The Routledge Companion to Critical Accounting

Robin Roslender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138025257
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686736
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The field of critical accounting has expanded rapidly since its inception and has become recognised as offering a wealth of provocative insights in the wake of the global financial crisis. It is now firmly embedded within accounting literature and in how accounting is taught.

Surveying the evolving field of Critical Accounting, including theory, ethics, history, development and sustainability, this Companion presents key debates in the field, providing a comprehensive overview. Incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on accounting, the volume concludes by considering new directions in which critical accounting research may travel.

With an international array of established and respected contributors, this Routledge Companion is a vital resource for students and researchers across the world.

SECTION II

2

INTERPRETIVISM

Danture Wickramasinghe and Chandana Alawattage

1 Introduction

Exploring the nomenclature and the intellectual traditions that delineate what is meant by ‘interpretivism’ in the context of accounting research reveals a continuing debate. A common position holds that there is a significant difference between interpretive and critical research, with some commentators arguing that they are different due to their distinct theoretical, methodological and ideological underpinnings. Other commentators take a more equivocal position, however, affirming that they are broadly the same, although while the terms can be used interchangeably there is a need to be consistent in using them in the piece of work at hand. Newcomers to the field may expect a convincing delineation or at least an attempt to minimise any unnecessary ambiguity, however.

Until the 1960s accounting research was rooted in a techno-functional tradition that sought solutions to technical and policy problems in accounting (Baxter and Davidson 1977). This emphasis then gave way to a generic research approach that privileged the use of economic science and statistical tools, often referred to as positive accounting research (Watts and Zimmerman 1978, 1979). At the beginning of the 1980s, the interpretive or naturalistic turn in accounting research emerged as a challenge to the mainstream (Colville 1981; Hopwood 1983; Tomkins and Groves 1983a,b). During the following three decades the interpretive accounting research tradition has become ever broader in nature as it has drawn from the social and sociological theories of Marx, Weber, Habermas, Giddens, Foucault, Latour and Bourdieu, among others (Baxter and Chua 2003). The resulting heterogeneity of interpretivism was clearly evident in the polyphonic debate, which also introduced the novel notion of the ‘new’ interpretivism (Ahrens et al. 2008), and in the other papers in the special issue. The term ‘interpretive’ has also been (mis)used to mean something other than statistical analysis, juxtaposing interpretation with quantitative analyses. Interpretivism has thus become an elusive, chameleon-like concept that defies the identification of any definitive meaning, a conclusion that is commensurate with interpretivism’s own precepts and underpinnings.

This chapter traces the evolution of the interpretive turn in accounting research and outlines the key tenets on which this approach was founded and continues to evolve. At base the interpretive turn implies a greater reliance on the subjective interpretations of the actors involved in social interactions. In this sense, while the researcher’s prior theoretical positions and ­orientations can play a major role in forming the theoretically coherent arguments and/or narratives, the substantive rationalities (Weber 1978; Kalberg 1980) emanating from their opinions, ideas, expressions, beliefs, judgments and so forth also play a central role in making sense of interpretive research in accounting. In the following pages we revisit the different paths that interpretive research in accounting has taken. In order to organise our thinking, we make use of the distinction between seeing interpretation as a politico-ideological act and interpretation as a methodo-philosophical act, as in Sections 3 and 4 of this chapter. Initially, however, we provide an overview of the genesis and evolution of interpretive accounting research. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that now might be an opportune time to revisit the work of Max Weber, arguably the principal intellectual progenitor of the interpretive tradition.

2 Genesis and evolution

The origins of interpretivism in accounting research can be thought of as a social movement – an ideologically structured action mobilising in different social settings to challenge a number of dominant ideologies and established practices, routines and rituals (Davis, McAdam, Scott and Zald 2005; Zald 2000; Zald and McCarthy 1979). Within this movement, accounting academia began to resist (and is still resisting) the dominant mainstream research paradigm that was dominated by a number of root disciplines including psychology, neoclassical economics and systems theory. These frameworks permeated prescriptions and model building with a view to enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency and efficacy of organisational processes. The social movement that emerged challenged these frameworks and identified an alternative – the interpretive tradition.

How did this happen? Before outlining the analytical profile of the social movement’s outcome, we will sketch its early contours and subsequent developments. There is no argument among accounting researchers in the interpretive camp that it was Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) that provided a forum for the genesis, voice and expansion of interpretive research in accounting. Its founding editor, Anthony Hopwood, embarked on this agenda declaring:

[The] terminology and underlying calculus of ‘profits’ and ‘costs’ continue to exert a profound impact on human consciousness and action.

(Hopwood 1976: 1)

This was an historical moment in the making of accounting, previously considered to be a technical and professional practice requiring technical advancements in terms of model building and policy making, as a genuine social science. The new agenda called for the emancipation of accounting from the clutches of economics and finance. Hopwood continues:

The social and behavioral sciences … less familiar to most accountants in terms of both the body of knowledge and the underlying values. And integration of accounting and social perspectives was a very different endeavor from the integration of finance and accounting.

(Hopwood 1976: 3)

This beginning, as we now recognise, was persuasive and influential. In due course AOS published a number of seminal interpretive papers, including Tomkins, Rosenberg and Colville (1980), Colville (1981) and Rosenberg, Tomkins and Day (1982). Broadly, these works draw on interpretive sociology, which challenged the position of functionalism. Drawing on the ideas of interpretive sociologists such as Weber, Mead, Cooley and Blumer, who emphasised the role of symbols, images and human interaction, these researchers created a space for research to ­investigate how accounting is implicated in such social phenomena. Interpretive sociology privileged the significance of interpretations of events and things. The governing principle here is that there is a constitutional role for human consciousness to create meanings and value, by reflecting on ‘things’. They emphasise that things only exist within the meanings and labels given to them by human beings, through their everyday life experience. Thus, for example, life experience, understanding, giving meanings and using things to reproduce meaning are the interpretive acts of human beings. Organisations, control systems or their budgeting functions are the kinds of things being interpreted by people through these interpretive acts (Wickramasinghe and Alawattage 2007).

Colville (1981) commends a form of action research that integrates Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory and Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) social constructionism. For Colville, accounting is socially constructed so that we need to use a methodology that social scientists employ in understanding social reality. Building on Colville’s foundations, as well as Rosenberg et al. (1982), Tomkins and Groves (1983a,b) identify “everyday accountants” in their accounting essay written from the perspectives of interpretive sociology. The everyday accountant’s reality was discussed in terms of three forms of realities: reality as a symbolic discourse; reality as a social construction; and reality as a projection of human imagination. For this, they draw on three methodological positions, namely symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and phenomenology, respectively. These researchers applied their insights in empirical research on contemporary local government accounting practices in the UK, providing a series of interpretations about what they observed. Their studies were the first in the genre of reporting ‘sociologically’ rather than providing ‘statistics’ for testing a predetermined theory. The publications were recognised as situational accounting ‘stories’ that provoked issues and debates.

A sound foundation for a new tradition of interpretive accounting research quickly emerged, being very evident at the first two Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conferences in 1985 and 1988. Many subsequent interpretive papers were presented at these conferences, while the researchers who participated began to develop the network of interpretive research. The decade proved to be a golden era for interpretive accounting research with many seminal papers published within the pages of AOS. These include Tinker (1980); Tinker, Merino and Neimark (1982); Cooper and Sherer (1984), Berry, Capps, Cooper, Ferguson, Hopper and Lowe (1985); Chua (1986); Neimark and Tinker (1986); Hopper, Storey and Willmott (1987); and Hopper and Armstrong (1991). Not only did these papers promote further sociologically oriented research in accounting, they also encouraged accounting researchers to read social theory seriously. Consequently, a prospectus of social theories became available to accounting researchers with which to theorise accounting practices. These theories were drawn from institutional theory, actor–network theory (ANT), Habermas, Foucault and Bourdieu – all of which and whom are still highly visible in the three main interpretive accounting journals, the Accounting, Accountability and Auditing Journal (AAAJ), Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) and AOS.

Returning to the notion of a social movement mentioned earlier, in a sense we can see that the development outlined is a social movement constructed within accounting academia. In our view this social movement was charged with developing a set of critiques of the accounting mainstream, which sought to document (a) the lack of attention to the wider socio-political implications of organisational practices, and (b) the methodological weaknesses inherent in the prevailing positivistic orientation of accounting research. The term ‘interpretive research’ is thus used here to denote the alternative approaches that seek to resist and rectify these weaknesses. It is in this way that the genesis of interpretivism might be understood as a resistive social movement. This resistance and rectification has two distinct but interrelated dimensions: the ­politico-ideological and the methodo-philosophical, both of which originated from and continue to evolve as a project of understanding accounting beyond its conventional technical/managerial meanings by locating accounting in its wider sociocultural, political, economic and institutional contexts. In the following two sections we document this view.

3 Interpretation as a politico-ideological act

In respect of the politico-ideological dimension, the interpretive project in accounting research initially stemmed from a stream of accounting research that attempted to draw attention to two important aspects of the context of accounting, as it was conceptualised in the 1970s and 1980s: individuals and groups (the micro context); and society (the macro context). While often not always explicit, these were clearly, for our understanding, attempts to advance a political meaning in the theorisation of accounting practices. They were political interpretations because they attempted at understanding and explaining how accounting is implicated in human conditions – the power and role of accounting in determining the situation of human beings within and outside of organisations and their wider social arrangements. These early attempts were also critical of the dominant managerialist and economic overtones of accounting research, initially offering an alternative political and institutional interpretation of how understanding accounting practices had already begun to gain ground during the 1970s.

3.1 Behavioural negligence questioned

First was the project of behavioural accounting, where the purpose was to import industrial psychology and sociology to discuss the social and psychological implications of accounting practices. Proponents of this approach began to ask a range of important questions about the absences in relation to social and behavioural aspects evident in mainstream accounting research. Hopwood poses the following questions:

How would you design information for control purpose without considering how it would fit in with the other means of influencing behavior in organizational settings? How would you provide information to motivate superior performance without having some understanding of human needs and aspirations? How would you manage the processes of standard setting, budgeting and planning, all of which are essentially social in nature?

(Hop...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• SECTION I
• SECTION II
• SECTION III
• SECTION IV
• SECTION V
• SECTION VI
• Index