Habermas's critical philosophy
Jurgen Habermas has influenced the philosophy of critical accounting. Habermas’s ethical and procedural model - the Ideal Speech Community -can be used to determine the rightness of the various actions that citizens make. It is important to remember that Habermas began as a critical and radical theorist before moving towards a more procedural direction. Habermas’s later work was influenced by Kant and he engaged with the work of John Rawls. Habermas differed from his sources through the development of a theory of communicative action: communication and language were seen as providing a decision-making structure. He referred to this device as the Ideal Speech Community (ISC). Perhaps the clearest definition of the ISC was made by Arrington and Puxty (1991, p. 45). They argued:
Habermas provides an ethical-political model - what he calls the ‘Ideal Speech Community’ - as a regulative ideal to guide public argument oriented toward the formation of a rational consensus with respect to the shape and rationality of interested social actions. That model binds public argument to the following procedural conditions of justice-in-argument, and it is the ethic that provides the foundation for his social theory.
(Arrington and Puxty, 1991, p. 45)
Habermas’s ISC is a procedural decision-making device. Ethical actions must pass four procedural tests. They are: (a) the comprehensibility of the utterance; (b) the truth of its propositional component; (c) the correctness and appropriateness of its performatory component; and (d) the authenticity of the speaking subject (Habermas, 1973, p. 18).
These four procedures provide the components of the ISC to regulate the discourse in the public sphere. More fundamentally, the claims adjudicated in the ISC move in the theoretical space between the actual and what is possible (Power & Laughlin, 1996, p. 448). That is, accounting research must generate: (a) unrestricted participation in the accounting arena; (b) equality of opportunities in the accounting discourse; (c) correctness and cooperative motives in constructing conceptual frameworks; and (d) the mechanism to determine the communicative claims concerning the ‘good’
Basic concepts in accountability research 121 society. The device has been applied to accounting issues such as the viability of conceptual frameworks, public-private initiatives as well as the role of accounting in society.
Habermas argues that the life-world is a cultural space that gives meaning to societal life. Moreover, it is itself a reservoir of human social developments that contrast with the more tangible systems and ‘through social reality which gives these systems meaning and attempts to guide their behaviour through steering media’ (Laughlin, 1987, p. 486). Systems, on the other hand, are the self-regulating actions around specific mechanisms or media, such as money or power (Broadbent, Laughlin & Read 1991, p. 3) are developed. Lifeworlds are the communicatively formed (over time) life experiences and beliefs which guide attitudes, behaviour and actions. Systems are expressions of lifeworld concerns and can be represented at the micro-level as functionally, tangible organisations. Habermas states:
We speak of social integration in relation to the systems of institutions in which speaking and acting subjects are socially related (ver-gellschaften). Systems are seen here as lifeworlds that are symbolically structured. We speak of system integration with a view to the specific steering performance of a self-regulated system. Social systems are considered here from the point of view of the capacity to maintain their boundaries and the continued existence by mastering the complexity of an inconstant environment. Both paradigms, lifeworld and system, are important.
(Habermas, 1975, p. 4)
The key idea to keep in mind is that the decision-making device (ISC) determines the rightness of social actions through rational discourse. This discourse is said to be free from forms of economic, political and social domination. Arrington and Puxty (1991) explain that the ISC is used to determine the rightness of social actions in the public sphere. They emphasise the concept of justice-in-argument is ascribable to Habermas. I argue that the ISC is similar in purpose to Kant’s categorical imperative (discussed earlier in this chapter).
