Education

Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290
The social relevance of ethics education in a global(ising) era: From individual dilemmas to systemic crises
Gordon Boyce
Division of Economic and Financial Studies, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia Received 2 July 2005; received in revised form 16 January 2006; accepted 12 September 2006
Abstract Ethics in accounting and business education must be considered in the contemporary context of neoliberal economic globalisation. Ofcial responses to corporate scandals have included new laws and regulations, and some have argued that these scandals illustrate the need for change at an individual level, but this paper argues that the problem is manifested at a system level and that greater attention must be paid to the wider economic and social system within which individuals operate. Contemporary accounting education tends to treat ethics as an add-on component that itself may be justied in instrumental ways, such as a claim that it may enhance corporate protability. In accounting and business education programs, case study scenarios utilising codes of ethics and ethical decisionmaking models are typically prominent in ethics components of accounting courses. This model of teaching is critiqued in this paper, and it is agued that it is necessary to transcend the individualised conception of ethics implicit in such approaches. Accounting and business educators have a special responsibility to examine ethics in the broader context of globalisation because it is at this level that many relevant ethical concerns arise. These concerns are directly connected to accounting education and practice. University academics (as intellectuals) should balance the humanistic/formative and vocational aspects of education. In relation both to developments in globalisation and the systemic crises of which accounting is a part, accounting educators should actively consider their positions in relation to the global hegemonic balance. As mediators in the intellectual realm, accounting educators can do more to make accounting education relevant to the lived experience of students, to the multifaceted
Tel.: +61 2 9850 8530; fax: +61 2 9850 8497. E-mail address: gboyce@efs.mq.edu.au.
1045-2354/$ see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2006.09.008
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G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290
global(ising) context in which we live, and to the capacities of graduates to act meaningfully in and on the world, individually and collectively. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
. . . we can see no possible ethical or intellectual justication for much of what currently passes as accounting education . . . (Gray et al., 1994, p. 63).
1. Introduction In response to contemporary corporate collapses and associated accounting scandals, particular individuals have been popularly identied as the cause of the problems and new laws and regulations have been promulgated to alter the legal and accounting frameworks within which corporations operate. Despite a blaze of legislative and regulatory activity, little has been done to change the underlying substance of the economic system that rewards (and demands) the very acts that bring about corporate scandals. Indeed, it is often implied that there is no viable alternative to both the extant social system and the current neoliberal direction of that system; it is often argued that there is a need for further neoliberal economic changes as a result of globalisation. These contentions are critically considered in this paper. The signicant inuence of business activity on economic, social, cultural, and political life means that questions about how such activity should be conducted cannot be conned to the realm of economics. The ethical implications of business activity extend well beyond headline-grabbing corporate scandals that periodically, but generally temporarily, populate the media. A meaningful response to this situation from educators in a range of disciplinary areas therefore requires critical examination beyond the immediate surface manifestations of corporate collapses and associated scandals. The aims of the paper are to examine the broad question of ethics in accounting and business education in the contemporary context of globalisation, and to consider the role and functions of accounting education (and of accounting academics) in this context. Whilst one response to corporate scandals may see the need for change as focussed at the level of the individual economic agent, here it will be argued that greater attention must be paid to the wider economic and social systems within which individual (un)ethical actions occur, and that systemic features of globalisation, in conjunction with events at local, regional, and national levels, must be central to the analysis. It is argued that in order to fully address ethical concerns that have re-arisen in recent times, change at national and global system levels is necessary because reform attempts that are directed at individuals and corporate entities alone are largely futile. It has been argued that the nature of the corporate environment, structure, and control systems mean that corporate social responsibility may be difcult to achieve, but it is nevertheless necessary because the size and immense power and inuence of corporations makes their apparently economic decisions also social decisions (Mintzberg, 1983, p. 12). But while the need for corporate social responsibility (and, by extension, business ethics) may be recognised, this must be placed against a situation where economic and market imperatives are closely associated with actions that themselves lead to corporate scandals
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and deleterious social, environmental, and ethical outcomes (for example, the imperative to drive costs down, increase prots, and continually grow economic and business activitysee Catchpowle et al., 2004; Tinker and Carter, 2003). Even advocates of marketbased business activity recognise that ethical and ecologically sustainable business is not likely (and may not be possible) under current economic, social, and political arrangements, and that mega-corporations occupy a central place in a suite of problems that require deep structural change. Korten (1998, 2001), for example, advocates the abolition of the corporation as we know it1 (see also Hawken, 1993). His conclusion is partly based on a rejection of the notions that: (i) appeals to the conscience of corporate executives will generate more responsible corporate behaviour, and (ii) social and environmental responsibility should and will be pursued because it can result in increased corporate prots (Korten, 1999, p. 2201). Going further, Hazelton and Cussen (2005) argue that the legal and market/business environment in which corporations operate means that, for all practical purposes, corporate social responsibility is impossible and that corporations (such as their continued existence is deemed useful) should therefore be regarded as amoral entities. Bakan (2004) also argues that in their pursuit of prot and power, corporations are pathological entities and they must be fundamentally reformed. A common thread underlying the arguments of Korten, Hazelton and Cussen, and Bakan is that unless and until the social and economic systems that produce perverse market imperatives and pathological institutions are addressed, the problems are likely to persist and grow. Without fundamental reform, suggestions that corporate social and environmental responsibility provide a solution are likely to have the effect of further legitimating extant structures and arrangements (Bakan, 2004, esp. Chapter 2). The analysis in the remainder of this paper is organised into four substantive sections, as follows. The rst section considers the ethics of accounting for corporate legitimacy. A brief outline of recent corporate and associated accounting scandals is provided as a basis for considering how the accounting profession and accounting academics have responded to this state of affairs. It is argued that accounting and business educators must think beyond the disciplinary connes of their specialisation to see the crisis in accounting education (some aspects of which have been outlined by Albrecht and Sack (2000), for example) as a manifestation of wider business, social and economic crises. The second section considers how ethical issues are dealt with in contemporary accounting education, arguing that there is an urgent need to expand our thinking well beyond codes of ethics and ethical decision-making models that typically form the basis for considering ethics in accounting. The individualised conception of ethics that such approaches are predicated upon is problematised. The third section broadens the considerations of ethics in accounting and accounting education to consider the context of globalisation and its contradictions. This is necessary because current global developments and their local manifestations (or, indeed, the absence of positive local effects in many cases) provide the context for many ethical concerns in accounting. In addition, the interactions between accounting and globalisation themselves give rise to important ethical concerns. The intellectual role of academics, in
1 Kortens position is not anti-business per se; he denies the validity of socialism as a response because he sees socialism as merely seeking to socialise the corporation, which would otherwise continue.
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light of a framework for thinking about the various dimensions of globalisation, is examined. The nal section of the paper summarises the ethical implications of the paper for accounting educators.
2. The ethics of accounting for corporate legitimacy 2.1. Corporate misdeeds and accounting Scandals such as those involving Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, OneTel, HIH, and a range of other prominent companies in the United States of America, Europe, and Australia bear similarity to scandals and collapses that have been a part of the corporate landscape for as long as the corporate form itself has existed (see Bakan, 2004; CCH Australia, 2001; Clarke et al., 2003; Leaf, 2002; Main, 2003; Sykes, 1996, 1998). Even though they only rarely come to light, the types of behaviours associated with corporate scandals and collapses are not atypical (Sykes, 1998), and are not merely an aberration of an otherwise well-functioning system (see Craig and Amernic, 2004; Froud et al., 2004) or the result of a perfect storm (see Scully and Gentile, 2003; c.f. Reinstein and McMillan, 2004). The drive to meet (perceived) demands of the market is often a source of unethical practice. In order to prosper, businesses seek to ignore or externalise as many costs as possible, such that achievement of the greatest market success may also signal the highest externalised and unrecognised costs (Hawken, 1993). These consequences go well beyond the billions of dollars lost by investors, creditors, employees and others as a result of recent accounting scandals (see Rezaee, 2005). The larger and more powerful the entity, the greater is its capacity to ignore and externalise for the sake of prot generation. In a global context, multinational corporations are able to externalise costs to developing countries as well as to poorer regions of developed countries (the global South). The population of developed countries and wealthier regions (the global North) are unaware of the costs borne by others (see Jones, 1988, for striking examples). Accounting is centrally implicated in these matters not only because of its use, abuse, or general failings in relation to corporate scandals, but because it is accounting representations that set the competitive conditions for others to match if they are to survive economically (Tinker and Carter, 2003, p. 580). Capitalism relies on the extension of the penetrating quantication of accounting which is utilised to deepen commodication and subordinate almost all other factors to prot (and shareholder value) (Catchpowle et al., 2004; Lazonick and OSullivan, 2000). The way we traditionally conceive of and account for market imperatives is directly associated with a range of deleterious social and environmental outcomes including habitat destruction, social alienation and dislocation, human exploitation, and dispossession.2 Business systems remain largely blind to the social and environmental costs of corporate activity as these ethical spill-overs are ignored and masked by conventional accounting systems and their representations. Indeed, the idea
2 There is a large body of accounting research in support of this point (e.g. Arnold and Hammond, 1994; Boyce, 2000; Chwastiak, 1998; Everett and Neu, 2000; Lehman, 1995; Neu, 2001; Tinker, 1985, 2004).
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of corporate social responsibility may well be oxymoronic within such systems, because the market demands and rewards social and environmental irresponsibility and punishes those who do not bend to this will (Korten, 2001, Chapter 15). 2.2. Responding to crises: making accounting better The accounting response (and that of business leaders and commentators) to corporate scandals has largely been one of mild reformism, representing more of the same. Suggestions that disclosure issues need to be examined again have not extended much further than the need for relevant, timely, understandable, reliable, and comparable information for decision-making by various stakeholders (e.g. Corporate Transparency: Making Markets Work Better from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand, 2002). This ostensibly reformist agenda is reminiscent of an Introductory Accounting syllabus from decades ago, and reads almost straight out of the accounting conceptual frameworks that pre-date any of the recent scandals. Reforms to accounting frameworks, standards, regulation, and law that seek to produce better disclosure (e.g. Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand, 2002), better corporate governance (e.g. Economist Intelligence Unit, 2002, 2003), or even better forms of accounting itself (e.g. Clarke et al., 2003), even though they may be meritorious on their own terms, do not address the underlying social, political, and ethical contexts within which corporate scandals arise. Accounting continues to function in a manner that legitimates extant social and economic power because it perceptually links economic activity to social values. Legitimation generally (and accountancy in particular), serves an ideologically mystifying and exploitative function to maintain extant power relations and to solidify existing processes of creation and distribution of wealth and power (see Richardson, 1987). The strategy of the accounting profession reects its political positioning as a key player with vested interests in the issues. Recent research suggests that as the accounting profession seeks to further its own interests (and those of its clients) through political lobbying and political donations, it helps shape public policy in favour of conservative and neo-liberal agendas (Arnold, 2005; Dwyer and Roberts, 2004). Playing an important enabling role in the economic-rationalist restructuring of the state and helping build economic globalisation to principally serve the interests of capital (Catchpowle et al., 2004), accounting does not inhabit a position of (ethical) neutrality or disinterest in what happens in business (see Davids and Boyce, 2005). Developments in social, environmental, and ethical accounting and reporting (e.g. see Zadek et al., 1997) have not changed this situation signicantly because these newer forms of accounting suffer from many of the same ethical problems as traditional nancial accounting and audit. Substantial control over the processes of preparing and verifying environmental and social reports has been captured by management (Ball et al., 2000; ODwyer, 2003). Corporate social and environmental reporting is used as part of a wider strategic effort to gain, maintain, or repair legitimacy in the eyes of the public (see Suchman, 1995), often by attempting to avoid issues, to alter social values and expectations, to alter public perceptions of corporate activity, or to symbolically conform to public expectations. Rarely is corporate reporting a demonstration of changed corporate behaviour to actually conform with social
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expectations (see Lindblom, 1994). On the contrary, corporate reporting is largely a tool through which management seeks to impose its perspectives and its interpretations upon others (see Amernic, 1992). Managements inuence places the credibility of environmental and social reports at risk, although organisational legitimacy may be sustained ideologically merely by the very fact of being seen to be audited, rather than there being any real substance to the audit process itself (Ball et al., 2000, p. 2). It is paradoxical that the involvement of social and environmental accounting researchers and academics may have assisted corporate capture of the social reporting and sustainability agendas (Tinker and Gray, 2003, p. 74750). 2.3. Complexly doing nothing The recent history of professional regulation and reform operates cyclically: criticism of accounting/auditing failure leads to increased public expectations, which results in new and extended prescriptions, rules and standards, leading initially to reduced public concerns, but eventually followed by new criticisms following new rounds of failures (Lee, 1995). It has been concluded that the accounting professional bodies react to public crises in a manner that ensures little change to underlying fundamentalsa complex strategy of doing nothing (Fogarty et al., 1991). In situations where more (than nothing) is done to quell immediate crises, reforms may be undone at the earliest opportunity if it is perceived that they impede business activity. Evidence of contemporary moves in this direction is already available, with the comment from an inuential Economist Intelligence Unit report that corporate governance dominates the political and business agenda, accompanied with the suggestion that the pendulum has swung too far (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2002, p. 34). The Economist Intelligence Unit cites concern from executives that new regulation may impair their ability to run their businesses effectively and hamper growth.3 Good corporate governance per se is not regarded as a central concern for business; it is only regarded as justiable if it brings a nancial return. This position is typied by the question: are investors really prepared consistently to sacrice earnings for the sake of ethics? (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2002, p. 4; see also Economist Intelligence Unit, 2003). Because, it is contended, regulation remains a very blunt instrument to tackle a hugely complex area (p. 5), it is argued that greater disclosure may lead to information overload, that accounting is imprecise, and that discretion in preparing accounts is legitimate because there are genuinely different view on matters such as asset valuation (p. 6). The bottom-line recommendations from the Economist Intelligence Unit report are that the relatively oblique level of corporate culture should be addressed, that better internal corporate oversight is sufcient, and that any residual concerns can be dealt with through fuller disclosure and letting the market do the rest.4
3 These concerns are not necessarily surprising, given that the Economist Intelligence Unit is unashamedly a voice for business and its work cited here is based on surveys of corporate executives. 4 Similar views are reected elsewhere, for example, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand (2002), and the range of business academics that were the focus of the research of Scully and Gentile (2003).
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Overall, it is difcult to conclude other than that the corporate and accounting responses to contemporary scandals amount to thinly veiled justications for simply letting business get on with business whilst changing little in terms of the way business operates. They may therefore be interpreted as further stages in a complex cycle of doing nothing. 2.4. Market sacralism The wider economic and social, political, and economic systems, within which human and corporate cultures are formed and reinforced, and which play a large part in shaping human decisions and actions, are rarely open for question in ofcial narratives. Corporate and accounting reform is premised on the assumption that the fundamentals of business and capitalism are not to be questioned. One prominent view has it that even a hint of anti-capitalism that may lead students to question their ethics in being in business at all is a bad thing (Jennings, 2004, p. 16). It has been explicitly suggested that the underlying aim of the whole exercise of corporate reform is (and should be) to maintain condence in corporate America (Rezaee, 2005) (or corporate Australia, or corporate Britain . . .). This approach treats the market, the corporation, and the capitalist economy as sacred, further legitimising them and obviating critique. A hands off the market approach is particularly problematic for any putative move towards social, environmental, and ethical accounting because it is not possible to seriously address business ethics and sustainability unless the role of the market is also questioned. The term market economy is essentially ideological (Carrier, 1997; Dilley, 1992). It conjures up romantic images of the agora, the market square, farmers and craftspeople, creating a . . . satisfying feeling that there are forces in the world that function properly and effectively . . . in a manner that is human-centred and socially embedded (Hawken, 1993, p. 76). By contrast, in practice markets that are oriented towards price and prot exclude many (most) social and environmental costs (and, indeed, benets) and are thus incapable of recognising the full range of impacts of organisational activity (as noted earlier in this paper). The free market may be read as one where powerful players are free from accountability to local communities (Hawken, 1993, p. 78), increasingly disembedded and abstracted from local economy and human practice (Carrier and Miller, 1998; Dilley, 1992). This leads to a perverse form of inversion of value and meaning which masks a distinction between near opposites: The use of the term the market for an ancient and transcultural form of social life, as well as for the corporately structured competition for capital and prot in a borderless global economy, is a value confusion of such magnitude that it is metaphysical in nature. But the distinction between near opposites is consistently repressed . . . It is the power train between an underlying value program and peoples understanding of its meaning and implications that drives the wheels of its social acceptance . . . (McMurtry, 1998, p. 14). Focusing beyond the market itself, some argue that dealing with the crisis in accounting requires that we make better people. This is associated with a vision of a post-corporate world that will come about if humans are prepared to assume responsibility for changing ourselves . . . (Korten, 2001, p. 18). Such lofty goals (which are reected in Low, Davey, and
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Hoopers paper in this issue) are not unworthy in themselves,5 but human nature may not be the central problem. This form of market sacralism, along with corporate libertarianism and the accompanying rhetoric of freedom and individualism, provides the market with moral legitimacy while valorising greed (see Hawken, 1993; Korten, 2001, Chapter 5). This is counter-intuitive from an ethical perspective because the market system has been shown to lead to a form of moral minimalism, driving moral standards down, with the moral standards of the market set by the behaviour of the worst (Shaw, 1999). In addition to the punishing effects of nancial market discipline, systems of executive remuneration within corporations undoubtedly are designed to remove personal and ethical values from corporate decision making. Korten (2001, p. 224) argues that . . . top executives have to be paid outrageous salaries to motivate them not to yield to their instincts toward social responsibility (emphasis added). In the present round of reforms, nothing seems likely to change in this realmin response to evident public concern over the levels of executive remuneration, the Economist Intelligence Unit says The good news for bosses is that no one on the inside of the governance debate has any real problem with their getting rich as long as they are adding lasting value to their companies (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2003, p. 34, emphasis added). 2.5. Taking on the (ethical, educational) responsibilities Education can inuence ethical behaviourthis is one of its basic social functions. Thoughout history, schools and universities have always instilled particular values in those who attend (see Boyce, 2002). If education did not have any inuence on the values of students, as reected in their attitudes and actions, it would be largely meaningless. However, universities generally reect the dominant political and social values of the ruling bloc and inculcate these values in a way that conrms and reinforces the hegemonic status quo (Kearney, 1970). Recent research by the Aspen Institute in New York serves to demonstrate this effect. It was found that students priorities shift during the two years of business school, from customer needs and product quality towards the importance of shareholder value (Gentile and Samuelson, 2003, p. 2). The good news was said to be that business schools were found to make a difference, but the bad news . . . was that students were moving in a direction that wouldnt help them address the kinds of values conicts, crises, and trends that the press, the general public and our own faculty are concerned about.6 Given that business education may be . . . an important lever for changing business (Gentile and Samuelson, 2003, p. 2, emphasis added), the key questions to be addressed are how to make business education matter. For Gentile and Samuelson, it is important to see
5 Although it is perhaps ironic that such expressions echo many elements of the activism of the radical US Right who also ostensibly seek a return to various traditional values. The call for . . . a common set of virtues and values that can elevate humankind . . . and can help this nation lead the world to the level of a global and humane civilization (Doost and Fishman, 2004, p. 637) echoes with the justications offered for the 2003 invasion of Iraq (even though political and rhetorical motivations may be contrasted with more humanistic ones). 6 Low, Davey, and Hopper (in this issue) recognise a key associated problem in that business school training is centred on narrow goals of prot maximisation for shareholders, and that the social costs of such singular pursuits are marginalised; that, in effect, business schools train good people to do bad things (or, at least, things that have bad outcomes for many).
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the full range of social impacts and business results as having a complex interdependent and reciprocal relationship. Social Impact Management is dened as the eld of inquiry at the intersection of business practice [or needs] and wider societal concerns that reects and respects the complex interdependency between the two (Gentile, 2002c, p. 4; see also Gentile, 2002a, 2002b; Gentile and Samuelson, 2003). The concept is designed to enable business managers to appreciate this intersection and to take on societal concerns as their concerns and as core business responsibilities rather than extraneous factors. From within business education itself, this presents a more progressive view than the more traditional position (popular in the accounting literature) that the management of such concerns is merely a matter of gaining, maintaining, or repairing legitimacy for the benet of the rm. An implication of these ideas is that it is necessary to address the varying roles people play in their own lives and the possible contradictions between multiple roles. Even shareholders wear many hatsthey also are, or represent, employees and customers . . . (Scully and Gentile, 2003, p. 4).7 Because it is likely that prior education and self-selection means that accounting students will tend to align their thinking more with economic roles as shareholders/investors, managers, or entrepreneurs, rather than with social roles as citizens, family members, customers, social group members, and workers (Boyce, 2004, p. 57880), accounting education must transcend its conventional portrayal as being connected only to the economic realm.8 Students varying social roles and identications provide an important base. Whilst critical educational efforts in accounting are exceptional rather than typical, Social Impact Management and the growing eld of social and environmental accounting aim to ll this void: . . . environmental accounting provides a particularly good opportunity to explore the extent of accountings implication in social issues . . . and the moral imperatives that this implies for accountings response in terms of pragmatics, ethics, public interest and professionalism . . . (Gray et al., 1994, p. 65). . . . when we begin to actually travel down the path of reasoning these questions suggest, we get glimpses of a world different from the one we are familiar with, one where the traditional distribution of resources and power a distribution that has served many of us quite well may likely be disturbed (Gentile, 2002b, p. 7). Disturbing understandings is only a rst step; understanding is a necessary precursor to action in and on the world, which is essentially counterhegemonic (Boyce, 1996, 2002, 2004; Tinker and Gray, 2003). 2.6. Beyond vocationalism In considering where accounting educators t into this picture, it is important to note the central role of accounting in creating and sustaining particular economic discourses
This means that any shareholder primacy model is simplistic, perhaps dangerously so. The focus on economic roles at the expense of the social may mean that people ultimately contribute to their own exploitation (Tinker et al., 1991, p. 30).
8 7
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and actions, and the prominent role of the accounting industry in recent corporate scandals. Accounting educators bear particular ethical responsibilities because they . . . are in the uncomfortable position of being producers of inequality, possibly at an accelerated rate (Poullaos, 2004, p. 726, emphasis added; see also Craig and Amernic, 2002, p. 1223). Education as opposed to training is often difcult to achieve in the light of a welter of professional body requirements that lend themselves to a relatively narrow vocational approach. It is ironic that even add-on ethics components may be justied by the fairly narrow instrumentalist notion that they are necessary for accounting work. By contrast, a long-held vision focuses on education as the development of the whole person, with obligations extending beyond preparation for the world of work (see Amernic and Craig, 2004; Aronowitz, 2000; Craig and Amernic, 2002; Newman, 1996; Preston, 1992; Tinker and Koutsoumadi, 1997). This includes reection on and problematisation of the pervasive ideas of the times, providing an active space for difference, debate, contestation and dissent, and preparing for a suite of activities that are part of active democratic social and political life (see Aronowitz, 2000; Boyce, 2004; Craig et al., 1999; Gray and Collison, 2002; Newman, 1996; Saravanamuthu, 2004).9 In short, university education should critique society and disturb the (intellectual) peace (see Craig et al., 1999; Neimark, 1996).
3. Dealing with ethical issues in contemporary accounting education Antonio Gramscis suggested approach to education, balancing the humanistic, formative and vocational, preparing students for manual and intellectual work (broadly conceived) is particularly apposite for accounting (Gramsci, 1971, 27 et seq.).10 To effectively take on the responsibilities that are incumbent upon accounting academics, it is necessary to consider accounting ethics in a broad context. This necessitates going beyond individual unethical manifestations and malfeasances that often make the headlines. 3.1. A quest for ethical relevance At the level of corporate law and regulation, the contemporary focus on corporate governance and legal reforms such as the SarbanesOxley Act in the United States of America and the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program (CLERP) in Australia are reactive in nature. Calls for reform of accounting education in recent years have been similarly reactive, often driven by perceived changing needs of the profession. There is signicant concern that accounting education serves to indoctrinate, pacify and cripple ethically our students
9 In accounting education, it is these critical components that to dene the fundamental relevance of technical content (Saravanamuthu, 2004). 10 It is noted that many of Gramscis comments were made in relation to elementary and intermediate education. However, they are equally applicable or at least transferable to higher education, particularly in an era of mass university education. Indeed, on one fairly conservative view, Gramscian notions of the interchange between politics and education are more applicable at university than lower levels of education (see, for example, Entwistle, 1979), and it is widely accepted that Gramscis ideas have particular relevance for the education of adults (Borg et al., 2002; Coben, 1998; Mayo, 1999).
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(Tinker and Gray, 2003, p. 728) and ethics has still not been given the prominence it merits (Gaa and Thorne, 2004). Any attempt to critically infuse ethics into accounting education is fraught with difculty because of the pre-existing tendency to engender a particular kind of identity within students in which the economic dominates over the ethical. Accounting students are taught that good actions maximise corporate prots; consequently economically good actions are equated with moral goodness (McPhail, 1999, p. 836). This idea is twinned with the fallacious notion that private costs and benets are identical with social costs and benets (Bailey, 1990, p. 213). Framing ethical issues as separate to core business issues may convey the idea that they are not a part of business activity; or that they are exceptional. Thus, if ethics education is seen as a vocational add-on that is centred on solving professional dilemmas, there is a danger that ethics is treated as something separate from business and organisational activity instead of something that is integral to it. By contrast, ethics must be seen as being inculcated in the mundane practices of business (Gentile, 2001; Gentile and Samuelson, 2003). 3.2. Accounting, prot, and ethical decision-making In the usual approach, if ethics is included at all within accounting curricula that are crowded with technical material (including professional body pronouncements and legislative requirements) (see Gaa and Thorne, 2004), accounting, business, prot, and ethics are often linked in a manner that progresses in a manner akin to the following: 1. Business is about making prot and creating shareholder wealth (full-stop); 2. Accounting, as the language of business is about helping #1; 3. As long as business does #1 (and accounting does #2), everyone is better off (on the rising tide that lifts all boats); 4. Because of #3, we do not have to worry too much about big picture ethics, since that is not a concern of business (due to acceptance of #1); 5. However, when #4 goes wrong (manifested by corporate or accounting scandals), ethical analysis is focused on errant individuals; identied individuals are blamed, shamed, and punished (or, at least, vilied); then we go back to concentrating on how accounting can help #1; 6. If #5 alone seems inadequate to deal with the identied problem, reform accounting and business regulationbring in tough new laws or regulations to deal with unethical business activity, but make sure that they do not fundamentally interfere with #1. The assumptions made at #1#3 are rarely questioned, but they are based on theoretical assumptions or assertions made without reference to real social phenomena. Fundamental failures of accounting at #2 are rarely the focus of investigation (but c.f. Clarke et al., 2003, for a signicant counter-example, at least at the level of technical practice). At #5, ethical decision making models may be used. These models provide a number of steps in ethical analysis that may be followed. Each step is designed to follow logically, and the nal step is usually something along the lines of make a decision. For example, in what has become a popular approach, the American Accounting Association (AAA) case
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book, Ethics in the Accounting Curriculum: Cases and Readings (May, 1990)11 utilises a seven-step decision making model in analysing ethics case studies: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Determine the facts. Dene the ethical issue. Identify the major principles, rules, and values. Specify the alternatives. Compare values and alternativessee if there exists a clear decision. Assess the consequences. Make your decision (May, 1990, p. 12).
This approach may incorporate generally abstract consideration of the elements of a professional Code of Ethics, which may or may not be applied to ctional case vignettes (see Fulmer and Cargile, 1987; Langenderfer and Rockness, 1989; Sisaye, 1997). Codes of ethics are discussed, their provisions memorised, and ethical problems solved according to their strictures. This is ostensibly achieved through a generally mechanistic and rule-bound application of formal pronouncements, provisions and requirements, although broad ethical theories such as utilitarianism or deontology may also be applied. Centring ethics teaching on models and codes has some intuitively desirable features, such as the provision of a structured approach to ethical reasoning and analysis in accounting and non-accounting contexts and the raising of end-user ethical dilemmas. However, the application of ethical decision making models suffers from several major problems. Firstly, the approach, and the pedagogical framework within which it is embedded (as outlined above), is rooted in a business-centric shareholder-primacy model. Ethics is largely treated instrumentally in that ethical behaviour is presented as justiable if it can be shown to be good for business. Thus, in a variant on the teaching framework outlined above that may be adopted for pragmatic reasons, it may be suggested that ethics can be brought in at #2 by saying that ethics is about doing business the right way and ethical behaviour is good for business. Only in the business case for attending to multiple stakeholders are the interests of shareholders and other corporate stakeholders aligned. It is assumed that by taking care of other stakeholders, shareholder interests are maximised (Scully and Gentile, 2003, p. 1, emphasis added), and that business therefore has an interest in attending to wider societal concerns. It is further assumed that self-interest and the prot motive provide sufcient incentives for business ethics. By contrast, research by Scully and Gentile (2003) suggests that academics in business disciplines recognise that in practice the interests of shareholders and other stakeholders are not necessarily aligned, in part because the wrong stakeholders may be validated. But the shareholder primacy model is not meaningfully challenged and most academics still subsume non-shareholder interests to the overriding aim of prot/wealth maximisation. Paradoxically, this leads to an analysis that sees the problem with corporate scandals
11 The input of the organised accounting profession to such educational programs is ironic, given accountings role in ethical scandals. Less than 10 years before the scandal which brought it down, Arthur Andersen were lauded for having . . . developed educational materials relating to accounting ethics in addition to holding conferences that included discussions relating to business and accounting ethics education . . . (Geary and Sims, 1994, p. 4).
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as being not that companies were too focused on prot/wealth maximisation, but that corporate management were not sufciently focused on this goalthey sought to maximise their own wealth rather than that of shareholders. This view essentially reduces the ethical problem to the need to align shareholder and management interests (a prominent concern in conventional agency research in accounting). A particular problem with taking the view that ethical and social responsibility can, does, or should result in a nancial payoff is that this approach implicitly justies unethical and socially irresponsibile corporate behaviour, for we know that they do pay (see Gentile and Samuelson, 2003). If the focus is on prot, and making things pay ethical and social responsibility are reduced to mere instrumental, and secondary, roles. A second problem with the conventional approach ethics teaching is that, whilst it may be argued that the formulation of various ethical decision making models helps to develop ethical problem solving skills in students, thus encouraging systematic decision processes beyond the application of codes of ethics (Langenderfer and Rockness, 1989, p. 67), it is hard to see how these models approach anything like the reality of real-world decision-making or meaningfully tap into and develop students own ethical value systems and associated capacities for action. The third and fourth problems are related to the second. Where the focus is on codes, it is likely to be severely decient because in practice, codes of ethics or codes of conduct in themselves are unlikely to prevent unethical conduct (see Oliver and Robison, 1995).12 Evidence suggests they make little difference to the actual or intended actions of students (Fulmer and Cargile, 1987). In practice, they are unlikely to prevent fraudulent reporting, even if accompanied by monitoring and control mechanisms (Brief et al., 1996). They inculcate a narrow and rigid understanding of responsibilities, with accountabilities beyond the rules generally regarded as being outside the domain of consideration; this leads to a situation where an ethical variant of creative accounting (loopholing) may implicitly be deemed to be acceptable (Armstrong et al., 2003). It is hard, then, to imagine that ethical outcomes can come from a checklist of values, procedures, or rules. The fourth problem is that these approaches treat ethical decision making as a pseudomechanistic form of problem-solving, neither mimicking the realities of real-world decision-making (noted above), nor encouraging expansion of thinking beyond model boundaries. Research has shown that students may be able to address hypothetical ethical dilemmas in abstract ethical decision-making, but that there is considerable difculty when it comes to translating this into the arena of actual decisions and actionswhat would actually be done (Thorne, 2001). It is important, therefore, that ethics education develop students moral sense rather than, or at least in conjunction with, ethical analytical skills (Armstrong et al., 2003; McPhail, 1999, 2001b). Fifth, an excessive focus on individuals has the effect of marginalising considerations both of the collective nature of ethics and the social context. Ethics is typically portrayed
12 This is not merely because of inadequate mechanisms for enforcement and punishment. Several other factors assume signicance: codes contain rules that may be interpreted in different ways; rules in a set may be instantiated in different ways and may intersect in different ways in different situations; similar rules may produce a range of acceptable practices; and merely following rules (even detailed ones) does not absolve one from ethical or legal responsibility beyond the strictures of rules (Oliver and Robison, 1995).
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as a matter of personal choice; it is suggested that ethical problems would be solved if only accountants (and others) were better people so that they would make more ethical decisions (this is a part of the problem discussed earlier in this paper). This general diagnosis suggests that morally inadequate individuals are the source of problems (at #5), and the prescription requires morally upright, virtuous people with the motivation and fortitude to do the right thing (e.g. Armstrong et al., 2003; Jennings, 2004; Knapp et al., 1998; Leung and Cooper, 1995; Loeb, 1988; Mintz, 1995; Pomeranz, 2004; Stewart, 1997; Thorne, 1998, 1999, 2001).13 Without denying the importance of individual decisions and actions, ethics is much more than a matter of individual choices, because organisational and social ethics is concerned with the way compliance, accountability and justication are dealt with at a system level (Cohen and Grace, 2001). Individualist approaches to ethics denies the inherently collective responsibility that all members of a community share for designing systems of responsibility and allocating individual responsibilities within such systems (see Baier, 1993). In addition to a problematic individualistic presentation of ethics, teaching case studies (e.g. May, 1990; Northcott, 1995; Thomas, 2004) typically take each case as an individual and discrete unit of analysis. Cases are rarely connected in a manner that considers the overall systemic crises that they may represent. Rather than systems failures, the focus typically remains on the moral failures of individuals (Jennings, 2004, p. 24; and see Rezaee, 2005) within isolated cases. For example, the Enron and associated scandals have been constructed as cases where the principal problem was that . . . many accountants and auditors made poor ethical choices (Jennings, 2004, p. 7). Such individualist reconstructions of events impair critical analysis of underlying systemic causes of ethical problems (Tinker and Carter, 2003; Tinker and Gray, 2003; Williams, 2002) and fail to address corporate and economic cultures that encourage and reward unethical conduct through demands for ever-increasing rates of return and wealth accumulation (see Brief et al., 1996 for a contrasting argument).14 In short, if unethical (or socially undesirable) behaviour is demanded and rewarded by an economic and social system, diagnoses that see the problem as lying at the level of errant individuals miss the point. Sixth, and following from the previous point, problems are typically constructed as ethical dilemmas. A dilemma is a situation in which there is no right solution, as each of the available alternatives15 is considered to produce an undesirable outcome; an ethical dilemma is therefore a situation where all available alternatives are (prima facie) likely to result in ethically unfavourable or problematic outcomes, and a person may effectively
13
Under this approach, the core of the solution may be perceived to come from simple things such as reading ethical masterworks (Jennings, 2004), celebrating accounting heroes (Knapp et al., 1998), or more complex processes that attempt to develop virtue ethics or sound ethical motivations (e.g. Armstrong et al., 2003; Mintz, 1995; Thorne, 1998). A variation on this prescription advocates sending white collar criminals to jail as a deterrent to others (Leaf, 2002). 14 Some of the literature does recognise the importance of the broader context in accounting ethics. For example, . . . institutional factors have a profound effect on the choices [individual accountants] make . . . (Gaa and Thorne, 2004, p. 2); . . . it is both appropriate and necessary to examine business ethics on both individual and organizational levels (Gandz and Hayes, 1988, p. 658). Despite such recognition of the broader aspects of ethics, the individualist reconstruction of ethical problems and dilemmas that pervades the treatment of accounting ethics negates meaningful critique and socio-historical contextual consideration. 15 Strictly speaking, there are two equally unfavourable choices in a dilemma.
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be forced to make a morally unfavourable choice (between the lesser of two evils). For example, a dilemma may be constructed as involving a choice between a persons loyalty to an organisation and their loyalty to self, colleagues or family. In such a case, each of the available courses of action is presented as ethically unfavourable because each results in the sacrice of an important ethical value, therefore resolution centres on subjective judgements based on personal prioritisation of values and weighing of consequences. A problem, however, is that scenarios presented to students may not actually contain moral or ethical dilemmas because one side of the dilemma may be economically rather than ethically unfavourable. Presentation of such scenarios as ethical dilemmas implies that each of the available options is of moral equivalence (see Whitbeck, 1992). In Low, Davey, and Hoopers research (in this issue), for example, many of the survey question scenarios (in the rst survey) did not contain moral dilemmas, since only one of the two options offered in the scenario represented a clear moral course of action; the second option offered was not a moral course of action (for example, ignoring a debt-laden off-balance sheet subsidiary).16 Similarly, Social Impact Management (Gentile, 2002b, outlined earlier in this paper) implicitly and explicitly draws on the notion of ethical dilemmas in its attempt to break down traditional dichotomies such as business/society; workers/customers; industrial resources/environment; and shareholders/stakeholders. For example, it is suggested that: Many of todays most vexing managerial questions present themselves to us not as choices between right and wrong, but between two rights or two wrongs. The answers are not clear . . . (Gentile, 2002c, p. 4). This construction is premised on the implicit assumption that prot/wealth is a right and that this right competes on an (ethically) equal footing with other factors such as human rights and environmental protection. If the construction of ethical problems as grey-area ethical dilemmas involving ostensible choice between morally equivalent alternatives (whether or not implied equivalence is intended) an avenue may be provided for students to avoid the complexity of moral problems and evade ethical decision-making. Therefore, whilst the standard way of posing ethical problems as dilemmas precodes and preinterprets them in a way that is convenient for the instructor (Stewart, 1997), the essence of many problems may be lost. Dealing ethically with such problems ultimately requires acceptance of moral responsibility and a focus on the ethically good, raising . . . how-much, how-to questions at least as often as whether questions (Whitbeck, 1992, p. 128). If the precoding and preinterpretation of problem situations as dilemmas can be avoided and if dilemmas are regarded as apparent rather than actual, students may be asked to explore the ethical and other implications of offered choices (and to look for other choices that are not immediately apparent in a given choice-set), rather than simply deciding. Consideration of the social context of choices may reveal that taking the ostensibly ethical route may in itself give rise to ethically unfavourable outcomesstudents may discover an ethical dilemma where none was immediately apparent. For example, if an individual is faced with the choice of complying with a management direction to produce misleading accounts or to refuse to do so and risk losing his or her job, then refusing seems to be a clear moral course of action that involves insistence on an ethical right
16 The problem with such scenarios as presented to students is compounded because this involves their abstraction from socio-historical context, as discussed in the fth point, earlier.
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(avoidance of deliberate deception in the preparation of accounts); there may be an associated economically unfavourable outcome (loss of income). An ethical negative (misleading) counterposed against an economic negative (economic loss) in this way does not, ipso facto, present an ethical dilemma, but further analysis of the economically unfavourable outcome may associate it with an ethical badthe endangerment of livelihood for self and family. This endangerment may itself be seen as a product of the social and economic context in which decisions and choices must be made. Ethically, the endangerment of life capacity is not comparable to the unfavourable market or prot outcome that might represent the corporate-view of a refusal to mislead (which is where the pressure initially seems to come from), but at a personal level it shows why it is not realistic to expect individuals to immediately make the obvious, right decision. Deeper analysis shows that ethical decisions are complex, they are socially structured, and the outcomes thereof are not straightforward. It is never quite so simple as just doing the right thing. The dialectical interaction of ethics and society means that ethics can never be regarded as black-and-white, but at the same time it is important for students to discover what it is that makes a problem situation a dilemma, why ethical decisions in the real world are hard to make, and how they have many dimensions. If ethical problems (dilemmas or not) are not contextualised in the world of real-life decision-making, then ethics themselves may be seen as a pious and convenient myth that is unconnected with real life, masking underlying tensions and subsuming key issues (c.f. Cooper, 1992 on new environmental ethics). Despite the dangers analysed above, the explicit inclusion of ethical dilemmas can be helpful if it provides the opportunity to transcend the effacement of such dilemmas (where they actually exist) through accounting logics that operate to turn real moral dilemmas into economic, costbenet calculations. Thus the presentation of ethical dilemmas can work against a tendency to pretend that ethical issues do not exist in the rst place, or that they cannot be solved except through the application of an overriding accounting logic. In this sense, there may be a contribution to a necessary denial of the relevance of economic calculations when essentially ethical principles are at stake (Harte et al., 1991, p. 250), but the ethical implications of available alternatives must be explored. However, an additional problem arises even when a genuine ethical dilemma is presented (that is, where both/all available options are ethically unfavourable), for there may be a tendency to obviate the exploration of further alternatives. Such exploration is vital to successfully dealing with dilemmas: Faced with a true dilemma, it makes little difference which horn one chooses. The only good responses to dilemmas are those that enable one to escape the dilemma, if this is possible . . . (Whitbeck, 1992, p. 127). Ultimately, of course, there may be an irreducible conict between goals (whether ethical or not), and choices must be made, but the ethical value-base of such choices should be explicit, as should their social structuring. Finally, the standard approach to including ethics in the accounting curriculum seeks incremental and gradualist change in the ethical development of students. The focus is often on professional and organisational values (and codes) as the major ethical referents (Sisaye, 1997). This approach is designed to assist accounting educators in the process of developing the professional orientation of accounting students towards ethical values, and is useful to the extent that it succeeds in this aim, but it may reinforce a shallow notion of ethics and inculcate the idea that ethics is a mere matter of rational decision making
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based on denable and identiable steps or of following the provisions of codes of ethics. As the above discussion shows, awareness of conict, contradiction, competing interests, contingency and uncertainty at the root of many ethical problems should be integral to ethics education. 3.3. Getting beyond codes, models, and individualised ethics It is possible that the use of ethical decision making models could be expanded to incorporate the multidimensional, socio-political aspects of ethical dilemmas, thus seeing ethics as more than mere decision-making. Various steps of a decision model might be used as a basis for surfacing issues such as the existence of competing ethical values, non-complementary alternatives, competing individual and collective interests, a range of possible differential consequences for different parties, and power relationships that impinge on ethical decision making in practice. This would require the infusion of critical thought, inspiration, imagination, and creativity, and the capacity to transcend existing organisational and professional assumptions and norms and may require the disruption of students prevailing positions (McPhail, 2001b). Given that ethical considerations necessarily involve a social component, it is particularly important to get beyond individual ethical dilemmas and to consider how ethics inheres in social structures, systems, and power. This does not mean that the importance of the individual should be overlooked, but that ethics should not be individualised in a manner that reduces ethical considerations to individual decisions. Individuality individual abilities, desires, and preferences must necessarily be drawn upon in considering ethical questions and responses to them, but this is quite a different matter to abstracting the individual from social context, marginalising the wider system context from ethical considerations, and assuming that ethical decisions are merely matters of individual choice. It is also necessary to think beyond both the local/national economic contexts within which ethical issues arise, because so many of the ethical implications of the practice of accounting are no longer isolated to specic local concerns. Just as much of accounting, business and economics are becoming global, so must our thinking (and acting) about ethics in these realms become global. Many ethical concerns in accounting including seemingly isolated manifestations of individual or corporate misconduct ow from the interactions between accounting and globalisation, and therefore the ethical challenges of globalisation should be of central concern to accountants.
4. Looking out: ethical challenges of globalisation Whether it speaks of labor, the environment, or ways of living, the narrative of globalization offers as its ction the enfranchisement of the entire globe through a wash of wealth and choice. Yet every day it works to enact just the opposite (Medovi, 2002, p. 73). This section considers the implications of globalisation for accounting ethics education, arguing that globalisation should not be unproblematically accepted either as a concept or
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a practice, for several reasons that are directly relevant to a consideration of how we think of (and teach) ethics in accounting. The validity of the concept of globalisation, including its meaning, implications, and its very existence as a real phenomenon, are subject to contestation and resistance. The term and actions taken in its name are inherently political, making a critical questioning of what has become unquestionable in relation to globalisation arguably the most urgent of the services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves (Bauman, 1998, p. 5). At the very least, this is because, despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, . . . global inequality is a major part of the contemporary collective condition . . . The buzzword is globalization but we inhabit a divided world . . . (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, p. 130). Distorted ways of thinking about globalisation have often reduced it to a spectacle that many people view either from the sidelines, or from a bandwagon that is lurching after the media fad or the stock opportunity of the moment (Worthington, 2000, p. 24). This may in part be because the concept in use has become so all-encompassing that in most of its uses it does not provide for an adequate critique of the complexity of modern economic, social, and political life (see Amoore and Dodgson, 1997; Thompson, 2003). 4.1. Globalisation and its contradictions As Everett (2003, p. 4036) points out, globalisation is used synonymously with a range of other terms, each of which carries different connotations. However, it may be possible to agree at a basic level that, in its contemporary guise, globalisation results in a transformation of social geography to include supraterritorial spaces without ending the relevance of territorial geography (Scholte, 2000, Chapter 2). Beyond this, there is disagreement, in part because much globalisation discourse relates to an imagined inevitable or soon-to-be state rather than an existing state of affairs. Globalisation is itself an ongoing teleological unfolding (Medovi, 2002, p. 65) rather than an existing system. It is a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal process . . . (Jessop, 2002, p. 97). Globalisation has brought about changes to many aspects of capital and capitalist production and the role of states and nations. It has resulted in a broadening of the role of extrastate loci of governance, but it also represents a continuation of established patterns and trends (Harvey, 1995; Jessop, 2002; Scholte, 2000, Chapter 6; Worthington, 2000, Part 1). Whatever effects it has had, globalisation has not displaced deeper social structures in relation to production (capitalism), governance (the state and bureaucratism more generally), [and] community (the nation and communitarianism more generally) . . . (Scholte, 2000, p. 8). Globalisation implies that the scale of whatever change is represented by the term is such that every corner of the planet is touched, and that any benets of global transformations are globally spread. By contrast, in whatever way globalisation is thought of and whatever it means in practice, its effects are not experienced globallyits drivers, effects, costs, and benets are distributed in a manner that is far from global in scope or scale. It is paradoxical, that globalisation implies wholeness, but as Held and McGrew (2002, p. 3) explain (in arguing the case for globalisation sceptics), If the global cannot be interpreted literally, as a universal phenomenon, then the concept of globalization seems to be little more than a synonym for Westernization or Americanization. Indeed, it may be argued that rather than representing the current international social and political order as global it may be better
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seen as one in which the hegemony of the United States of America and its allies is being expanded (see Aronowitz and Gautney, 2003; Held and McGrew, 2002, Chapter 1). In the South, globalisation tends to be experienced as yet another round of northern hegemony, another round of concentration of power and wealth (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, p. 132). This perspective sees the world as being meaningfully reshaped not by truly global forces, but through the military and economic might of a small number of powerful countries who also dominate international rule-making bodies. The tools and means through which this is achieved are not conceptually or practically unique to the global era, relying as they do on the application of state power and militarism. The recent and ongoing Iraq war presents a quintessential manifestation of this, and the point is reinforced by the incapacity of putative global forces represented by the United Nations to have any signicant inuence over, let alone the capacity to stop, the determined policy of the United States and its allies in the Coalition of the Willing. While globalisation, as a quickening and expanding scale and extent of transnational economic ows and social interactions, is undoubtedly happening, it remains the case that the interests and actions of a small number of powerful nation-states substantially shape and drive whatever transnational changes are taking place. Poullaos (2004) argued that globalisation is characterised by a situation where what happens there affects what happens here. Whilst this claim captures one element of globalisation, it may equally be argued that such analysis marginalises huge parts of the world, omitting many heres and theres from the analysis. For the billions of people who live in rural regions of China, India, and Africa, poorer regions of Europe, the Americas (including the United States and Canada), Australia, and elsewhere, it may be difcult to believe that globalisation has changed much at allit is the here and now that continues to dominate life. In poorer countries, despite outward signs of development progress, economic benets are not spread broadly, and behind the carefully constructed facade . . . billions face an ever more desperate struggle for survival (Korten, 2001, p. 2). Scratch the kitsch of globalization the corporate gloss and marketing babble of globalization and underneath there is glaring inequality, misery and conict (Nederveen Pieterse, 2002, p. 24). Thus, economic globalisation has failed to deliver the basic necessities of a good life secure livelihoods, quality housing, health, education, food, and a quality natural environment on anything like a global scale. Indeed, globalisation processes have undermined these qualities for billions of the worlds people, despite the availability of adequate natural resources to meet many of these needs. Although a small number of newly industrialised countries have made economic gains, the development gap between these few countries and Western nations, and the worlds poorer countries is, in fact, widening, partly reversing an earlier trend.17 Unevenness is central to globalisation, and despite its promise of prosperity and happiness, globalisation has created and reinforced both wealth and poverty, which are spread unevenly between and within countries. Notwithstanding the provision of technologically sophisticated trappings, a substantial portion of the worlds population is excluded from globalisations benets and hundreds of millions of the worlds poor are made more vulnerable (Held and McGrew, 2002, p. 1; Hoogvelt, 1997; Nederveen Pieterse, 1997, 2000).
17 Following the Asian economic/nancial meltdown in 1997, some 200 million people were plunged back into poverty (see Worthington, 2000, p. xi).
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Boyce (2002, p. 583) made the point that While two-thirds of the worlds people are untouched by the information technology revolution, any notion of global change and globalisation is problematic.18 Although technological change is often portrayed as the driving force that creates an inevitable process of globalisation, the potential of information and communications technologies (ICTs) as drivers of globalisation must be placed alongside their actual penetration, which is highly uneven such that ICT-driven economic activity is both insignicant on a global scale and highly concentrated in a small number of countries and regions, notably the United States of America (Thompson, 2004).19 These economic trends are also reected in the social, cultural and civic spheres, where ICTs may have provided new means for the already connected, but has otherwise changed little (ibid.).20 As there is no tide of history that sweeps all before it (Medovi, 2002), alternative views of globalisation are likely to disturb the dominant sense of inevitability that sees a particular form of (economic) globalisation either as already in existence or as an imminent future. Whilst globalisation is often thought of as an economic phenomenon, this simplistic perspective effaces the social totality. If an important aspect of globalisation is increasing international interdependence, then there are clearly economic, social and ecological dimensions to this interdependence (Hall, 1991, p. 245), with other important aspects of globalisation including public order globalisation (governments working together on common problems), and popular (or civil society) globalisation (see Suter, 2000, for example). The tendency to focus on economic and, to a lesser extent, political dimensions of globalisation means that it is often difcult to see past major global players towards the emergence of an incipient global civil society which encompasses non-government organisations and a range of social movements and activists with a range of concerns extending well beyond the narrowly economic. Such movements are prominent in various sites of resistance to economic globalisation and are, in part, associated with an alternative vision of globalisation that focuses on its role in protecting and developing global public goods and the global commons through international cooperation. It is held that international cooperation should also enhance global policy outcomes in areas including environment, peace, health and nancial stability (Kaul et al., 1999, p. 4536). The case of global public goods is a worthy site for ethical consideration because the effects of inadequate global public goods are particularly inequitable and maldistributive. A lack of global public goods is accompanied by a surfeit of global public bads such as pollution, environmental degradation, social dislocation, poverty, social stratication, and
18 Poullaos (2004, p. 7167, fn. 4) took issue with this particular point, rhetorically asking for evidence that the lives of two-thirds of the worlds population are not affected by information technology (whether or not they have any access to it) . . .. This challenge is addressed in part in this section. 19 An absence of access to ICTs for most of the worlds people itself limits access to certain forms of accounting, bookkeeping, and electronic commerce (see Everett, 2003, p. 4078), thus emphasising the importance of ICTs both to the spread of accounting-as-we-know-it and globalisation more generally. 20 An additional point made by Poullaos (2004) was that we should not reduce globalisation to information technology. This seems to have been based on a misreading of the critique in Boyce (2002) and its particular context, where the point being made was in direct reference to Tillings (2002) earlier discussion that explicitly argued that globalisation was both related to and driven by the information technology revolution, comparing this revolution to the Industrial Revolution. As argued here, while globalisation was not and ought not be reduced to information technology, the potential importance of ICTs must be recognised and placed against the continued dominance of old economy, local economic activity in the lives of most of the worlds inhabitants.
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human rights abuses. Many of these outcomes are not inherent in globalisation itself but are directly related to the pursuit of neoliberal policies towards globalisation (Scholte, 2000, Chapter 9). These outcomes are particularly inequitable because whilst the rich have the wherewithal (wealth, knowledge, power) to arrange their affairs in such a manner as to provide protection and to inuence public policy in their own favour, the poor typically have no such power and cannot afford to make such private arrangements. So a lack of public goods affects equity adversely because the poor cannot avoid the problems as easily as the rich (Kaul et al., 1999, p. 457). Whilst globalisation processes, combined with developments in ICTs, have the potential to enhance democratic participation both locally and globally, these outcomes do not ow automatically, and current trends in globalisation have involved the development or deepening of substantial democratic decits (Scholte, 2000). There have been some positive innovations in democratic practice, including devolution and the development of global civil society through the innovative use of information technologies, but the gains have been modest, and [o]n the whole the growth of global governance, global markets, global communications and global civil society have sooner detracted from than furthered popular collective self-determination in contemporary history (Scholte, 2000, p. 282). It may well be that it is the anti-globalisation demonstrations and protests, which have brought thousands of people in many parts of the world out onto the streets, that signal a revival of sorts in democratic functioning, albeit outside and beyond the arena of electoral politics which is largely captive to powerful interests (e.g. Bakan, 2004, Chapter 4; Briloff, 2004; Dwyer and Roberts, 2004; Hertz, 2001; Tinker and Carter, 2003; OConnell, 2004). To the extent that anti-globalisation protests represent a new determination on the part of citizens to have a say in determining their own futures, they signal a potential renewal of civil society and active political agency. Optimistic views may draw on an emergent coming-together of peoples across national boundaries in the dimension of civil society, often in opposition or resistance to what is happening in the name of globalisation in the economic and political spheres. These are not aberrations or mere irritants to globalisation, but even here there are vast cleavages. Except in isolated cases, little seems to be happening in terms of empathy, understanding, and action to bridge the divide between peoples (see the characterisation of a global divide put forward by Huntington, 1998). These divides operate at local, national, and international levels. For example, at the local level there may be tensions based around issues of race and ethnicity; at the national level the divide may be manifested in opposition to immigration; and at the international level we see growing and virulent anti-Islamism in some places and antiWesternism in others.21 The richpoor divide and the polarisation that often accompanies it operates at all three levels. Despite some evidence of renewal of political agency, the potentially integrative mechanisms of globalisation and global networks do not eliminate an important level of exclusion through which particular groups are left out of global networks. Only a small number of
21 Some, but not all, of these tensions may reect a regression to a very defensive and highly dangerous form of national identity which is driven by a very aggressive form of racism (Hall, 1991, p. 26). Not all opposition to globalisation is driven purely by resistance to capitalism, even though much of it may be related to a perceived (or claimed) decline in the power of nation-states.
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elites can be regarded as independent from territorially dened units of power (states). The freedom of capital to move around the world is not experienced by most of the worlds people (Bauman, 1998, Chapter 1). The emergent global transnational class, the members of which see themselves as citizens of the world rather than tied to nation-states (Sklair, 1998)22 and as having interests in global markets rather than local, inhabits a world that is nothing like that inhabited by billions of others. At the same time, a focus on global communities of interest (and associated macro-economic indicators) may obviate the importance of local communities and micro-activities (and lives) at the local level. Thus, associated with the rise of a transnational capitalist class, globalisation has resulted in substantial disconnection between power and the local conditions over which that power reigns, creating new versions of absentee-landlordship (Bauman, 1998, p. 10). It may be argued that, as isolation from locality has become something of an essential element of power, it is only power that has truly been deterritorialised, resulting in local community disintegration (Bauman, 1998, p. 20). These processes of economic globalisation are associated with social restratication: . . . the so-called globalizing processes rebound in the redistribution of privileges and deprivations, of wealth and poverty, of resources and impotence, of power and powerlessness, of freedom and constraint. We witness today the process of a worldwide restratication, in the course of which a new socio-cultural hierarchy, a worldwide scale, is put together (Bauman, 1998, p. 70, original emphasis). Processes of globalisation are said to have profound implications for the capacity of states (and their national and local governments) to act in the interests of their people, although the retreat of the state (Strange, 1996) is as much an internally adopted neoliberal economic rationalist policy as it is an externally imposed constraint on governments. This has implications for democratic processes within and beyond the state: On current trends . . . globalization is not dissolving the state and bureaucratism in general any more than it is unravelling capitalism. Contemporary changes in governance are far more subtle and complex. If the trends described . . . pose a threat, then it is not to the state and bureaucracy, but to democracy (Scholte, 2000, p. 158). Overall, globalisation, far from representing a united globe, may be equally characterised by division (e.g. Carey, 2002; Hurrell and Woods, 1999). Even in the economic dimension the global economy is particularly uneven in its spread and unequal in its distribution. If globalisation is meant to imply a truly global sphere of human social, economic, and political activity beyond the constraints of local space or the national state, then it may be argued that the concept is invalid because, in essence, little has changed across these dimensions. The central point to be made is that we should not fall into the trap of regarding whatever it is that we see and think of as happening under the rubric of globalisation as being universal
22 This is a transnational capitalist class that approximately corresponds to the ownership and control of transnational corporations. It is principally comprised of transnational corporate executives; politicians, professionals, and employees of national and international governmental and quasi-governmental agencies involved in the promotion and regulation of the international economic order; and transnational individuals and organisations who control media and other consumer-oriented organisations. For Sklair (1998, p. 136), Globalisation means that increasingly capitalists seek to transcend the national in search of the global.
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in source, nature, or effects. The global divide is not a simple EastWest or NorthSouth phenomenon because economic and social changes wrought in the name of globalisation have differential effects within the countries of both North and South. Whilst analyses must look beyond the old characterisations of EastWest/NorthSouth, they must also not get swept into a language of globalisation that takes these divides out of the analytical framealthough the lines of exclusion are blurred, they still exist.23 This understanding is particularly important in light of the consideration of the ethical domain being considered in this paper, because the non-global nature of the practice of globalisation, in term of both the unevenness of its effects and the driving role of a small number of powerful states, gives rise to important ethical considerations that may otherwise be elided in globalisation discourse. 4.2. Ethically considering the global The discourse of globalisation has become a place where ostensible new realities are often asserted rather than demonstrated (or are demonstrated by exception rather than by generalisation) (Hall, 1991). The gulf between the potentiality of globalisation and its actuality means that consideration of its ethical implications is imperative: Seeing our [accounting academics] covenant as with the citizen obliges us to consider that accounting and accounting research might be playing a role in globalizations contradictory and dangerous effects. It further forces us to consider who exactly it is that suffers from these effects (Everett, 2003, p. 416). In order to take a global view of ethics and to consider the ethical dimensions of corporate activity beyond individual misdeeds, an awareness of the role of accounting in perpetuating the ethical effects of globalisation is important (see Graham and Neu, 2003). Because accounting is signicantly implicated in both globalisation and distribution, concerns about globalisation impinge signicantly on accounting, accounting education, and ethics within accounting education. If ethics is regarded broadly as the eld of inquiry that concerns the actions of people, in situations where these actions have effects on the welfare of both oneself and others (Gaa and Thorne, 2004, p. 1), then global issues of fairness, distribution, environmental impacts, and social effects of things that happen in the name of globalisation cannot be ignored. The sheer disparity of the human condition across the globe should be ethically considered in a global context (see Worthington, 2000, p. 223). In the South, especially, economic globalisation may be seen as being centrally implicated in dependency and neo-imperialism (Amaladoss, 1999).24 At the level of society and culture, especially consumerist culture, globalisation may be associated with the abstraction of
23 Nederveen Pieterse (2000) suggests that Existing analytics such as dependency, imperialism, exclusion and conspiracy theories are not adequate for dealing with these new relations (see also Nederveen Pieterse, 1997). In relation to the notion of exclusion, he develops the term asymmetrical inclusion as perhaps better reecting the fact that the middle-class in developing countries does participate in global circuits of advertising, brand-name consumerism and high-tech services, which, at another end of the circuitry, increasingly exclude the underclass in advanced economies . . . (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, p. 131; citing Nederveen Pieterse, 1997). 24 But see Nederveen Pieterse (1997, 2000) for a discussion of the weaknesses of these forms of analysis.
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economic from social relationships, the imposition of uniformity, intolerance of diversity (despite a rhetoric that suggests otherwise), and the reduction of culture to prot-seeking (see Amaladoss, 1999, for example). In the political dimension, globalisation has resulted in greater power for the already-powerful and the division of the world into camps and alliances. Distributional effects, in particular, must be central to any ethical consideration of globalisation given evidence that the benets of globalisation principally ow to the already-well-off, most notably multinational and transnational corporations (Korten, 2001). Despite these considerations, in accounting we still tend to see the global(ising) world in our own terms; we account for it in our own, traditional, ways. We know little about alternative value systems that spring from, say, Indian or African cultures. We struggle to deal with non-economic value systems that spring from our own culture, such as those based on environmental or ecological values. Globalisation has to mean a lot more than economic globalisation, on the one hand, and harmonisation of nancial reporting standards, on the other, if it is to have any real meaning for accounting. The ethical error of excluding everyone else unless they come into our sphere of accounting is profound. Indeed, explicitly taking the position of the excluded and marginalised provides a better starting-point for developing an understanding of the social totality than does starting considerations from the vantage point of the winners (see Connell, 1993, Chapter 3; Luk cs, 1974). Many a popular(ist) accounts of globalisation do just the opposite. 4.3. Global power and hegemony The range of problems with globalisation both the concept itself and practices that go under its name mean that older concepts of power and hegemony remain particularly apposite to analyses of the ethics of the international social, economic, and political order (Gramsci, 1971). Globalisation itself is not inherently good or bad but critical analyses of globalisation that eschew the importance of power and hegemony and the expansion of capitalist production may conceal as much as they reveal. An understanding of hegemony, how it is exercised, and how it may be countered is essential, but it must be understood that the extant hegemony is strong: . . . the power, wealth and impact of multinational corporations not only exceed that of many national governments, but no longer strike a good number of the worlds citizens as even surprising (Gentile, 2001, p. 1). Corporate rule must be challenged in order to revive the values and practices it contradicts: democracy, social justice, equality, and compassion (Bakan, 2004, p. 166), but this presents a signicant challenge because the discourse of globalisation, and the sense of newness and inevitability that often goes with it, may have the effect of reinforcing the existing hegemonic bloc. It may also diminish our capacity or willingness to challenge established ways of thinking and acting and lead us to ethically ignore the victims of our collective actions or inactions: Western ideology blames the victims of progress for their own oppression, then covers its tracks by interpreting the globalization process through prepackaged media images and trendy scholarship which project an image of adaptation, but leave more fundamental patterns of thought and action undisturbed (Worthington, 2000, p. 24).
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Ethical transcendence of present economic and social arrangements will not result from an exclusive focus on the ethical/moral domains, or result from an adding-on of ethics to extant educational programs. Globalisation highlights the fact that we cannot validly treat the economic, social, political, and ethical as distinct spheres because each relies on and intrudes into the other. Hegemony (or counterhegemony) is constructed and exercised in the conjuncture of all of these elds (Gramsci, 1971), so the intertwinement of economic, public order, and popular aspects of globalisation needs to be considered. For example, critique of the extraction of surplus value from labour may be reinvigorated by supplementing and combining it with critique of extraction from the environment and from ways of life and culture itself (see Medovi, 2002). Ethical considerations cannot stand alone, educationally, or in daily practice. The processes of globalisation and their outcomes are the product of human decisions. These decisions should be taken consciously and explicitly, subject to vigorous and meaningful debate (which includes the capacity to change decisions, actions, and outcomes). Whatever globalisation means, it does provide academic opportunities to clarify the interdependence of the material and moral realms in productive activity (Worthington, 2000, p. 27). The acknowledged role of accounting in social production and reproduction, and in creating and disseminating systems of value, means that accounting education has an important role to play. The role of education in fostering critical consciousness provides the key avenue down which accounting educators may seek to travel (Amernic and Craig, 2004; Aronowitz, 2001; Boyce, 2004; Freire, 1996; McPhail, 2001a). 4.4. Accounting education: the academic as intellectual In playing a critical mediating role between lived experience and consciousness, intellectual work creates the conditions and tools of symbolic interaction that produce real beliefs and worldviews. Beliefs and worldviews thus created (largely in the social and civic realms) form the basis of social consent that underlies social power and rule (Gramsci, 1971), but intellectual work can be reifying or emancipatory in its social function. The difference corresponds with the relationship between intellectual work and the reproduction, modication, or challenging of the dominant social power (Aronowitz, 1981; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993, p. 445; Luk cs, 1974). a Social reproduction can be the result of either silence or active complicity on the part of intellectuals in relation to the symbolic order of the extant economic system (Bourdieu, 1998). All educators . . . have to be seen as intellectuals, who as mediators, legitimators, and producers of ideas and social practices, perform a pedagogical function that is eminently political in nature (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993, p. 31), thus the political content of education cannot be assumed away by accounting educators. Broadly, academics may play the role of traditional or organic intellectuals, the former considering themselves detached, independent, and isolated from social life and interests, while the latter have an integral tie of solidarity to the interests of a particular social group (Gramsci, 1971, 5 et seq.). In accounting, traditional intellectualism operates within narrow constructed or perceived boundaries of the discipline, without attention to the wider political and social roles of accounting. This results in the inaccurate portrayal of accounting as professionally independent of social and political life (c.f. Boyce, 2004). Although traditional intellectuals may see themselves as
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uncommitted to a particular class or hegemonic force, as holders (and purveyors) of cultural capital they unavoidably become part of the dominant social forces, legitimating extant social arrangements (Bourdieu, 1998; Gramsci, 1971; and see Richardson, 1987, p. 350). Intellectual autonomy and isolation is thus illusory because traditional intellectualism is coopted in a partisan manner. The consequent effective capture of traditional intellectuals forms a basis of hegemony and is an important characteristic of social power and domination (Gramsci, 1971, p. 10). Going further, hegemony is actively aided and abetted by intellectuals who are organic to ruling powers, creating, disseminating, and recreating the ideas and practices that function to engineer mass consent (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12). For instance, the ideology of economic rationalism, whilst it may be accepted by traditional intellectuals (above), is created and supported by hegemonic organic intellectuals (or conservative organic intellectualsAronowitz and Giroux, 1993). Several key ideas form essential parts of this constructed ideology: that the market is a neutral mechanism, that there is no alternative, that everyone benets, and that those who fall by the wayside do so principally due to their own failings (see, for example, Byrne, 1999; Emy, 1993; Hamilton, 1994; Rees et al., 1993). The prevailing ideology is reinforced by implementing technologies such as accounting that are presented as neutral tools that merely signify reality (c.f. Hines, 1988; Tinker, 1991). The key point is that intellectual work in this realm provides noncoercive reinforcement of social power and perpetuation of the interests of dominant social groups. By contrast to traditional intellectuals and hegemonic organic intellectuals, counterhegemonic organic intellectuals (or radical organic intellectualsAronowitz and Giroux, 1993; see also Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996) identify and act in solidarity with a diverse range of counterhegemonic interests, discourses and actions, connected to broad social movements which play a critical role in the pursuit of social change. The role of hegemonic organic intellectuals in accounting and business disciplines actively conceiving, designing, and operationalising economic rationalism in its various guises in multiple sites itself gives rise to an important dialectical role within these disciplines for counterhegemonic intellectual mediation in the form of critique of received orthodoxy and development of alternatives. The decisive role is to help to break the monopoly of technocratic orthodoxy (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 27; also Said, 1994) but this does require explicit commitment to a counterhegemonic position (Gramsci, 1971; and see Boyce, 2002). More generally, critical intellectuals within and without universities are vital to the active functioning of democracy, but their voices must be heard above the din of orthodoxy: . . . the critical intellectual . . . is rstly critical of the intellectual doxa . . . There is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical powers. The intellectual is one of those, of the rst magnitude. That is why I think that the work of demolishing the critical intellectual, living or dead Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, and some others . . . is as dangerous as the demolition of the public interest and that it is part of the same process of [conservative] restoration. . . . I think that everyone would have a lot to gain if the logic of intellectual life, that of argument and refutation, were extended to public life (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 89, emphasis added).
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Amongst the variety of roles fullled by universities throughout their history has been their role in social stabilisation and control in the interests of the state and social elite a hegemonising force concerned with the production and reproduction of social systems but the role of the university in developing counterhegemonies has also been present since their inception, at least in theory (see Boyce, 2002). The critical social role that has been associated with the idea of a university (Newman, 1996) includes its capacity for developing critical democratic thought in citizens (Aronowitz, 2000), and this aspiration still presents an ideal to be striven for, even if it has never really reected the practice of universities, either in the past (Kearney, 1970) or the present (Tribe, 2004). 4.5. The democratic necessity of intellectual mediation Intellectual mediation (initially as theoretical construction) transcends immediate cognition, explicitly or implicitly developing and amplifying links between theory, ideology, and lived experience. In actively mediating between consciousness and lived experience, organic intellectuals abandon the pursuit of abstract knowledge, transcend the narrow sphere of their specializations . . . (Salamini, 1981, p. 118). Knowledge thus produced relates to the daily realm and the social totalityit is here where ideas, conceptions, and consciousness itself are produced, effected, and reproduced (Marx and Engels, 1970, p. 47). In the emancipatory and enlightening sense, mediation requires transformation of the immediately given into a more deeply understood reality in the conjunction of economic, social, cultural, and ideological realms (Luk cs, 1974). Such consciousness-raising in the classroom can prime a future practice (Tinker and Gray, 2003). Whether it is recognised or not, accounting educators play a key mediating role insofar as accounting (and associated) courses form accounting students understandings of the discipline of accounting and its functions, the nature and importance of ethics in business, and the meaning and implications of globalisation. These (mediated) understandings affect (but do not determine) students subsequent beliefs, intentions, and actions in and on the world. Accounting education is not just about direct organic intellectualism, as intellectual roles are dispersed throughout society (Gramsci, 1971). Education provides a means for the development of organic intellectuals whose work lies beyond the realm of the university. This requires a capacity to identify social interests behind particular forms of power, to challenge traditional understandings, and to share knowledge and understanding of a social totality that includes the technicaleconomic functions of accounting and their intertwinement with the social, ethical, and political. Gray (2002) argues that new imaginings of new accountings are required, and these must increasingly be informed by critical accounting. In the context of globalisation, the sort of accounting that stimulates and infuses discourse and debate (Boyce, 2000) may be developed around popular or civic society globalisation the arena of social movements but academics cannot act alone, for a wider conuence of social forces is necessary. The role of academic intellectuals with writers, artists, scientists and others is decisive initially in breaking the monopoly of technocratic orthodoxy (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 27). This means that new ways of communicating between researchers, activists and society must also be developed. Critical accounting research should have a direct connection with accounting teaching, including emerging ideas that see a role for accounting in reclaiming
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the public sphere for democratic discussion and debate (Boyce, 2000; Lehman, 2001). The environmental and social visibilities that may be created by accounting research (e.g. Boyce, 2000) should facilitate discourse and debate within and beyond the classroom. The educative role is vital here because much present social and environmental accounting practice is used to obscure rather than illuminate and to foreclose debate rather than stimulate itthis in part ows from the appropriation by vested interests of accounting calculus and accounting language (Boyce, 2000; Tinker and Gray, 2003). In relation to the concerns of this paper, a critical understanding of the nature of the ideology surrounding globalisation must be developed, including an elucidation of systemic (rather than individualist) links with ethical crises. In the rst instance, a key capacity for accounting educators may be to create disruptive visibilities (Poullaos, 2004, p. 726) in problematising the dominant ideas of the times (Amernic and Craig, 2004; Craig et al., 1999; Craig and Amernic, 2002), ultimately connecting with a broader social movement which unites concretely different kinds of struggle (see Aronowitz, 1981, p. 1278; Hall, 1996, p. 4167; this may be regarded as a counterhegemonic historic blocsee Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). Work within the public sphere and in civic society organisations may hold a particular potential because [c]ounterveiling power is now located in the diffuse realm of global civil society, of civic organizations and NGOs, local and national (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, p. 133; see also Brecher et al., 2000; Ekins, 1992; Korten, 1990; Mitchell, 1998).25 A counterhegemonic historic bloc requires transcendence of narrowly constructed disciplinary boundaries to explore areas of knowledge that may seem prima facie to be outside accounting, but which have an integral connection to the realities of the accounting practice and its effects (Boyce, 2004). Critiques of global processes of value extraction from labour, ecology and environment, and life and culture are all important.
5. (Ethical) implications for accounting educators (Qua intellectuals) To function efciently to function at all we must concentrate our efforts. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statements of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavour and lawful prot (Unsworth, 1992, p. 353). In many senses, accounting operates in the realm of the abstract. Accounting portrays a world based on models and assumptions, and our manner of accounting for things is increasingly removed from the social, cultural, political, and ethical experiences that form the essence of what we are ostensibly accounting for. In part, this reects a wider tendency in Western economic thought and practice to remove economic activity from social relationships. This has been a process instituted by some and imposed upon and experienced
25 As a growing force in global politics, NGOs may remain . . . the most important way of mobilising public opinion and, in focusing attention on a problem . . ., in part because they provide an alternative focal point for loyalty and identity and . . . a vehicle for people to opt out of the self-absorption, self-obsession and materialism which characterise so much of contemporary life (Suter, 2000, p. 356).
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by others (Carrier and Miller, 1998, p. 9). Decisions are taken as if the world actually conformed to the abstractions of accounting and economics, and actions are taken with the intent of making it conform (Carrier, 1997; Carrier and Miller, 1998). To get beyond this conundrum and to build an accounting that has the potential to meaningfully contribute to ethical discourse and action, we must picture things beyond our conventional portrayals. We must let our real experiences of the world in all its social, economic, cultural, and political complexity and contradiction intrude into our models and our professional and educational practices. Such picturing is likely to lead us to question our practices and should lead us to change them. This presents an uncertain and unsettling ethical challenge, and it may be bad for business (as we know it). Accounting education often treats ethics either in an instrumental sense (good for business) or as something of an exceptional activity (to be thought about only when things go wrong). Although accountants may be reluctant to picture things beyond numbers and reports, in order to realise the aims of education in accounting we must rethink what we mean by accounting itself and what we include within its ambit (Boyce, 2004). As long as the focus remains on a construct of economic relevance, the social and democratic potential of accounting is marginalised (see Boyce, 2000). The possible role of accounting education in inuencing ethical behaviour should not be overplayed, but the intellectual role of academics means that accounting educators do bear a special responsibility for addressing ethics locally and globally. Current attention to the ethical aspects of accounting and business is therefore welcome, but accounting education will remain decient if it continues to be dominated by a technicist mindset that regards ethical decision-making as just another form of problem-solving skill-development. Accounting ethics must be problematised well beyond the view of ethics as individual dilemmas and decisions. The current crises in business and in accounting education are part of more general social and economic system crises; systemically necessary business practises and the associated means of accounting for them are directly related to corporate collapse. It is these very practises that are rewarded by the market, despite continuing business scandals and spectacular corporate collapses. It is well-established that accounting plays key roles both in questionable business practices themselves and the legitimation of them, but more fundamental rethinking of accounting and accounting education, rather than simplistic and reactionary reform to accounting and corporate governance, is required to deal with this situation. Re-evaluation of the core content of accounting education as we (still) teach it may connect with wider educational goals for economic and social life and for democratic participation (Aronowitz, 2000, 2001; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, 1993; Boyce, 2004). These issues and the associated challenges necessitate a series of personal and collective struggles for accounting educators and their students, which should lead accounting educators and graduates to critically question their own roles in reproducing and legitimising extant social relations. Failing to consciously make a choice between traditional and organic intellectualism (hegemonic or counterhegemonic) between reproducing the system (and its inherent problems and injustices) or taking an active role in the consideration and creation of alternatives does not mean that such a choice is not actually made. Endeavours to take pragmatic middle of the road or pluralistic positions, championing moderation, consensus and compliance, will tend to act in ways that have
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the effect of sustaining, protecting, and preserving the status quo (Tinker et al., 1991, p. 29). Any form of development is both a personal and social process (Max-Neef, 1991), so while ethics should not be regarded merely as individual decision-making, and ethical breaches should not be regarded merely as individual transgressions, there remains a signicant place for the personal in all of this. The personal is with us (as educators and as accountants) and not them (the unethical). If accounting educators are to make a real difference, they may start with the self (not the other): We want to change the world, but we are confronted with a great paradox . . . [at a personal level] I lack the power to change the world or any signicant part of it. I only have the power to change myself. And the fascinating thing is that if I decide to change myself, there is no police force in the world that can prevent me from doing so. It is just my decision and if I want to do it, I can do it. Now, the point is that if I change myself, something may happen as a consequence that may lead to a change in the world. But we are afraid of changing ourselves. It is always easier to try to change others . . . (Max-Neef, 1991, p. 113). We need to nd ways to meld our personal choices with the micro, meso, and macro contexts within which we are situated, extending the personal to collective and social processes. Accounting educational and research praxis must extend beyond change out there to include change to the in here self-consciousness of actors, subjects, and their observers (Tinker and Gray, 2003, p. 751). The out-there and in-here are both needed. Critical activity in teaching and learning programs in accounting provides an arena where all academics can make a contribution and have a potential impact. Intellectual involvement with students is perhaps the most important activity to be undertaken by educators with a commitment to social change (see Freire, 1996, for example). In this domain, by starting from what is already known about the functioning of accounting, there is considerable scope for accounting academics, within the rubric of the current accounting curricular arrangements, to play a signicant role in consciousness-raising (Boyce, 2004). They may thus provide the sort of intellectual mediation that facilitates the development of a society characterised by ethical behaviour and socially and environmentally sound practices.
Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Cindy Davids and Kala Saravanamuthu for their helpful comments.
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Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 255290

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