Accounting, interests, and rationality: A communicative relation

• Published in: Critical perspectives on accounting 1991, Vol.2 (1), p.31-58
• Main Authors: Edward Arrington, C., Puxty, Anthony G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1045-2354; 1095-9955
• DOI: 10.1016/1045-2354(91)90018-9

This is a pedagogical essay that suggests the value of Jürgen Habermas' theory of communicative action to the critical accounting research agenda. We outline in a broad way the formal pragmatic properties of accounting as communicatively rational social action, juxtaposing those properties against more customary senses of the term rationality in the context of accounting. Our claim is that accounting acts always and already are implicated in the teleological possibilities and actualities that inform objective, intersubjective, and private experience; and, because accounting is so implicated, we argue that its legitimacy is seen to depend upon democratic adjudication of reasons for and protests against particular forms of accounting practice. That argument is advanced through Habermas' reciprocal notions of communicative rationality and Ideal Speech Communities. Having made that argument, we then turn attention to social-systemic reasons why accounting might be viewed as legitimate despite deviations from these two reciprocal notions. The legitimacy of that deviation is seen to depend upon a presupposition of trust. Through in all, our primary purpose remains broad and pedagogical; that is, we are more concerned to introduce a formal pragmatic typology of accounting as rational social action and less concerned with excursus into particular, diachronic studies concerned to critique actual accounting practices.