Critical accounting and communicative action: On the limits of consensual deliberation

Judy Brown and Jesse Dillard

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, 2013, vol. 24, issue 3, 176-190

Abstract: Richard Laughlin's work provides a framework for scholarly engagement that includes process (middle range thinking), a societal model of administration, and a means for reflexive and collective decision-making. The framework draws on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which is underpinned by a deliberative, consensus-oriented conceptualization of democracy. Based on recent developments in political theory and related applied fields, we argue that deliberative democracy is only one of several democratic bases useful in understanding and/or improving accounting and accountability systems to better meet the needs of diverse contemporary societies. In particular, we contend that, in relying on Habermasian-style deliberative democracy, Laughlin's conceptualizations do not fully account for the dimensions of disagreement and difference in democratic interactions. Drawing on the work of agonistic political theorists and studies from the applied fields of communicative planning and critical policy analysis, we argue that deliberative democracy approaches based on ideal speech criteria and universalistic consensus need to be balanced with theorizations that recognize the reality and value of more open-ended and unfinalizable struggles among actors with different histories, cultures, and/or ideological orientations. While cognizant of the challenges involved in bridging deliberative-agonistic conceptualizations of democracy, such endeavors provide opportunities for (re)theorizations that offer promise for enriching critical accounting by, as we argue, reinforcing the critical/political in critical accounting. To this end, we consider possibilities of forging links between Laughlin's work and our own proposals for dialogic/polylogic accountings based on agonistic democracy in an effort to foster more enabling accounting praxis.

Keywords: Critical; Public interest; Praxis; Democracy; Communicative action; Habermas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235412000913
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:crpeac:v:24:y:2013:i:3:p:176-190

DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2012.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING is currently edited by Marcia Annisette, Christine Cooper and Yves Gendron

More articles in CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().