Combining differences in a postmodern world

As modern social science research indicates, the number one problem facing accounting is how to combine differences in a world of half-understood cultural fragmentation. The issue confronting theory is that block thinking cuts us from richer sources of the self. Laughlin attempts to avoid such charges by interpreting Habermas’s ideal speech model as a process-based research vehicle. As stated earlier in Chapter 6, it is therefore a processual middle-range approach as opposed to an idealised model.

Thus, by carefully reading Laughlin (1995), the key focus is to understand ‘what is going on’ in organisational settings. The framework,

therefore, is about understanding the problems for communication when constructing procedures and rule focussed strategies for change. It is therefore a category error to argue that Laughlin simply follows Habermas and ends up with a procedural accounting model. However, a careful reading of Laughlin shows that his work charts the subtle forces and vectors of power that are operating within organisational settings.

From a broader philosophical perspective, the supposition that accounting may uncover and interpret ‘what is going’ suggests subtle departures from Habermas’s major work on the idealised speech situation. It will be recalled that for Habermas, the problem reflects curtailing the power of language to restrict people’s freedom of choice. Habermas’s advice is to create regulative ideals to order cultural and political differences. Taylor points out that more research is needed concerning ‘the psychological background that Kantians have and so on, and why they get excited by certain things which do not excite me’ (Taylor, 2011).

Accounting researchers can benefit by considering how these complex debates impact on real-world problems. In Laughlin (1987), the role of language involved constative speech acts. It will be recalled that these terms involved the adjudicating mechanisms to arrive at consensual outcomes in organisational settings. It seems, however, that Laughlin operates with a richer understanding of the role of language. This richer approach to language has the potential to re-enchant our understanding of the sacred. This would take us in a direction different from Habermas’s infatuation with Kantian deductions and abstractions from real-world settings.

That is, Laughlin’s work on sacred values reveals significant identityforming features that can be excluded if we enter the idealised discourse arena. While Habermas emphasises the abstract nature of discourse, it has been argued that Laughlin stresses a process-based understanding of language. Clearly, what emerges from these debates is that Habermas is trying to unpack how reasons perpetuate the deep anxieties many people feel when living in the modern world. Here, Taylor’s (2011) question to Habermas is relevant in exploring language and reason when he asks: ‘what has that got to do with the discourse out there? Can people not understand it? Why discriminate on those grounds?’ Habermas responds:

How to settle this background consensus in the first place, if not within, so to say, a space of neutral reasons? And “neutral” now in a peculiar sense. They are secular in a non-Christian sense of secularization, for one reason. This, truly, you have described so wonderfully in your A Secular Age. Secularization from within the church means tearing down the walls of the monasteries and getting the serious commands of the Lord and the appeal for imitatio Christi. [...] This is secularization from within the Christian community.

(Habermas, 2011, p. 65)

For Habermas, the difference is that religious utterances belong to a kind of category of discourse in which we do not just move within a worldview or within a cognitive interpretation of a domain of human life. For accounting researchers, the task is to explore such processes of reasoning and how they are communicated through relevant publics. Again, Habermas’s work abstracts from the process and interpretivist focus that Laughlin (1987) initiated in his paper.

From a philosophical perspective, Taylor expresses concern about how you can express your experience in a manner that is not tied up with your membership in a community. Habermas argues that Taylor’s talk about being created in God’s image is, in our tradition, easily translatable into secular propositions. For Habermas, this derives from the Kantian concept of autonomy or from a particular interpretation of being equipped with human rights (Habermas, 2011, p. 63).

Taylor (2011) responds by explaining that he is telling another story about the psychological background that Kantians and Habermasians use. Habermas argues that the difference is that religious utterances belong to a kind of category of discourse in which ‘you do not just move within a worldview or within a cognitive interpretation of a domain of human life’ (Habermas, 2011, p. 63). For critical researchers, Habermas invites us to consider the motivations that led us towards the neutral decision model -the ideal speech situation. Habermas argues that:

[T]here is no reason to oppose one sort of reason (secular against religious reasons or Hegelian) simply because many people find religious reasons are coming out of a world view which is inherently irrational.

(Habermas, 2011, p. 61)

The purpose of the analysis is to understand how our common human reason works in religious traditions, as well as in any other cultural enterprise, including science. So there is no difference on balance. Habermas continues:

However, if it comes to lumping together Kantianism and utilitarianism, Hegelianism and so on with religious doctrines, then I would say there are differences in kind between reasons. One way to put it is that ‘secular’ reasons can be expressed in ‘public’, or generally shared, language. This is the conventional sense that Chuck [Taylor] is trying to circumvent by introducing the term official language. Anyhow, secular reasons, in this sense belong to a context of assumptions—in this case to a philosophical approach, which is distinguished from any kind of religious tradition by the fact that it doesn’t require membership in a community of believers. By using any kind of religious reasons, you are implicitly appealing to membership in a corresponding religious community. Only if one is a member and can speak in the first person from within a particular religious tradition does one share a specific kind of experience on which religious convictions and reasons depend.

(Habermas, 2011, p. 61)

Habermas (2011) is avoiding the argument that he ranks differences and does not reconcile them. For Habermas, the key issue involves how we emerge from participating in cultic practices in which reasons are tied to membership. This is the central difference between interpretations concerning the role of language and middle-range thought. Moreover, these interpretations have important implications on how we account, interpret and recognise different kinds of reasons.

For accounting researchers, the question boils down to Laughlin’s (1995) predilection for interpretation over abstraction. Additionally, what impact would this have on the middle-range approach and its application to organisational theory. For Habermas, according to Taylor, what is not considered, and which is abstracted from in secular space is the giving and taking reasons in terms of cultic practices. Secondly, there is no reference to socialisation in a religious community that can be traced back in the five or four great world religions to a historical thinker or historical origins, and is continued through a doctrine and the interpretation of such a doctrine. Habermas’s recent works explain how this socialisation is related to an ‘understanding of what it means to refer, in our kind of religions, to a kind of revealed truth’. He wants to demarcate different kinds of reasons and states that it is difficult to explain what it means outside those traditions.

Furthermore, Habermas offers a personal statement that he was raised as a Lutheran Protestant and now is agnostic. It is these experiences that are abstracted from in the public sphere and must be given expression in our accounts. This process of abstraction is what gives rise to the difference between religious and secular reasons for Habermas. While he argues that we have to abstract from these spaces if you enter a discussion between Kantians and Utilitarians. That is, with Kantian and Utilitarian reasons, there is no internally connected specific path to salvation, a path to salvation which considerably enhances religion, as we understand it. A path to salvation means follow an exemplary figure which draws its authority from ancient origins or testimony. Thus, the key difference is that for Taylor Sc Habermas (2009), it is impossible to abstract from, or prescind from, the differences among deep commitments, comprehensive world views, whether they are grounded religiously or otherwise. On this view, the fundamental discursive issue is that we cannot abstract enough to carry on the discourse and settle things discursively, from any of these kinds of deep constitutive commitments. Therefore, religion is not a special case.