Giving economic accounts: Accounting as cultural practice

Abstract

This essay describes accounting as a practice that has no necessary relation to the institutions and practices of a professionalized élite known as "Accountants". We assume that the giving and receiving of economic accounts is a ubiquitous aspect of human experience, and we seek to explain its practice as one of donating intelligibility and understanding to what Etzioni (The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics, Free Press, 1988) describes as the "moral dimension" of economic experience. Appropriating arguments from the moral philosopher H. Richard Niebuhr, we outline that moral dimension in a way that culminates in the act of giving economic accounts. Then, through the arguments of Paul Ricoeur, we show how the hermeneutical horizon of the economic account can be explained as an analogue to the hermeneutics of speech and the hermeneutics of writing. These two opposed structures of discourse — speech and writing — form a theoretical typology adequate to the task of expanding our sense of what accounting is and what it is not in a way that accomodates the cultural ubiquity of the economic account.