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Professionalism, the Public Interest, and Social Accounting

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Accounting for the Public Interest

Part of the book series: Advances in Business Ethics Research ((ABER,volume 4))

Abstract

The tendency towards self-interest and an increasingly commercial orientation in accounting, together with a string of business and accounting scandals, brings the professional status of accounting into question. This chapter explores the how a renewed sense of professionalism within accounting may lead to greater recognition of the social within accounting. Positioned at the margins of accounting, social accounting includes emergent technologies of social accounting, focusing on silent, shadow, and counter accounting that expose values and priorities, challenge accepted understandings, generate new visibilities, and highlight the perspectives of neglected and marginalised segments of society. In so doing, social accounting may provide an important means for addressing the public interest agenda in accounting, and for strengthening the relationship between accounting and the public interest.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Defining social accounting as revolving around non-financial concerns encompasses a very broad domain of social and environmental issues. This is consistent with the approach now adopted by many researchers in this growing field (see Gray 2002a, 2006a, 2007; Gray and Laughlin 2012). Therefore, for the purposes of the discussion in this chapter, the more specific endeavours, and, to some degree, more established sub-disciplinary field, of environmental accounting, or sustainability accounting, may be considered under the broad rubric of social accounting. Although the particular focus of the chapter is on the social dimension, the considerations of the chapter also broadly relate to what is sometimes referred to as social and environmental accounting.

  2. 2.

    Without drawing conclusions about the appropriateness of the terminology, the chapter will continue to use the term “accounting profession” whilst recognising that “accounting industry” may, indeed, be more appropriate.

  3. 3.

    This is not entirely surprising, because accounting exists not just in but because of its environment. However, it is part of a symbiotic process through which it mutually legitimates, and is in turn legitimated by, particular modes of economic activity (see Cooper et al. 1989; Strange 1996: Ch. 10).

  4. 4.

    The role of the accounting profession in a range scandals and corporate misdeeds has been significant. For example, in exposés of the background to many corporate collapses in Australia, the professions were singled out for particular criticism, with accounting and auditing receiving prominent attention. See, for example, Sykes (1996) and Main (2003), who singled out the professions – notably accounting and auditing – as key culprits.

  5. 5.

    “Material” may include financial, here.

  6. 6.

    In attempts to develop social accounting, where there has been a focus on financial quantification, this has seriously limited the endeavour because such an approach admits only a relatively narrow perceptual field: “… the accountant’s perceptual field is constrained by reference to events that … can generally be described in financial terms” (Owen 1992: 24). Owen (2005: 397) concluded that much of the present practice of “social reporting amounts to little more than a smokescreen, diverting attention away from core issues of ethical and moral accountability”. Gray (2006a: 798) argued that accounting in this vein actually “produces a social construction of a world of precision and accuracy, of measurement and rationality, of bleakness and inhumanity …”.

  7. 7.

    Although Gray (1998: 213) stresses that the aim of social accounting is to change the world, much social accounting research has been criticised as representing “political quietism” (Tinker et al. 1991), subject to capture by those opposed to real social change. In this light, it has been compared with “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” (Puxty 1986: 107).

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  1. Department of Accounting, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Gordon Boyce

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    Steven Mintz

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Boyce, G. (2014). Professionalism, the Public Interest, and Social Accounting. In: Mintz, S. (eds) Accounting for the Public Interest. Advances in Business Ethics Research, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7082-9_6

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