-Principal can be the community of stockholders or capital markets (listed companies), donors (registered charities) or taxpaying citizens (public sector organisations). Although customers, clients and suppliers are key actors in organisational life, they are considered neither resource providers nor ultimate account demanders. Accountability to them takes on a different form, called stakeholder accountability , and constitutes a step towards Higher-Stakeholder accountability (Collier, 2008; Cooper & Owen, 2007).

  2. 2.

    In day-to-day activities, socialising accountability operates as a substitute for hierarchic accountability. Peers and other group members operate as the wardens of organisational doctrine and demand reasons for conduct they expect to be consistent with what the Higher-Stakeholder is supposed to require. Peers serve as surrogates for the Higher-Stakeholder, exerting lateral controls. Socialising accountability appears as a soft form of hierarchic accountability (Roberts, 1996, 2001).

  3. 3.

    Etymologically speaking, a problem is an object sent forward (πρω-βλεμα). This notion is therefore generally understood to mean that an object sent forward can never be reached. Endeavours to approach it ultimately result in it being pushed further forward. By extension, the notion of problematics encompasses ideas: sending an idea forward means that this idea is subject to debate and controversy. The notion of problematics is very suggestive of the impossibility of giving any definitive answer, making the object sent forward unanswerable. The impossibility of answering such questions led Plato to conceive of the notion of contradiction as an unanswerable question. Nowadays, a contradiction is understood to be an irresolvable contradiction or logical disjunction. This is the sense Spinoza and his followers drew in the seventeenth century from the term’s original meaning.

  4. 4.

    This legal notion of liability embraces moral concerns discussed in the critical accounting literature on assets and liabilities or debits and credits.

  5. 5.

    For these economists, the absence of maximisation functions makes non-financial accountability irrelevant.

  6. 6.

    For instance, social value can be the welfare produced for society in general or parts of it. One measure of environmental value can be reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

  7. 7.

    To explain how calculations dominate accountability discourse, Quattrone (2004) shows how monks in the Society of Jesus used to quantify the lives of their flock. They accounted for souls through sacraments, sins and subsequent indulgences. These were valued at a price set by the clergy to remit offences against God.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grenoble École de Management, Grenoble, France

    Vassili Joannidès de Lautour

  2. School of Accountancy Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Vassili Joannidès de Lautour

  3. University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Vassili Joannidès de Lautour

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  1. Vassili Joannidès de Lautour
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Joannidès de Lautour, V. (2019). Ethical and Accountable Management Accounting: Mission Impossible?. In: Strategic Management Accounting, Volume III. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20157-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20157-9_5

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