Basic issues in accountability: Interpretivism, openness, and transparency

Interpretivism, openness, and transparency¹

Some basic themes between decision usefulness and emancipator accounting

Basic philosophical issues in accountability research are examined in developing emancipatory accounting. In this regard, the following argument develops Chapter 7’s critique of utilitarianism and procedural forms of practical reasoning. The chapter also examines communicative, liberal, and utilitarian ideas for accountability and emancipatory research. The ideas from these schools of thought reflect the prominent role that they play in accountability research and how they must be challenged. They focus on the rightness or wrongness of decisions in civil society.

The chapter examines the work of Rawls’ (1971) who, in A Theory of Justice, had developed new ways to develop principles of justice. Notably, accounting theorists such as Gaa 1988 and Williams (1987) have used Rawls’ procedural decision-making model in the contexts such as accounting (Lehman, 1995, 2002, 2017).

Rawls extends Kant’s famous categorical imperative to human rights issues (Rawls, 1971, 1980, 1982, 1985). With its origins firmly in Kantian philosophy, the procedural decision-making model has been used to determine the justice of accounting decisions in terms of the rights of people (Dworkin, 1983, 1987). This chapter then develops the argument that procedural forms of liberalism and utilitarianism foreshorten the scope of moral philosophy. They are limited in that they do not focus on the politics of the good and prefer a form of postmodern misology that asserts political solutions without full democratic interchange in the public spheres of modern communities. The key idea to keep in mind is that accounting theorists, such as Gallhofer and Haslam (2019), have moved from Benthamite theory to a postmodern inspired focus on otherness and difference. Both share a commitment to the maximisation of the interests of others to whom Western modernity has been illiberal and unjust.