Abstract
Accounting and business must begin the task of exploring the politics of difference and fullness in a world of half-understood social domination and theistic evaluation. For reasons like these theorists inspired by agonism and postmodern ideology argue that their approach is superior to ‘consensually oriented approaches.’ It is claimed that agonistic pluralism is not necessarily resolution of ideological differences but is about imagining, develo** and supporting democratic processes wherein these differences can be recognised and engaged (Tregidga and Milne, Crit Perspect Account, forthcoming, 2020).
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Notes
- 1.
Dearth experiences emerges from the thinking mind. The focus on individual and internalist processes leads to connections with a naturalistic and scientistic search for values that shape peoples’ lives.
- 2.
One of the aims of this chapter is to overcome a criticism that interpretivism operates as a binary dualism. This criticism means that interpretivism would lock communities into present unjust structures from which they are unlikely to escape. Indeed, a major critical accounting journal that provides novel perspectives on accountability made this claim. The reviewer noted that this approach is just ‘plain wrong’. One wonders how one can be wrong when binaries are impossible possibles (ie., being right or wrong is to miss the point).
- 3.
Habermas argues that: [T]his will emerge ‘from the mutual opening of existing national universes to one another, yielding to an interpenetration of mutually translated national communications’. Habermas explains that current proposals to transform European governance into executive federal structures is a mistake. His central argument is that the European project must realize its democratic potential by evolving from an international union into a cosmopolitan community.
- 4.
It will be developed in Chap. 13 of this book that depth experience is considered to have two modes: fullness and dearth (White, 2010). Fullness focuses and refers to the politics of transcendence and refers to those moments when one becomes emerged in and empowered by a source, which ‘may be God, Nature, progress or something other’ (Connolly, 2015; White, 2010).
- 5.
Depth experience has gained some prominence in the work of Campbell et al. (2009) but the open question is how to develop reforms in globalising contexts. This chapter maintains that the two modes of depth experience, dearth and fullness, are integral to the impact of accounting procedures which emanate from the Western world and are needed to combat the processes of globalisation and harmonisation which are being applied to other cultures and nation states without a full analysis of their impacts. These two modes of depth experience need to be given expression through language in order to enact change. For example, through language, debate and dialogue can be opened with these other cultures and nation states.
- 6.
William Connolly notes: ‘It is one thing to believe in a world of becoming; something additional is needed to affirm it. To come to affirm such a world, it is needful to dwell thoughtfully in such moments and to work on ourselves by multiple means to overcome resentment of the world for not possessing either providence or ready susceptibility to human mastery. Taylor is dubious about our doctrine, though he acknowledges that he cannot give knockdown arguments against it. So in a second movement he recoils back upon that judgment, calling upon himself and others to enter into what I would call a relation of agonistic respect with the bearers of such a creed.’ (2008, np.)
- 7.
For example, Chwastiak (2013) has provided the example of how the military industry’s search for profit in other nation-states is often detrimental to the beliefs and values of those nation-states.
- 8.
Booth then argues that all accounting is secular and ignores important identity-forming factors. As Jacobs observes in his 2003 piece: Therefore, upon returning to Laughlin’s (1988, 1990) analysis of the role of accounting systems in the Church of England and Booth’s (1993) framework for researching accounting in religious organisations it becomes clear the sacred and secular are not to be understood as structuralist categories but as individual experiences.......sacred and secular are not the binary conditions represented by Booth’s (1993) model but rather a continuum of experience and Laughlin’s (1987, 1990) findings were of perceptions, values and attitudes rather than inherent universal structures. (Jacobs, 2003, p. 193)
- 9.
Taylor emphasises the rise of post-Galilean natural science, which has sidelined all teleology and intentionality.
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Lehman, G. (2022). Applying Depth Thinking to Accountability. In: Accountability and Transparency in the Modern Anthropocene. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5191-5_13
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