Ethics and accountability: from the for-itself to the for-the-other

Description
Expanding global markets have resulted in renewed concern with accountability by transnational corporations and
other economic agents. Reflections on economic accountability, however, often inadequately theorize necessary ethical
presuppositions regarding the moral status of economic collectivities, including the scope of the moral community and
the good that this community seeks. This essay addresses these ethical considerations. Taking as my starting point
Schweiker’s [Schweiker, W. (1993). Accounting for ourselves: accounting practice and the disclosure of ethics.
Accounting Organizations and Society, 18(2/3), 231–252] claim that economic entities are properly accountable to a
wider scope of good than their own by virtue of the accounts that accountants render of such entities, I argue that the
discourse in terms of which the accounts are rendered serves to negate the very relation of obligation from which this
accountability derives.

Ethics and accountability: from the for-itself to the
for-the-other
Teri Shearer*
School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada K7L 3N6
Abstract
Expanding global markets have resulted in renewed concern with accountability by transnational corporations and
other economic agents. Re?ections on economic accountability, however, often inadequately theorize necessary ethical
presuppositions regarding the moral status of economic collectivities, including the scope of the moral community and
the good that this community seeks. This essay addresses these ethical considerations. Taking as my starting point
Schweiker’s [Schweiker, W. (1993). Accounting for ourselves: accounting practice and the disclosure of ethics.
Accounting Organizations and Society, 18(2/3), 231–252] claim that economic entities are properly accountable to a
wider scope of good than their own by virtue of the accounts that accountants render of such entities, I argue that the
discourse in terms of which the accounts are rendered serves to negate the very relation of obligation from which this
accountability derives. Speci?cally, I argue that the discourse of neoclassical economics that informs accounting prac-
tice constructs the identity of the accountable entity such that it is obligated to pursue only its own good. Conse-
quently, extant accounting practices are inadequate to meet the demands for accountability that are legitimately
entailed by the act of rendering an account. I explore the implications of this conclusion for understanding economic
accountability and related social accounting practices, and I propose the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to establish a
broader accountability on the part of economic entities. #2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Accountability; Corporate ethics; Levinas; Neoclassical economics; Social accounting
1. Introduction
The rapid acceleration of the global market
economy has spawned increasing concern over the
past decade with related social issues, including
environmental stewardship and a concern for jus-
tice in economic life. The concern is justi?ed. As
world trade and free markets continue to expand,
the in?uence of economic activity on the wealth
and sovereignty of nation-states, the ?nancial and
social well-being of individuals, and the fortunes
of corporate entities and the people they employ
becomes more pervasive. But at the same time that
market forces exert a greater discipline over our
individual and collective lives, we ?nd ourselves
increasingly unable to control, direct, confront, or
challenge the system that supports them. We are
all, it seems, caught in the web of a global eco-
nomic system that we feel increasingly powerless
to change.
0361-3682/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PI I : S0361- 3682( 01) 00036- 8
Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
* Tel.: +1-613-533-2318.
E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Shearer).
To be sure, the global economic web has pro-
duced signi?cant bene?ts in the form of cheaper
consumer goods, rising standards of living (for
many), and higher per capita incomes. But the
unparalleled scope of the global market system
also means that individuals and their governments
must secure those bene?ts, not by making the sys-
tem work for them, but by making themselves
work within the system. The price of success can
be dear. Regional labour forces, for example,
increasingly sacri?ce wage and bene?t provisions,
work-place safety regulations, job security and
maximum work-week provisions, or the right to
collective representation in order to make their
employment competitively attractive to transna-
tional corporations. Similarly, nation-states may
sacri?ce tax revenues, the environmental resources
of their countries, state control of essential ser-
vices, and the social and economic well-being of
signi?cant segments of their populations in order
to attract new investment or secure economic aid.
Even the largest transnational corporations,
whose activities and interests largely drive the
global market, ?nd themselves simultaneously
enslaved by it. Firms which fail to earn ‘‘competi-
tive’’ rates of return on invested capital (or,
increasingly, ?rms which fail to meet their earn-
ings projections—see Macintosh, Shearer, Thorn-
ton, & Welker, 2000) ?nd themselves subject to the
swift and often severe discipline of the market. As
the global economic system continues to expand,
it is di?cult to determine whom, if anyone, is in
control.
It is not so di?cult to identify the major players.
In addition to the multilateral organizations like
the WTO, the IMF, and World Bank, the game is
dominated by a small number of transnational
corporations, the size, scope, and wealth of which
are of staggering proportions. Based on 1995 data
compiled by the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington, DC, 51 of the 100 largest economies
in the world are not countries, but transnational
corporations (Anderson & Cavanaugh, 2000).
This same study found that the largest 200 trans-
national corporations recorded combined sales
that exceeded the combined GDP of all the
world’s countries except the largest nine, and that
were twice the combined GDP of the poorest 80%
of the world’s population. Similarly, McMurtry
(l998, p. 140) reports that approximately 300
transnational corporations control 70% of all
international trade and 98% of all foreign direct
investment—control that bestows these corpora-
tions with signi?cant in?uence over national gov-
ernments and the economic and social well-being
of their populaces. As McMurtry concludes:
Given their ability to confer or withdraw
investment from national economies in free
movement across boundaries, regulatory
standards, tax regimes, natural resource sites,
and labour forces, [transnational corpora-
tions] have no accountability to nation-states
or their electorates. On the contrary, nations
and societies have become accountable to
them (Ibid.).
In short, the triumph of free market capitalism
on a global basis has elevated the need for eco-
nomic accountability to a pressing social concern.
The stakes, as Schweiker (1993) appreciates, are
high: ‘‘If it is impossible to render economic forces
morally accountable, then human beings have
become slaves to their own ?nancial and corporate
creations, and the world is subjected to unend-
ing exploitation under the aegis of ‘e?ciency’
(p. 231). It is for this reason that we urgently need
to reconsider the moral dimensions of economic
life, to explore anew the adequacy of economic
accountability in an increasingly market-driven
world.
Accountants cannot escape involvement in this
undertaking. Indeed, it is impossible to engage in
either accounting practice or accounting research
without assuming a position on the extent of
accountability proper to the economic entities for
which accounts are prepared. The familiar posi-
tion, however, is deeply rooted in the tradition of
neoclassical economics, and seems to be adopted
without conscious re?ection in much of the
‘‘mainstream’’ of accounting practice and
research. As has been repeatedly observed (e.g.
Cooper & Sherer, 1984; Gray, 1992; Hines, 1989;
Lukka, 1990; Mouck, 1995; Preston, Cooper,
Scarborough, & Chilton, 1995; Reiter, 1994;
Thompson, 1998; Tinker, Merino, & Niemark,
542 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
1982; Tinker, Lehman, & Niemark, 1991), how-
ever, mainstream accounting’s reliance upon neo-
classical economics severely curtails the scope of
accountability demanded of the economic entities
for which we account. For this reason, Gray
(1992, p. 401) concludes that accountants must
‘‘?rst identify the cage in which we place ourselves
through economic thought, and then escape that
cage if we are to address either changes in
accounting in general, [or] protection and
enhancement of the environment in particular.’’
Contrasting with the economics-based view is a
considerable and diverse body of literature—and a
less extensive but clearly identi?able set of prac-
tices—which rests on a broader conception of the
accountability proper to economic agents and
entities. Broadly referred to as ‘‘social accounting’’
(Gray, 2000), this literature aims at e?ecting a
broader scope of corporate and non-corporate
accountability than present, economics-based
practices allow.
1
Included in this broad category is
literature addressing the theoretical or political
determinants of the moral obligation of business
(e.g. Benston, 1982; Gray, Dey, Owen, Evans, &
Zadek, 1997; Gray, Owen, & Maunders, 1988;
Lehman, 1995, 1999; Ramanathan, 1976; Schreu-
der & Ramanathan, 1984; Tinker et. al., 1991), the
feasibility and desirability of environmental
accounting (e.g. Cooper, 1992; Gray, 1992; Hen-
derson, 1991; Lehman, 1995; Power, 1992;
Rubenstein, 1992), the potential for an ‘‘emanci-
patory accounting’’ (e.g. Gallhofer & Haslam,
1996, 1997), and the development and imple-
mentation of social accounting and auditing prac-
tices (e.g. Gray et al., 1988, 1997; Harte & Owen,
1987; Maunders & Burritt, 1991). In various ways,
all of this literature assigns to economic entities a
supra-contractual obligation to some community of
others, and hence takes a broad viewof the extent of
accountability proper to economic entities.
E?orts to assign economic accountability in this
way, however, often inadequately theorize neces-
sary ethical presuppositions regarding the moral
status of economic collectivities, including the
scope of the moral community to which the entity
is accountable, and corresponding questions of the
good that this community seeks. Although e?orts
to address these ethical considerations have
appeared in the accounting literature (e.g. Arring-
ton & Francis, 1993; Arrington & Puxty, 1991;
Lehman, 1995; Reiter, 1997; Schweiker, 1993), the
subject has received relatively little attention, and
remains underdeveloped relative to the social
accounting literature to which it is requisite.
This essay is an e?ort to address these prior
considerations of ethics on which theories and
practices of economic accountability must rest.
Such consideration is critical, for any theory of
moral responsibility must ultimately rest on ethi-
cal considerations regarding the nature of the
economic entity, including its relationship to the
human community within which it operates.
Moreover, it is this notion of moral responsibility
that grounds the accountability of the entity with
respect to this community, and hence the
accounting practices that are undertaken to dis-
charge this accountability. In short, the very pos-
sibility of an enhanced ‘‘social accounting’’
presupposes fundamental challenges to our
received notions of accountability, and conse-
quently to the moral status of economic entities as
well as the ethical presuppositions from which
moral status derives. It is the task of this essay to
explore the ethical conditions requisite to an
enhanced social accounting for corporate and
non-corporate economic entities.
To confront the need for a broader economic
accountability is, however, to confront questions
of the origin and extent of collective moral agency.
Since economic entities are not individuals and do
not possess a consciousness, any attempt to
ascribe moral responsibility to collectivities must
locate the source of this moral agency elsewhere
than in the self-realizing ‘soul’ of the individual
subject. Recently, Schweiker (1993) has argued
that moral agency properly resides, not in the self-
realizing soul of the individual or collective agent,
but in the relation between language and activity,
rendered over time. Schweiker’s analysis demon-
strates that giving an account is one activity in
which moral agency is realized. This is because to
give an account is to present one’s identity in
1
Indeed, Gray (2000, p. 3) de?nes ‘‘social accounting’’ as
‘‘all forms of accounting which go beyond the economic.’’
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 543
relation to others and to the circumstances within
which one acts, and in so doing to transform one’s
e?orts and exertions into a power that is subject to
ethical evaluation. On Schweiker’s argument, eco-
nomic entities become members of a moral com-
munity by virtue of the accounts that such entities
render of themselves.
But if, as Schweiker has argued, it is the dis-
cursive portrayal of an identity in relation to oth-
ers that admits one to the community of moral
agents, then the community’s norms of moral
agency will be dependent upon the manner in
which subjectivity and intersubjective obligation
are constituted within the discourse of account. In
other words, when economic entities render
accounts of themselves in economic terms, the
identity so portrayed and the obligations of the
entity with respect to the broader community are
both dependent upon the speci?c conceptions of
subjectivity and intersubjectivity that are instan-
tiated by economic discourse. These conceptions, I
argue, are such that the good of the moral com-
munity always already reduces to the good of the
individual economic entity. The result is that the
discourse in terms of which the account is ren-
dered serves to negate the very obligation from
which accountability to broader ‘‘human and
environmental purposes’’ derives. For this reason,
extant accounting practices are inadequate to meet
the demands for accountability that are legiti-
mately entailed in the act of rendering an account.
My argument reasons analogically from the
interpersonal relationship of accountability inscri-
bed in and constituted by the discourse of eco-
nomics, to the accountability proper to economic
collectivities. The legitimacy of the analogical
argument rests on Schweiker’s claim that, in the
accounts that economic entities render of them-
selves, an identity is portrayed which is su?ciently
similar to that portrayed by an individual to invest
that entity with moral agency. The moral obliga-
tions of an economic entity, therefore, depend
upon a community’s shared understanding of the
moral obligations entailed by the personal, inter-
subjective relationship.
Accordingly, I begin by considering the con-
stitutive e?ects of the theory of economics on the
intersubjective relationship between self and
Other. Here I demonstrate that economic theory’s
construction of desire as necessarily appropriative
in intent commodi?es the target of the desire, and
hence objecti?es it in instrumental relation to the
subject who desires. From this, I argue that the
economic construction of the accountability rela-
tionship is ethically inadequate to capture the full
moral obligation of interpersonal accountability,
because the construction discursively negates the
subjectivity of the other qua Other, to whom we
are morally accountable.
Next, I argue that because extant accounting
theory and practice is informed almost exclusively
by the theoretical constructs and behavioral
assumptions of neoclassical economics, the moral
accountability enacted by accounting reports
exhibits the same ethical de?ciencies as the inter-
personal relationship of economic accountability.
As a result, the discourse in terms of which the
accountability is discharged serves to deny the
ethical presuppositions that are requisite to a
broader moral accountability on the part of eco-
nomic entities, and hence denies as well the pre-
conditions of social accounting.
But if the discourse of economics cannot
accommodate the full moral obligation of
accountability, it does not follow that economic
life cannot. I suggest that if the practice of
accounting is to enact a broader social obligation
on the part of economic entities, then what is
required is the infusion into the language of eco-
nomic accounts of a countervailing ethic that
takes seriously the intersubjective obligation to the
Other—an ethic that I argue is o?ered by the work
of Emmanuel Levinas. I conclude by suggesting
that, despite the apparent circularity that is thus
entailed, one starting point for re-constructing
economic identity such that it is morally obligated
to purposes other than its own is to begin to enact
a broader accountability through those practices
described as ‘‘social accounting.’’
2. Caveats
My essay is informed by two presuppositions
that are best set out in advance. First, I embrace
without argument the poststructuralist tenet that
544 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
identity (subjectivity) is a discursive production.
2
‘‘Natural’’ identity attributes are cultural ?ctions
produced and sustained by dominant discursive
practices. This means, as Butler (1990) explains,
that there is no recourse to a subject that precedes
the law of culture, and that what we take to be
‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘prediscursive’’ about identity is in
fact a product of discursive practices that both
produce and naturalize what we take that identity
to be. This means, as well, that ‘‘natural’’ identity
attributes are not irrevocably given, but rather are
subject to metamorphosis via the discursive prac-
tices that inform our culture (Haber, 1994, p. 119;
Prado, 1995, p. 163).
Second, and relatedly, I accept that the produc-
tion of lived reality is a hermeneutic or interpretive
process. The stories we tell give meaning to our
experience of reality, and hence shape and con-
strain what we take reality to be. What we take
reality to be in turn in?uences our actions, and in
this way further shapes what reality will be.
3
The
combined implication of these presuppositions is
that we cannot disentangle our experience of our-
selves and the world we inhabit from the stories
we tell and the metaphors we embrace. Indeed, as
Lako? and Johnson (1980) remind us, ‘‘the
essence of metaphor is understanding and experi-
encing one thing in terms of another’’ (p. 5,
emphasis added). Hence, when the economist
claims that the subject of economic theory is but a
convenient ?ction, or that people merely act ‘‘as
if’’ they are intentional utility maximizers, the dis-
tinction is moot. We are the stories we tell; what
we would be if we told di?erent stories is precisely
the point.
3. Accountability, intersubjectivity and ethics
Sinclair (1995) reminds us that accountability is
an elusive concept. It can be understood in a vari-
ety of ways ranging from a sense of personal obli-
gation to a ‘‘price’’ that one pays for power or
authority, to an incidental consequence of scrutiny
(Sinclair, 1995, p. 221). Yet whatever under-
standing one adopts, accountability always entails
and enacts intersubjectivity; to be accountable is
unavoidably to establish one’s identity as ‘‘intrin-
sically interdependent with others’’ (Schweiker,
1993, p. 234). For this reason, accountability is a
moral phenomenon that both can and should be
subject to ethical re?ection (Ibid.).
Schweiker (1993) points out that giving an
account is one means by which individuals are
constituted as moral agents (pp. 234–235):
[G]iving an account is one activity in which
we come to be as selves and particular kinds
of communities through forms of discourse
that shape, guide and judge life regarding
concern for the common good, human soli-
darity and basic respect (Ibid., p. 235).
Similarly, Arrington and Francis (1993) observe
that accountability constitutes the economic sub-
ject as answerable, that is, as one who is obligated
to demonstrate the reasonableness of his or her
actions to a community of others, through the
activity of giving accounts. For Arrington and
Francis, as for Schweiker, the accountability of
the answerable subject embeds a moral responsi-
bility that renders the economic subject a ‘‘moral-
economic self ’’ (Ibid.).
Following Schweiker (1993), I de?ne ‘‘giving an
account’’ as ‘‘providing reasons for character and
conduct, ones held to be understandable to others
and thereby rendering a life intelligible and mean-
ingful’’ (p. 234). That economic entities become
members of a moral community through the
activity of giving an account is of considerable
signi?cance to the concern to hold these entities
2
For an historical/philosophical description of the ways in
which identity is discursively produced, see any of the numer-
ous works of Michel Foucault. For a feminist explication of
the subject, see Butler (1990; 1993). In the accounting litera-
ture, see Bhimani (1994), Cherns (1978), Cooper and Puxty
(1996) Hoskin and Macve (1986) and Miller and O’Leary
(1987; 1994), among others.
3
Gary Zukav (1979, p. 310) puts this nicely:
‘‘Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be
true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon
our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what
we look for. What we look for depends upon what we
think. What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe. What we
believe determines what we take to be true. What we take
to be true is our reality’’.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 545
accountable to a wider scope of good than their
own. This is because it is the community of moral
agents within which the entity is situated that
de?nes whose needs count and whose goods are
sought. For this reason, Schweiker argues, the
good that business serves can never be simply the
good of the business entity, because the very con-
stitution of the identity of the entity entails a
community broader than itself. In Schweiker’s
words, ‘‘giving an account renders economic for-
ces servants of larger human and environmental
purposes without negating the singularity of their
identities or motives’’ (p. 249). In this way,
Schweiker concludes, accountants—through the
accounts that we render—help to create a broader
accountability on the part of economic entities,
and hence help to establish the ethical justi?cation
for social accounting.
4
Schweiker’s (1993) argument appreciates the
centrality of language and intersubjectivity in the
enactment of moral identity. On his analysis, when
an individual renders an account of her or his
actions, this linguistic activity enacts a ‘‘double-
ness’’ of identity whereby the individual is both
the one acting and the one accounting for the act-
ing. The acting subject and the subject enacted by
the account are not self-identical; indeed, it is the
slippage between these two that evokes such
familiar human a?ects as self-understanding,
pride, denial, and evasion (p. 240). An apprecia-
tion of this doubleness is critical to understanding
the source of moral agency, because it points to
the fact that ‘‘when I say something about my life,
I do not simply instantiate the identity of the
myself with myself’’ [Ibid.]. Rather, I discursively
portray an identity that of necessity evokes an
awareness of my relationship to others, and hence
constitutes my identity as interdependent with
others. In these relations to others lies the invita-
tion to moral evaluation, and the source of moral
agency (p. 241).
Schweiker (1993), of course, does not claim that
the accounts given by corporate and non-corpo-
rate business entities are analytically equivalent to
the accounts that an individual gives of herself.
For this reason, business entities are not the equals
of individuals in the moral community. At the
same time, however, he argues that the ?duciary
relationship of trust that exists between the
accountant and the entity for which she or he
accounts creates a doubleness of identity su?-
ciently analogous to that experienced by the indi-
vidual to create a ‘‘fragile unity of an agent or
community in time’’ (p. 244). As in the individual
case, the identity of the economic entity so enacted
is not identical to the diversity of interests and
agents that comprise the entity. Rather, the
account serves to create a ‘‘unity-in-diversity’’ that
constitutes the temporal identity of the collective
entity. As with the individual subject, this identity
necessarily entails membership in a linguistic and
moral community [Ibid.].
But if it is the linguistic activity of rendering an
account that entails and enacts intersubjectivity
and moral responsibility, then it seems clear that
there will be a close relationship between the dis-
course in terms of which the account is rendered,
and the nature and extent of the moral relation-
ship that is thereby constituted. For if discourse is
seen to be not merely produced by, but productive
of, human subjectivity, then the discourse in terms
of which the account is rendered will de?ne both
the behaviors for which one is accountable and the
criteria of reasonableness by which one’s activities
4
An entity’s ?nancial statements are one component of the
broader concept of an ‘‘economic account.’’ An economic
account encompasses all of the means by which an entity por-
trays itself to others, including its annual reports, press relea-
ses, and public relations campaigns. Consistent with
Schweiker’s de?nition of ‘‘rendering an account,’’ this por-
trayal is fundamentally discursive. In using the term ‘‘economic
account,’’ therefore, I am implicitly claiming that, for business
entities, the discourse through and by which identity is por-
trayed is economics. That is, when a business entity provides
interpretations of and justi?cations for its actions and under-
takings, the entity will draw upon the accepted motivations
and rationales of the economic subject (e.g. instrumental, goal-
directed behavior, cost-bene?t assessment, pro?t or share-
holder value maximization). Moreover, the entity will rely
upon fundamental concepts of rights and obligations drawn
from economic theory to identify those actions and under-
takings for which it must provide an accounting. This means
that business entities typically will not, for example, justify why
they did not invite their employees to join a union, nor o?er a
guarantee of life-long employment, since no pro?t-seeking
entity would, in ordinary circumstances, be expected to do
these things. An economic account is, then, a broad notion that
captures all means by which an agent or entity discursively
portrays itself as an economic actor.
546 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
are judged. In short, it seems warranted to con-
clude that there will be a close relationship
between the way that subjectivity and inter-
subjectivity is constituted within a discourse, and
the nature and extent of the moral accountability
that is enacted by accounts that are rendered in
terms of that discourse.
In the case of economic actors, it is economic
discourse that de?nes both the scope of the actor’s
accountability and the intersubjective obligations
from which moral responsibility derives.
5
Thus,
moral obligations among economic actors are
determined by the manner in which the discourse
of economics constructs the intersubjective rela-
tionship. This relationship deserves careful scrutiny
for, as Gray (1992, p. 401) observes,
[A] major part of the process of radically re-
thinking the world must begin from the role
that economics has played in constructing our
world, the ubiquity of that role, the e?ects of
that role, and the profound limitations which
economists, in general, have failed to notice
and/or to su?ciently clarify.
As I will subsequently demonstrate, economic
theory presupposes a speci?c conception of the
human subject, and a determinate social order in
which these subjects interact. Speci?cally, neo-
classical economics presupposes an egalitarian
social order characterized by a reciprocity of self
and other, and embeds a strong and correspond-
ing liberal belief that each person should be free to
pursue unencumbered her or his vision of the
good.
6
These presuppositions on which economic
theory rests create a speci?c conception of the
common good, and serve to ground theoretically
the moral identity—and hence the account-
ability—of the economic subject. To apprehend
this identity, and to evaluate the adequacy of the
accountability inscribed within it to the broader
realm of human purposes and pursuits, it is
necessary to look closely at the way that economic
discourse constructs subjectivity and inter-
subjectivity.
Before turning to this task, however, one further
caveat is in order. My motivation for examining
the economic construction of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity is not to dismiss the theory’s use-
fulness out-of-hand. Indeed, I readily agree that
economic theory provides a useful metaphor for
much of human behavior, much of the time.
Rather, my examination of the discourse is moti-
vated by a desire to understand whether the iden-
tity enacted by economic accounts can ground
accountability to ‘‘larger human and environ-
mental purposes’’ in the way that Schweiker’s
analysis suggests that it should. That is, is the
relation to ‘‘otherness’’ that is necessarily invoked
in the rendering of an economic account a bond of
su?cient robustness to carry the ethical burden
that Schweiker’s analysis places upon it? In this, I
confess, I am deeply skeptical. Indeed, when care-
fully examined, the discourse of economics can be
shown to covertly transmute the totality of inter-
personal relationships to which it is applied into
relations of instrumentality that, of necessity, era-
dicate the subjectivity of the other, to whom we
should be morally accountable. For this reason,
identity as rendered in economic terms is insu?-
cient to the demands of ethics, and insu?cient to
the task that Schweiker properly assigns it. The
analysis that follows seeks to demonstrate this,
and to point as well to an ethic that is adequate to
ground the moral accountability of economic
agents.
4. Constructing the economic subject
Neoclassical economics is characterized by an
overriding concern with the individual, conceived
in isolation from the social, political, and eco-
nomic institutions in which he exists (Hahn &
Hollis, 1979, p. 14). The focus of the theory is on
explaining and predicting the behavior of this iso-
lated individual; explanations and predictions of
5
Given the premises upon which my argument is built, this
statement is true tautologically. If identity is discursively con-
stituted, then an economic actor is, by de?nition, an actor
whose identity is framed, interpreted, and presented through
an economic lens.
6
On this point, Smith (1986) argues that neoclassical eco-
nomics is a primary contributor to the ‘‘new liberal paradigm’’.
On the relationship between liberalism and ethics in account-
ing, see Preston et al., (1995, p. 525).
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 547
social phenomena are presumed to follow from
the laws of individual behavior.
7
Indeed, neo-
classical economics attributes the very existence of
market economies to man’s ‘‘natural propensity to
truck, barter, and exchange’’ (Smith, 1937, p. 13).
Hence, not only is the economic subject presumed
antecedent to the institutional features of social
life, but it is the very nature of this subject that is
presumed to determine the form that these insti-
tutions assume. In its focus on the individual,
neoclassical economics is synonymous with the
theory of economic man.
The theory is elegantly simple. It says that,
placed in an environment where his means are not
su?cient to satisfy his wants, and where he is
allowed to exercise his own considered will, the
human subject will allocate his means such that
the incremental utility derived from the satisfac-
tion of each want is equal in proportion to its cost
across all wants. The allocation in this manner of
resources among competing ends is referred to as
‘‘rational choice,’’ a term which re?ects the nor-
mative status of what is essentially an algorithm
for solving a class of simple optimization
problems given certain starting premises.
The premises that guarantee the normative
superiority of the neoclassical optimization rule
are expressed as assumptions of the theory. Con-
ceptually, these assumptions fall into two broad
classes: those that specify the nature of the deci-
sion-making subject, and those that specify the
situational context in which the subject acts.
About the subject, two assumptions are critical
(Arrow, 1979, p. 111–112):
1. the subject is characterized by preferences,
the form of which is circumscribed but the
determination of which is exogeneous to the
theory; and
2. the subject will do that and only that for
which he expects a net gain in well-being.
With regard to the environment in which the
subject acts, it is necessary only that the context be
one of decision making under scarcity constraints,
which means that the subject must be free to
exercise her considered choice in an environment
in which her wants exceed her means (Robbins,
1952, Chapter IV).
Although, as I will later argue, the distinction
between the subject and the environment in which
she acts tends to collapse when economic theory is
used to describe or prescribe behavior in parti-
cular decision contexts, it remains logically neces-
sary to the theory for two reasons. First, because
economic theory claims to characterize the indivi-
dual independently of her environment (Hahn &
Hollis, 1979, p. 3), and, second, because economic
theory nonetheless purports to be descriptive of
the human subject only in those situational
domains that conform to the assumptions of the
theory. In other words, the theory purports to
describe an invariant human rationality, but one
that is employed only when the human subject is
confronted with the speci?ed choice environment.
In other situational domains, ostensibly, the
human subject is free to employ alternative
rationalities or choice criteria. Economic theory is
silent on how its subject will behave when
confronted with ‘‘non-economic’’ decision contexts.
That economic theory ostensibly describes
human subjectivity only in certain, well-speci?ed
and delimited domains of human experience has
important consequences for the way that eco-
nomic accountability is constituted. This is
because the theory’s overt claim to describe only
one facet of human subjectivity leaves open the
possibility that human identity, even when under-
stood on an economic model, nonetheless is also
constituted by relations to others that cannot be
captured in terms of this model. The point is cri-
tical: If identity is constituted in the act of render-
ing an account, and if the account is rendered in
economic terms, then what is at stake is the very
possibility that economic identity entails obliga-
tions and relations to others that extend beyond
the descriptive and prescriptive domain of the
theory itself. In other words, what are at stake are
the very relations to others that Schweiker identi-
?es as the source of the moral accountability of
the economic subject. If human identity, as con-
stituted in the language of economics, does not
7
John Stuart Mill expresses succinctly the logic that
informs the theory: ‘‘Human beings in society have no proper-
ties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved
into, the laws of the nature of individual man’’ (Mill, A System
of Logic, quoted in Hollis & Nell, 1975, p. 264).
548 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
also entail subjective relations to others that can-
not be captured within the economic model, then
whatever accountability the economic subject may
be said to owe depends entirely upon the inter-
subjective obligations of economic agents inter-
acting among themselves. These obligations, I
argue later, are too thin to support an ethically-
adequate accountability on the part of economic
agents. The point for now is that if economic the-
ory does not e?ectively restrict itself to discrete
domains of human life, then it is at risk of colo-
nizing the whole of human experience, ensuring
that human subjects understand themselves and
one another as self-interested utility maximizers,
even in those domains of human engagement most
removed from the market transactions that
economic theory ?rst intended to describe.
There is good reason to believe that the envir-
onmental assumptions have never functioned
e?ectively to delimit discrete domains of human
experience to which the theory properly applies.
As early as 1914, Wicksteed observed that:
An ardent lover may decline a business inter-
view in order to keep an appointment with his
lady-love, but there will be a point at which
its estimated bearing upon his prospects of an
early settlement will make him break his
appointment with the lady in favor of the
business interview. A man of leisure with a
taste for literature and a taste for gardening
will have to apportion time, money, and
attention between them, and consciously or
unconsciously will balance against each other
the di?erential signi?cances involved. All
these, therefore, are making selections and
choosing between alternatives on precisely the
same principle and under precisely the same
law as those which dominate the transactions
of the housewife in the market, or the man-
agement of a great factory or ironworks, or
the business of a bill-broker (Wicksteed, 1933,
p. 780).
Indeed, for Wicksteed it seemed evident that
‘‘the inner core of our life problems and the grati-
?cation of all our ultimate desires . . . obey the
same all permeating law’’ (Ibid, p. 776).
Many contemporary economists seem to share
Wicksteed’s belief in the generality of the eco-
nomic decision logic (see, for example, Becker,
1976, 1981; Landsburg, 1993; McCloskey, 1985;
McKenzie & Tullock, 1975). The temptation is
understandable. For if the human subject behaves
in an economically rational manner in deciding
how many dollars to spend on a car, is it not rea-
sonable to assume that she will behave similarly in
deciding how many hours to study for an exam?
How many hours to visit her invalid mother? How
many children to bear? The point is that if one
accepts that discursive practices are never merely
passive descriptions of a social world that exists
prior to and independently of the articulation of
the discourse, but rather that such practices work
actively to construct social reality in ways con-
sistent with the discourse, then the applicability of
economic theory grows as the theory gains general
acceptance.
8
Economic theory, in other words,
discursively creates the very conditions that render
it applicable—thus enabling an imperialism that
e?ectively opens the whole of human experience to
economic description and prescription.
But the imperialism couldn’t proceed, of course,
if economic theory were not simultaneously able
to transmute the broader spectrum of human
motivations into instances of self-interested utility
maximization—the one motive of which the the-
ory admits. For clearly, the motives that human
agents are wont to attribute to their actions are
quite di?erent when the action in question con-
cerns a lover, than when the action in question is a
market transaction of the type that economics
prototypically describes. Again, there is consider-
able evidence to suggest that such transmutations
8
Space does not permit me to make a rigorous demonstra-
tion of this here. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated at length how
the ‘‘scarcity-constrained decision-making’’ environment that
ostensibly renders economic theory applicable is also a product
of that same theory. Speci?cally, economic theory has been
instrumental in transmuting our understanding of ‘‘scarcity’’
into a general condition of modern existence (see Xenos, 1989).
It has also had the e?ect of transmuting ‘‘counter-preferential
choice’’ into ‘‘constrained decision-making’’ - thereby rendering
what would be antithetical to an economic decision logic per-
fectly amenable to it. The combined e?ect has been to extend
the rationality of economic choice to potentially all human
experience.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 549
are well within the discursive power of the theory.
9
Robbins (1979) illustrates the reasoning that
enables the transmutation:
[T]he fundamental concept of economic ana-
lysis is the idea of relative valuations; and. . .
while we assume that di?erent goods have
di?erent values at di?erent margins, we do
not regard it as part of our problem to
explain why these particular valuations exist.
We take them as data. So far as we are con-
cerned, our economic subjects can be pure
egoists, pure altruists, pure ascetics, pure
sensualists, or—what is much more likely—
mixed bundles of all these impulses (Robbins,
1979, p. 44).
As Robbins suggests, the determination of an
individual’s preferences is exogeneous to neo-
classical theory, and there is nothing in the theory
that restricts the domain of these preferences.
10
Thus, if an individual values acts of altruism,
asceticism, or sensuality, these valuations can
assume their respective positions in the preference
ordering, alongside and among those that are
more narrowly self-serving. Economic theory pre-
dicts the same maximizing behavior in pursuit of
preferences of all sorts.
In an important sense, however, Robbins’s
argument is disingenuous. The point is a subtle
one, and Hirschman hints at it when he notes that,
of self-centeredness and rational calculation, the
former is the principal determinant of economic-
ally rational choice,
11
for the reason that rational
calculation tends naturally toward self-centered-
ness (Hirschman, 1992, p. 36). His explanation for
this tendency is:
Once action is supposed to be informed only
by careful estimation of costs and bene?ts,
with most weight necessarily being given to
those that are better known and more quan-
ti?able, it tends to become self-referential by
virtue of the simple fact that each person is
best informed about his or her own desires,
satisfactions, disappointments, and su?erings
(Ibid.).
While it is almost certainly true that individuals
do tend to be best informed about their own costs
and bene?ts, the explanation misses a more
important point: Even if a person is presumed to
be keenly informed about the costs and bene?ts to
another (as is sometimes the case with, say, a
mother and her infant child), and even if that per-
son is further presumed to make choices in con-
sequence of this knowledge, the mere fact that the
person is able to choose on this basis creates a
strong presumption that she derives some satis-
faction (or, equivalently, avoids some dissatisfac-
tion) from acting upon her knowledge of the costs
and bene?ts to the other, as opposed to acting on
the basis of her own costs and bene?ts, narrowly
de?ned. The point is not that one’s own pre-
ferences tend to feature more prominently (or
appear with more saliency) in one’s calculation of
costs and bene?ts, but rather that the calculation
itself is prima facie evidence of a cost or bene?t to
the one performing the calculation.
Indeed, this point is widely appreciated by eco-
nomic theorists, who have devised numerous ways
9
Again, space does not permit a rigorous demonstration of
this point. However, even Adam Smith, a moral philosopher
who decisively held that self-interest was but one of a trichot-
omy of motives that fuel human action (see Smith, 1976, Sec-
tion II, Chapters 3–5), contributed to the eventual triumph of
interest over all other motives by concluding that the non-
rational passions of the common citizen most often ?nd their
expression in a desire for economic gain (Hirschman, 1977, pp.
107–109; Justman, 1993, pp. 56–57). As Holmes (1990) retro-
spectively observes, ‘‘the notion that interest is the principal
driving force behind all behavior has had an astonishingly tri-
umphant career’’ (p. 286).
10
I subsequently argue that neoclassical theory does in fact
restrict the domain of the individual’s preferences, but the
point for now is that it does not do so overtly.
11
Hirschman uses the term ‘‘interest propelled action’’
where I use ‘‘economically rational choice’’. The choice
behavior denoted by these terms is fundamentally equivalent,
except that economic choice implies a scarcity of means with
respect to ends, while interest-propelled action need not. As
regards the choosing subject, however, (distinct from the
environmental context in which the choice is made), the two
concepts can be taken as equivalent.
550 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
of incorporating concern for the other (and, less
frequently, malevolence towards the other) into
their traditional self-interest models.
12
Mans-
bridge (1990) explains the rationale that informs
these e?orts:
The traditional method of adding more than
one motive to a model is to assume a single
goal of maximizing ‘utility’ and turn motives
other than narrow self interest into desires for
di?erent kinds of consumption goods,
revealed to be valued by the process of choice
itself. These goods can then be modeled as
goods the actor trades o? against one another
in the familiar pattern of indi?erence curves
(1990, p. 257).
13
Hence, the interest-maximization assumption is
not as innocently inclusive as it may appear to be,
since in the end all preferences, be they altruistic
or sensual, are reduced to egoism. If it is true that
economics ‘‘rules out neither the saint nor Ghengis
Kahn’’ (Hahn & Hollis, 1979, p. 4), it is equally
true that it clouds the distinction between them.
At this point, it is possible to see that the dis-
tinction between the economic subject and the
environment in which she acts, while logically
necessary to the theory, in fact collapses as the
theory expands to encompass nearly all human
action and decisions. For once the human subject
is conceived as a rational utility-maximizer, more
and more of this subject’s life experiences begin to
be perceived as constrained choices among com-
peting ends, and hence amenable to the logic of
economic choice. At the same time, however, the
very presumption that the subject’s actions take
place in an environment requiring constrained
choice lends a powerful presumption of (broadly
de?ned) interest to any action that is taken; choi-
ces, after all, must be made with some objective in
mind, and the mere fact that the subject chooses
one objective among others suggests that the cho-
sen objective yields bene?ts to him, albeit perhaps
only vicariously. In this way, economic theory
enables a discursive imperialism that makes it
increasingly di?cult to distinguish our economic
intentions and actions from the myriad other
motivations and compulsions that contribute to
the human experience.
At this point in our consideration, it is tempting
to conclude that if self interest is to be so broadly
de?ned that anything one does can be labeled
sel?sh, then the choice between ‘‘self interested’’
and ‘‘altruistic’’ as descriptors of human action is
of no more signi?cance than any choice between
synonymous terms. Altruism, like roses, does not
depend for its essence upon its name. Indeed,
many economists have made this point, some in
approbation for the robustness of the economic
model (e.g. Becker, McKenzie & Tullock, Mans-
bridge); some in frustration at a totalizing impulse
that threatens only to muddy the theoretical and
methodological waters (e.g. Holmes, Hirschman).
A member of the latter camp, David Hume saw in
such tendencies to embrace all action with the
metaphor of self interest the perversion of lan-
guage and the calling of things ‘‘not by their
proper names’’ (Hume, 1963, p. 86). More
recently, Holmes (1990) and Jencks (1990) have
condemned the tendency to capture all of human
action with the metaphor of self interest as the
frivolous abandonment of an eminently useful
distinction:
14
12
For example, Sen (1990) conceives of sympathy and
antipathy as cases of interdependent utility functions. Simi-
larly, Jencks (1990) uses the concept of interdependent utility
to model empathy, community, and morality. Mansbridge
(1990) treats altruism as a luxury good, as does Hirschman
(1981) and Taylor (1987).
13
A notable exception to this usual method of incorporating
motives other than narrow self-interest into the economic
model is the ‘‘dual utilities’’ model of Margolis (1982, 1990).
Margolis conceives of self-interested and group-interested
behaviors as distinct and competing spheres of behavior. While
private interest and social interest are each maximized sepa-
rately according to the usual criteria, allocations of resources
across the two spheres will not necessarily conform to the
consumer choice rule of equimarginality.
14
Macaulay took a slightly di?erent approach to the critique
of interest as the motivation of all human action. In his 1829
essay on Mill, he opines that the doctrine that men always act
from self interest, ‘‘when explained. . .means only that men, if
they can, will do as they choose. . ..t is. . .idle to attribute any
importance to a proposition which, when interpreted, means
only that a man had rather do what he had rather do’’
(Macaulay, 1978, p. 125).
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 551
We can always say that the altruist includes
the welfare of others in his utility function. . ..
Theorists are free to indulge in such linguistic
idiosyncracy, of course. If they make no dis-
tinctions then, naturally enough, everything
will be the same. But why jettison well entren-
ched and useful contrasts between, say, inter-
ested and disinterested or calculating and non-
calculating behavior? A generic concept such as
the maximization of personal utility. . .swallows
up such distinctions (1990, p. 269).
But if we accept that discursive practices not
only describe but create human subjectivity, then
there is considerably more at stake in the expan-
sion of the self-interest metaphor than mere lin-
guistic convention or the pragmatics of
communication. There is more at stake because
the metaphor pervades our sense of self, and sup-
plies the interpretive schema by which we under-
stand our intentions, motives, and behaviors, and
by which we de?ne our rights and obligations in
relation to others. In short, economic theory
imbues human subjectivity with a particular
rationality that both restricts the interpretation of
human experience and legitimates itself by the
very discourse that instills it. Hence, even if ‘‘self-
interest’’ is broadly construed to include behaviors
that are ‘‘other-directed’’ as well as those that are
narrowly self-serving, it matters that we conceive
of ‘‘other-directed’’ behavior as ultimately self-
serving, rather than viewing it as in con?ict with, or
irreducible to, our own private interests. In the sec-
tion that follows, I attempt to demonstrate exactly
what is at stake when we conceive of our relations to
others on a model of self-interest. What is at stake, I
argue, is no less than the very subjectivity of an Other
to whom we might be morally accountable.
5. The commodi?cation of the other
Although neoclassical economics is ostensibly
concerned only with individual choice behavior,
the construction of the economic subject as
(broadly) self-interested also and unavoidably
de?nes the nature of this subject’s relationships
with others, and hence also the social arrangements
that govern commerce among them. For this rea-
son, economic theory is as much a discourse of
intersubjectivity as it is of subjectivity. Indeed, it is
precisely this observation—that identity always
implies a relationship to others—that enables
Schweiker to conclude that economic actors can-
not be merely self-interested, and must therefore
be accountable to a moral community that extends
beyond themselves. To evaluate the economic
subject’s relationship to others, and thereby to
evaluate the adequacy of economic discourse to
discharge moral accountability, it is necessary to
look closely at the model of intersubjectivity that
is implied and instantiated by economic theory.
This model is manifest in the posited relationship
between the desire of the economic subject, and
the value of the object/other in relation to which
the subject acts. A close examination of how eco-
nomic theory constructs this relationship suggests
both the ethical inadequacy of the economic sub-
ject’s relationship to others, and the conditions of
possibility for a more adequate ethic of economic
accountability.
Neoclassical economic theory presumes that the
individual begins with a desire (a ‘‘preference’’),
the origin of which is exogenous to the theory. The
self interested drive to ful?ll this desire leads to
economizing behavior on the part of the indivi-
dual which, when aggregated with the self inter-
ested actions of other individuals, determines the
‘‘value’’ of the desired object (the ‘‘good’’). In the
neoclassical model, therefore, desire serves as an
exogeneous variable that creates the impetus for
economic activity; value is the endogenously
determined outcome of this activity.
To neoclassical economists, reacting to the labor
theories of value of Ricardo and Marx, it is ele-
mentary that ‘‘value’’ does not reside in the good
itself, but rather in that good’s relationship to the
satisfaction of human desire:
Value is . . . nothing inherent in goods, no
property of them, but merely the importance
that we ?rst attribute to the satisfaction of
our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being,
and in consequence carry over to economic
goods as the exclusive causes of the satisfac-
tion of our needs (Menger, 1950, p. 116).
552 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
In the theory of neoclassical economics, it is
desire that grounds whatever value a commodity
may assume; even those commodities most
restricted in supply will acquire no value until they
are found to be useful to the satisfaction of human
desire. In other words, the economic relationship
between desire (as the exogeneous impetus for
economic activity) and value (as the endogenously
determined outcome of this activity) is character-
ized by a temporal and causal precedence of desire
over value; value, both in use and exchange, is gran-
ted only on condition that the object remain the tar-
get of a desire that originates from outside of itself.
When desire and value assume the temporal and
causal relationship speci?ed by the economic
model, desire becomes an unavoidably appro-
priative act, one that grants value to the desired
object only insofar as the object stands in instru-
mental relation to the desiring subject. Moreover,
the desire that in this way gives rise to value is
always and unavoidably a self-interested desire,
inasmuch as the desire signi?es a lack on the part
of the desiring subject, in relation to which the
valued object stands as the means to its ful?llment
(Xenos, 1989, p. 4).
To appropriate the object/other, as I use it here,
is to take the object/other as one’s own; to turn it
to one’s own purposes and ends. As Walras (1954)
observes, appropriation can be legalized in the
institution of private property, but it can also
persist in the absence of formal property rights.
My claim is that to desire the other for the ful?ll-
ment of what is lacking in one’s own subjectivity is
to turn the other to one’s own purposes, and in so
doing to invest the intersubjective relationship
between self and other with a logic of instrumen-
tality that makes of the other an object of satis-
faction in relation to the desiring self. In the
language of Kant, the other is made a means
rather than an end in herself, and by this act is
objecti?ed and her own subjectivity denied. Where
the value that accrues to an object is conceived on
the economic model, this value necessarily serves
to objectify its target, granting it value only inso-
far as it satis?es the cravings of the self-interested
and needy subject.
But to assume, as the theory of economics does,
that value accrues only on condition of a desire
that originates independently of and prior to it is
to disregard the important distinction between this
value and another, captured in everyday language
by the words ‘intrinsic value’. Whereas use and
exchange value both presuppose the temporal and
causal precedence of desire over value, intrinsic
value marks a relationship in which it is value that
gives rise to desire. In this inversion of the tem-
poral/causal relationship presupposed by eco-
nomics, ‘value’ stands outside of and prior to
‘‘desire’’; it is value that engenders desire. And
from the point of view of the desiring subject,
value is no longer the contingent byproduct of an
act of appropriation, but rather a quality of the
object itself, the presence of which arouses desire
in the subject.
15
The inversion of the temporal and causal rela-
tionship between desire and value thus has sig-
ni?cant implications for the way that we
understand the intersubjective relationship
between self and other. Value, understood as a
quality of the object/other itself,
16
may generate
desire on the part of the desiring subject, in rela-
tion to whose desire the other might then be said
to be the ‘‘object’’. But desire, following as it does
as a consequence of value rather than its guaran-
tor, cannot possibly succeed completely in appro-
priating the other to its own ends, because it is the
object/other in itself, in its autonomy from the
desiring subject, that gives rise to the desire in the
15
I do not wish to claim too much for the desire/value ter-
minology. In particular, it is questionable whether an a?ect
that arises in response to another is properly called ‘‘desire’’ at
all; rather, it may be that desire by its nature signi?es the
intentions of the subject who experiences it. Still, con-
ceptualizing ‘‘intrinsic value’’ as an inversion of the temporal
and causal association between desire and value that is pre-
supposed by the notion of instrumental value does serve as a
useful mnemonic device in that it starkly exposes that which
instrumental value is not and cannot be. This starkness of
expression is at once the value and the shortcoming of using
the desire/value relationship to mark the distinction that I wish
to explore.
16
In inverting the relationship between desire and value, one
is also granting the desired ‘‘object’’ a subjectivity of her own,
inasmuch as the ‘‘target’’ of the desire is no longer objecti?ed
by the fact of the desire. Hence, I now refer to the ‘‘target’’ of
the desire (now more appropriately the source of the desire) as
the ‘‘object/other’’ or simply the ‘‘other.’’
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 553
?rst place. In other words, if one desires some-
thing (the ‘‘other’’) merely because the other has
value in itself, then the other cannot be reduced to
a mere object to be appropriated in the service of
the desiring subject’s wishes, because such an
objecti?cation and appropriation would under-
mine the very foundation on which the desire is
based.
17
This conclusion rests on the proposition that the
act of appropriation also and unavoidably objec-
ti?es the target of the appropriative act. Conse-
quently, when conceived as a response to the
subjectivity of the other, desire cannot be reduced
to the desire to appropriate the other, since to do
so would be to objectify the other and hence deny
the subjectivity from which the desire is held to
spring. When desire is viewed as a consequence of
value, the other cannot be appropriated to the self
without simultaneously eradicating the desire
itself. Equally important, desire understood as a
consequence of value loses its inherently self-
interested character, because the lack with which
the term is so frequently associated becomes
instead an a?rmation of the value of the other.
The desire that on the economic model is pre-
sumed to signify ‘‘neediness’’ is, on the inverted
model, an involuntary ‘‘drawing towards’’ in
response to the irresistibility of the other qua
other. Thus reconstrued, desire is neither sel?sh
nor appropriative, and its expression serves to
a?rm rather than objectify the target of the desire.
It is in this sense that desire can be said to be
potentially other-a?rming and non-egoistic, as
well as potentially appropriative, self-interested,
and other-denying. When desire is viewed as the
outcome of a recognition on the part of the desir-
ing subject of the ‘‘inherent’’ value or worth of the
object/other, then the subject’s desire serves to
a?rm the value of the other as other. Conversely,
when the subject’s desire for the other is viewed as
the source of the value of the other, then the desire
becomes an appropriative, self-interested act that
e?ectively denies the other as other. On this latter
model, the ‘‘other’’ is a?rmed only as an object of
utility in relation to the desiring and self-serving
subject.
The importance of the temporal and causal
ordering of desire vis a vis value was not lost on
David Hume, who, in his essay, ‘‘Of the Meanness
or Dignity of Human Nature,’’ opines:
[T]here are two things that have led astray
those philosophers that have insisted so much
on the sel?shness of man. In the ?rst place,
they found that every act of virtue or friend-
ship was attended with a secret pleasure;
whence they concluded that friendship and
virtue could not be disinterested. But the fal-
lacy of this is obvious: the virtuous sentiment
or passion produces the pleasure and does not
arise from it. I feel a pleasure in doing good
to my friend, because I love him; but I do not
love him for the sake of that pleasure (Hume,
1963, p. 133).
But despite the obviousness with which this
observation presented itself to Hume, it is a dis-
tinction that is obscured by the language of eco-
nomic theory. For even though the economist is
silent about the origins of the desire that gives rise
to economic action, the very supposition that the
desire can ?nd expression in the choice-logic of the
economic model e?ectively precludes the possibi-
lity that the founding desire was anything other
than appropriative in intent, since only the desire
to appropriate can be accommodated to the
model. Economic theory thus maintains the exis-
tence of desires that are exogeneous to the theory,
but the nature of these desires is always already
speci?ed in terms of the theory itself.
At ?rst glance, the observation that economic
theory cannot accommodate desire of a non-
appropriate sort would seem to mark the limit of
the theory’s ability to describe and prescribe
human behavior. But on closer inspection, it
17
Ruth Hines (1991) has made this point as well, and illus-
trates it with unusual poignancy in describing her friendship
with and dependence upon Ficus Elastica, a rubber tree that
grows in her backyard. While it is possible to account for
Ruth’s relationship to the tree by its utililty to her (as shade
from the harsh sun; as protection for the little rain forest that
grows beneath it) and its disutility to her (Ficus Elastica is a
notorious drain-invader), to do so would be to pervert the
experience of friendship and mutual dependence that Ruth
describes as the real source of its ‘‘value.’’
554 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
becomes apparent that, even though economic
theory cannot accommodate desire of an other-
a?rming kind, such desire does not serve e?ec-
tively to create a ‘‘protected’’ sphere of human
action and interaction with respect to which the
theory has no descriptive or prescriptive force.
This is because, as noted previously, the theory
does not e?ectively discriminate those choice
environments to which it ostensibly applies from
those to which some other choice behavior is pre-
sumed to apply. Instead, the theory posits econo-
mizing behavior as a natural and self-evident
human response to any and all situations requiring
choice among competing ends. Consequently, the
theory imposes its descriptive and normative force
in all circumstances in which a choice appears
freely to have been made; if the desire that com-
pels the voluntary allocation of ‘‘resources’’ is in
fact inappropriate to the logic of the theory, this
fact will be obscured as the theory reinscribes the
desire in the language of self interest and
appropriation for which the economic model is
appropriate.
18
That the theory of economics discursively
transmutes the totality of human desire into self-
interested appropriation is more than a benign
terminological idiosyncrasy; it is, rather, a forceful
restriction of the way in which subjectivity and
intersubjectivity is experienced. This has impor-
tant implications for our concern to ground a
broader accountability on the part of economic
entities, because the moral obligation to account is
itself derivative of the intersubjective relationship
that is taken to characterize members of a given
moral community. At the social level, the con-
sequences are oddly paradoxical. On the one
hand, economic theory constructs a social world
in which there is only one subject, and a world of
objects with which—as his needs or desires dic-
tate—the subject interacts. On the other hand,
however, each member of society is presumed
to be an economic subject in her or his own
right, who, by the exercise or her or his own
desire, objecti?es all other subjects and hence
negates their subjectivity. The economic social
world is, thus, simultaneously both egalitarian
and totalitarian.
The egalitarian characteristics of the economic
social world have, perhaps not surprisingly, been
widely recognized. Indeed, given the social condi-
tions in which the theory emerged, the egalitarian
implications did much to promote the theory’s
eventual acceptance.
19
To be sure, the democratic
implications of a theoretical and commercial
apparatus in which each individual is taken as
equal have obvious and merited appeal—at least
to most of us living in the West. Yet, however
desirable these egalitarian underpinnings may be,
they also have the signi?cant e?ect of shoring-up
the economic conception of the human subject as
motivated solely by his or her own interests. This
is because, a fortiori, equal and sovereign subjects
do only what those individuals choose to do. In
short, self interest (broadly construed) becomes
the only motive that appears rational for a sover-
eign and self-determining subject. Therefore, it is
not simply that, as Sen (1990, p. 29) observes, ‘‘it is
possible to de?ne a person’s interests in such a
way that no matter what he does he can be seen to
be furthering his own interests in every isolated act
of choice’’; rather, and signi?cantly, it is that the
very depiction of the subject renders any other
decision criterion suspect on a priori grounds.
This observation explains why economists are
generally suspicious of the descriptive accuracy of
ethically-motivated action. George Stigler, for
example, asks in his 1981 Tanner Lectures at
18
A paradigmatic example of the construction of economic
desire is Gary Becker’s (1981) theory of ‘‘assortative mating’’
(1981, Chapter 4). Becker analyzes ‘‘love’’ as one component of
the preference function of individuals in the ‘‘marriage mar-
ket.’’ The economic approach to the experience of love appears
defensible because economic theory does not overtly restrict
the nature of the preferences of which the theory admits. When
carefully examined, however, the economic approach to the
analysis of ‘‘love’’ unavoidably commodi?es the recipient of
the love, and hence eradicates the very subjectivity in response
to which ‘‘love’’ is commonly supposed to spring.
19
These include an increasing discontent with hereditary
privilege, with Christian asceticism and the doctrine of original
sin, and with the unpredictable and passion-inspired exploits of
the ruling classes (Hirschman, 1977; Holmes, 1990; Justman,
1993).
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 555
Harvard, ‘‘Do people possess ethical beliefs which
in?uence their behavior in ways not dictated by,
and hence in con?ict with, their own long-run utility
maximization?’’ (Stigler, 1981, p. 175). His reply:
Let me predict the outcome of the systematic
and comprehensive testing of behavior in
situations where self-interest and ethical values
with wide verbal allegiance are in con?ict. Much
of the time, most of the time in fact, the self
interest theory . . . will win . . . We believe that
man is a utility-maximizing animal . . ., and to
date we have not found it informative to
carve out a section of his life in which he
invokes a di?erent goal behavior (Ibid, p. 176).
To economists who share Stigler’s views, ‘‘ethi-
cal’’ behavior—if it is held to exist at all—reduces
to a form of enlightened self-interest; we refrain
from stepping on one another’s gouty toes
(though they be in our path) because we believe
ourselves to be better o? in a society in which
everyone agrees to step around one another’s toes,
than in a society in which our own toes are routi-
nely trampled.
20
McKenzie (1983) describes well
the economic manifestation of ‘‘ethics’’:
What we call ethics, on this approach, is a set
of rules with respect to dealings with other
persons, rules which in general prohibit
behavior which is only myopically self-ser-
ving, or which imposes large costs on others
with only small gains to oneself. General
observance of these rules makes not only for
long-term gains to the actor, but also yields
outside bene?ts, and the social approval of
the ethics is a mild form of enforcement of the
rules to achieve this general bene?t (p. 6).
Within economic discourse, then, ‘‘ethical’’
behavior is simply that which, while it bene?ts
others as well, ultimately yields a net long-term
bene?t to the individual engaged in the behavior.
If it did not return a net bene?t to the actor, she or
he would be under no presumption nor injunction
to engage in the behavior. The obvious con-
sequence of subsuming ethical behavior within the
concept of enlightened self-interest is that eco-
nomics is able to admit of ‘‘ethics,’’ but without
challenge to the theory’s depiction of the sovereign
and self-interested subject, and without challenge
to the decision logic that is said to be descriptive
of this subject. The result is that, within economic
discourse, each individual is properly held
accountable only for the pursuit of her or his pri-
vate good. The question that Schweiker (1993)
raises, and that I want to revisit here, is whether
such accountability is adequate to the moral iden-
tity that is inherent in the very activity of rendering
an account.
6. Accountability and moral identity
Schweiker (1993) concludes that to hold eco-
nomic actors accountable in exclusively self inter-
ested terms is contradictory to the moral identity
that is enacted in the practice of giving an
account.
21
Speci?cally, Schweiker argues that ren-
dering an account enacts a moral identity that
transforms mere force (i.e. the exertions and
actions of the actor) into a power that is subject to
ethical evaluation (p. 240). It does so, Schweiker
argues, because by its very nature it ‘‘provides
20
The gouty toes example is, of course, Hume’s (1965, p.
72). He cites it as evidence that people do not always act in
their own interest, but this is because Hume views the broad,
‘‘enlightened’’ version of self interest as ‘‘the calling of things
not by their proper names’’ (Hume, 1963, p. 86). For Hume,
any self interest that is enlightened enough to subsume ‘‘ethics’’
is not properly described as self-interest at all. As I have
argued, however, the constitutive and productive dimensions of
discourse mean that there is considerably more at stake than
the (arbitrary) choice of a signi?er.
21
Schweiker is not the ?rst to reach this conclusion. In the
Gorgias (Plato, 1987), Socrates demonstrates that since all
action that produces pleasure is ultimately aimed at the
attainment of the good, such action is properly accountable to
a standard of the good that is distinct from the pursuit of
pleasure. Moreover, this higher purpose for the sake of which
we do things must, on pain of contradiction, exceed the imme-
diacy of the pleasure of doing them. Consequently, any notion
of accountability that explains actions solely by reference to
the pleasure produced is a false account; it is unfaithful to the
moral agency that is entailed by the very activities for which we
seek to provide an account.
556 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
reasons for actions, relations and purposes that
instantiate a complex temporal structure demar-
cating the identity of the actor as a moral agent in
community with others’’ (p. 243). The act of giv-
ing an account, in other words, instantiates the
agent’s identity as intersubjectively constituted
and renders him accountable to some moral com-
munity whose values and beliefs will serve to judge
his intentions, actions and outcomes (Ibid., p.
236). Thus, Schweiker concludes, any theory that
restricts accountability to the pursuit of private
interest is self-contradictory for the reason that the
very act of giving an account instantiates the agent
as intersubjective and answerable to purposes
beyond the agent’s own:
I am contesting, then, the assumption that an
account of economic actors by theorists,
accountants and ethicists can hold the ‘I’ of
the agent as immediately understandable in
self-interested terms. What is missed in this is
how the portrayal of those agents grants to
them a self-understanding as self-interested.
When carefully examined, this portrayal of
agency is impossible because, in the act of
giving an account the agent is constituted as
interdependent with others and hence moved
by various motives (p. 237, fn 6).
Without denying the validity of this argument, it
is worth considering how economic theory, as a
discourse, conceals and negates this fundamental
contradiction. To do this, it is necessary to focus
on the twin notions of the individual and the
common good. The presupposition that these two
concepts are irreconcilably di?erent is of crucial
importance to Schweiker’s argument; because
Schweiker views social interests as irreducible to
private interests, accountability cannot be restric-
ted to self interest because the fact of the
accountability creates an identity that is answer-
able to the social good. Schweiker explains:
[T]he good of business cannot be equated
with the common good since, as we have seen,
any identity requires otherness and thus a
wider scope of good than itself. Thus giving
an account renders economic forces servants
of larger human and environmental purposes,
without negating the singularity of their
identities and motives (p. 249).
But the issue that Schweiker does not here
address is what happens to this argument if, as is
the case with neoclassical theory, the common and
the private good are conceived as instrumentally
related, if the former is held to be attainable only
by each individual’s pursuit of the latter? The col-
lective benevolence attributed by neoclassical the-
ory to the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the marketplace
serves discursively to negate the distinction, pre-
supposed by Schweiker, between the private and
the collective good. In particular, the good of
business can without contradiction be equated
with the common good if the ‘‘larger human and
environmental purposes’’ are themselves attain-
able only by the pursuit of the good of business.
22
This is, in fact, the import of Friedman’s (1970)
famous New York Times article on the social
responsibility of business.
My argument, then, is not that the contradiction
between the individual and the collective good,
presupposed by Schweiker, is false, but rather that
as a discursive practice, neoclassical economics
negates or denies the conditions that spawn the
contradiction, with the result that the normative
prescriptions of the theory continue to hold eco-
nomic entities accountable only for their private
goods. This is so, not because economic theory is
blind to a ‘‘wider scope of good,’’ but rather
because economic theory posits private interest
maximization as the instrumental and exclusive
22
The claim that economic theory makes of the private good
the instrumental means to the attainment of the common good
disregards the important issue of externalities. Where extern-
alities are acknowledged to exist, the instrumental relationship
between the private and the collective good does not strictly
hold. It is important to note, however, that externalities are
simply individual interests that cannot in the instance be
expressed in the ‘‘market’’; if they could be so expressed, then
the instrumental relationship between the private and the col-
lective good would once again hold. Hence, conceptually, pur-
suit of private good remains the means to the collective good.
This is, of course, why the neoclassical economist’s standard
solution to externalities is to extend property rights, thereby
‘‘internalizing’’ the externality.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 557
means to this good; within the discourse of eco-
nomics, the opposition between the individual and
the collective good is synthesized, with the result
that the underlying contradiction appears as no
contradiction at all.
That economic theory is able discursively to
negate this contradiction is a consequence of the
fact that the theory invests self-interested action
with the full weight of moral probity. It is able to
do so, I suggest, because the economic subject has
no Other whose being might obligate him to a
good that is greater than his own personal inter-
ests. As we have seen, in the society of economic
agents, all subjects are self-same; the very possibi-
lity of an alterior subjectivity is preempted from
the start. In other words, economic theory creates
a social world in which alterity is discursively
erased; in the economic social world there is only
one subject position, and a world of objects on
which the subject acts.
But if there is only one subject position and all
subjects are self-same, then the ‘‘wider scope of
good’’ that Schweiker locates in the relation to
others reduces to the private good of the accoun-
table subject. This follows from the observation
that when all subjects are self-same, there can be
no obligation beyond the pursuit of private pre-
ferences for the reason that the self (the self-same)
cannot obligate the self to anything without the
obligation being reduced to a self-imposed obliga-
tion, which is to say, an expression of personal
preference. This observation is not merely a play
on words but is, I believe, an expression of the fact
that only an Other who stands in a relation of
irreducible alterity vis a vis the self can be said to
compel the self to act in a manner that is not
broadly the expression of the subject’s preferences.
Stated di?erently, self-identical subjects cannot
compel one another to act because, as equivalent
and autonomous beings, neither presents the other
with a claim to consideration that exceeds the
other subject’s own.
The constitutive impact of economic theory is
thus to construct identity such that it is obligated
to no one other than itself. This is so even if one
accepts, with Schweiker, that an account given in
economic terms serves to constitute the identity of
a moral agent in community with others. It is so
because economic theory constructs subjectivity
and intersubjectivity such that the moral obliga-
tion to others always already reduces to the obli-
gation to oneself. Moreover, since all possible
economic subjects are reciprocally situated, the
collective good of society becomes both de?ned
and achieved by each individual’s pursuit of his or
her private good. The e?ect is to grant the obliga-
tion to a greater good, while discursively subsum-
ing this obligation in the pursuit of private
economic interest.
If my analysis is correct, therefore, then the
moral identity constituted by accounts rendered in
economic terms is inadequate to the demand for
ethical evaluation that Schweiker justi?ably
locates in the economic entity’s relation to others.
More speci?cally, economic discourse constructs
moral identity such that the reciprocal pursuit of
private interest becomes the sole ethical imperative
of subjects in commerce with one another. Thus,
while the rendering of an economic account may,
as Schweiker suggests, enact an identity that is
open to ethical evaluation, the e?ect of the dis-
course in terms of which the identity is rendered is
e?ectively to restrict this evaluation to the obliga-
tion of the entity to pursue its own interests. In
short, the moral accountability of the economic
subject or entity is wholly and completely dis-
charged by reference to the interests of that sub-
ject or entity. Moreover, given the nature of the
economic social world, such moral accountability
is deemed to be su?cient to the demands of ethics.
7. An ethics of the other
The conclusion that can be drawn from the
foregoing analysis is that if one seeks to hold eco-
nomic entities accountable for purposes beyond
their own interests, then one cannot do so solely
on the basis of the moral identity that is enacted
when these entities render accounts of themselves.
For as we have seen, economic theory constructs
moral identity such that the obligation to account
to a community of others always already reduces
to the obligation to account for the economic
agent’s self-interested endeavors. Within economic
discourse, in other words, the distinction between
558 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
private interests and the wider good is obscured as
the obligation to account to the other is deemed to
be adequately discharged by the accounting-for-
itself of the self-interested economic agent.
23
If we are to succeed in holding economic entities
accountable to ‘‘wider human and environmental
purposes,’’ then, we must have some way of
marking these purposes as distinct from the self-
interests of the economic entity. This, in turn,
requires an ethical imperative that can radicalize
accountability such that it is irreducible to the self-
interested accountability of the economic subject.
I submit that the French philosopher and ethicist,
Emmanuel Levinas, has radicalized the inter-
subjective relation of accountability in just this
way. For this reason, Levinas’s work both
demonstrates the ethical inadequacy of the eco-
nomic conception of accountability, and provides
the ethical foundation for a greater moral respon-
sibility on the part of economic agents and entities.
Levinas’s project seeks to challenge transcen-
dental philosophy with an ethics that grounds
subjectivity in the asymmetric encounter with the
radically other. For Levinas, the primacy accorded
to ontology in the tradition of Western philosophy
has, by privileging the intentionality of Being,
e?ectively suppressed alterity and transmuted
what is Other into the Same. Klemm (1989) poses
succinctly the question that motivates Levinas’s
project: ‘‘How can the transcendental subject con-
stitute the being of the Other except as alien ‘I’? Is
not transcendental philosophy thereby committed
to viewing the other as a modi?cation of the same,
thus violating the other’s autonomy and rendering
itself ethically suspect?’’ (p. 403).
In contrast to the tradition of transcendental
philosophy, Levinas accords primacy to the ethical
relation, as revealed in the face of the radically
other. In the encounter with the Other, the self is
confronted with an obligation that antecedes the
Being of the self, a responsibility that subordinates
the freedom of the self to the edict that issues from
the face of the Other: you shall not kill. Thus,
Levinas (1986) argues that ethics precedes ontol-
ogy, that ‘‘it is my inescapable and incon-
trovertible answerability to the other that makes
me an individual ‘I’’’ (p. 27).
In the relationship of the face-to-face, the
intentionality of the subject is subordinated to the
command of the Other. Thus, for Levinas (1985),
the intersubjective relationship is irreducibly
asymmetrical; ‘‘I am responsible for the other
without waiting for his reciprocity’’ (p. 98). In
insisting on the asymmetry of the ethical relation,
Levinas is rejecting Martin Buber’s description of
the self-other relationship as a ‘‘symmetrical
copresence’’ (Levinas, 1986, p. 31) of two sub-
jectivities. In Levinas’s view, intersubjective reci-
procity both destroys alterity and occludes the
responsibility that I have for the other. This
responsibility, Levinas insists, is not generalizable
to other ‘I’s’; rather, that my responsibility
exceeds that of all others is the basis of the asym-
metry on which the ethical relation is founded.
In the asymmetry of the face-to-face, therefore,
Levinas founds an obligation of accountability to
the other that exceeds the ‘‘accounting for itself’’
of the equal and sovereign subject. Moreover, this
obligation precedes the very constitution of the
subject as a subject; it is not a voluntary election,
but rather imposes itself on the subject by virtue of
the superior alterity of the Other. As Levinas
23
The distinction between accounting for oneself and
accounting to the other should not be overdrawn. Because
accountability is intersubjectively constituted, any accounting
for oneself is also, to some degree, an accounting to the other in
relation to whom one’s identity as accountable is established.
The terminology is, however, useful in distinguishing those
relations to the other that are strictly instrumental in nature
from those that acknowledge an obligation to the other. Where
the relationship to the other is strictly limited to the objectify-
ing and instrumental relation of economic subjects, account-
ability becomes a self-referential exercise that is captured in the
notion of accounting for oneself. By contrast, to account to the
other is to acknowledge a non-instrumental relationship to the
other, a relationship of responsibility for, or obligation to, the
other that can never be discharged by reference only to one’s
own interests. By accounting to the other, therefore, I mean to
capture both an economic entity’s supra-contractual responsi-
bilities to others with whom it contracts, and the entity’s
responsibility to others with whom it does not contract.
Accounting to the other thus represents a relation of account-
ability for those consequences of the entity’s actions that the
economist calls ‘‘externalities,’’ but it entails as well an expan-
ded notion of the entity’s accountability to those parties with
whom it explicitly contracts. I wish to argue that both dimen-
sions of the activity of accounting to are necessary to a more
morally adequate conception of economic accountability.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 559
(1986) explains, ‘‘even if I deny my primordial
responsibility to the other by a?rming my own
freedom as primary, I can never escape the fact
that the Other has demanded a response from me
before I a?rm my freedom not to respond to his
demand’’ (p. 27). In his introduction to Levinas’s
(1987) text, Time and the Other, Richard Cohen
describes this obligation as the ‘‘reorientation
despite-itself of the for-itself to the for-the-other’’
(p. 17), a description that captures well the radical
relation of accountability that Levinas’s ethical
project instates for the self with respect to the
Other.
Even though this ‘‘radicalized accountability’’
necessarily follows from the greater responsibility
of the ‘‘I’’ to the ‘‘Other,’’ it in no way negates the
more traditional relation of accountability that
exists between reciprocal ‘‘I’s’’. Rather, Levinas
argues, it founds the reciprocity from which the
latter emanates. For Levinas (1969), equality is
deduced from the originary inequality of the face-
to-face relation (1969, p. 214). This occurs when
the immediacy of the face-to-face, in which the
essential asymmetry is experienced, is viewed in
the abstract, as by a third-party observer (p. 213).
For Levinas, the inequality of the face-to-face
remains the originary relation from which this
equality follows, because it is only in the obliga-
tion to the other that the ‘‘I’’ assumes an identity
at all. As soon as the intersubjective relationship is
viewed from the outside as ‘‘two subjects facing
one another’’ (Chanter, 1995, p. 193), however,
those subjects assume a symmetry with respect to
one another that renders them equals.
This, Levinas (1969) argues, is the transforma-
tion that takes place when one moves from the
domain of ethics to a concern for justice and the
rules of moral life. Moreover, this transformation
also characterizes the intersubjective relations of
citizens in commerce with one another: ‘‘I and the
Other become interchangeable in commerce. . .
[T]he particular man, an individuation of the
genus man, appearing in history, is substituted for
the I and for the other’’ (p. 226). In this substitu-
tion, the ethical relationship is lost: ‘‘[The] social
relationship becomes total reciprocity. These
beings are not interchangeable but reciprocal, or
rather they are interchangeable because they are
reciprocal. And then the relationship with the
other becomes impossible’’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 82).
The point that I want to make is that Levinas’s
ethics suggests a radical accountability to the
Other that neither reduces to nor negates the
‘‘accounting for’’ of reciprocal and autonomous
individuals, but indeed founds it. This project, I
suggest, has profound implications for the way
that we understand economic accountability. Spe-
ci?cally, Levinas’s grounding of ethics in the
asymmetry of the face-to-face points to the fun-
damental ethical inadequacy of the self-interest
motive—no matter how broadly construed, and
no matter how congruous with the collective good
of a moral community. This is so because in the
self-interested discourse of economic account-
ability, any account of human action proceeds
only from the sovereignty of the acting subject,
from his essential equality with the subjectivity of
the other. In this irreducible equality, the ethical
encounter with the face of the other is denied, a
denial that serves to eradicate the originary
asymmetry from which equality derives.
Levinas’s project helps us to see how economic
theory’s insistence on the reciprocity of self and
other is, perhaps, a consequence of the ‘‘third
party’’ perspective that seeks to generalize the
intersubjective economic relationship to all poten-
tial ‘‘I’s’’. Moreover, his project suggests that such
generalization is a necessary consequence of the
elaboration of rules of conduct that seek to
achieve justice in our daily lives. Indeed, Levinas
reminds us that it is only in the equality bestowed
by the third-party gaze that rules of moral conduct
can be elaborated at all. But at the same time,
Levinas’s project reminds us that one’s account-
ability to the other is never wholly discharged in
the reciprocity of terms like self-interest, since the
equality that reciprocity presupposes is itself deri-
vative of an asymmetry in which the self is sub-
ordinated and held accountable to the alterity of
the Other.
My claim, then, is that economic accountability
cannot be adequately conceived in terms that are
exclusively self-interested, since the equality that
such accountability both demands and instates is
itself grounded in an inequality to which self-
interest can never be accountable. That self-inter-
560 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
est cannot account to the alterity of the other is, as
we have seen, an inescapable consequence of its
location in a discourse that always already objec-
ti?es the other in instrumental relation to the
needs of the self.
24
By contrast, an accounting to
the other necessitates a reconceptualization of self
in which one’s subjectivity is subordinated to the
demands of the radically other. Self interest is thus
inadequate to account for this self-subordination
that founds the ethical relation; self-interest as a
measure of accountability is therefore also inade-
quate to the ethical needs of a moral community.
8. Corporate accountability
The problems of economic accountability at the
corporate or business level seem at ?rst glance to
be far removed from the discursive construction of
economic subjectivity and intersubjectivity that
has been the focus of this essay. Yet policies and
practices at the societal level are a product of cul-
tural presuppositions about relations of sub-
jectivity and intersubjectivity at the personal level,
and shared conceptions of the individual’s rela-
tionship to the wider social order. As I have
argued, the economic conception of the private
intersubjective relationship legitimates the pursuit
of private interests, and speci?es that all transac-
tions into which two or more individuals enter are
mutually advantageous and hence facilitative of
the collective good. Friedman (1970, p. 124)
acknowledges this explicitly when he notes that
‘‘in an ideal free market . . ., no individual can
coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary,
[and] all parties to such cooperation bene?t or
they need not participate.’’ The e?ect, as Buarque
(1993, p. 11) observes, is to ‘‘make ethical all
forms of exploitation that do not imply actually
depriving an individual of his or her freedom.’’
This translates into an ethical order in which eco-
nomic agents are properly held accountable only
for the advancement of their private economic
goals, the well-being of the collective and of the
individuals whose lives are a?ected by these pur-
suits being presumed to be congruous with the
attainment of these goals. As a result, the eco-
nomic depiction of society as an aggregation of
interest-seeking, sovereign, and reciprocal subjects
serves to legitimate at a theoretical level the
restriction of economic accountability to the
pursuit of economic goals.
The in?uence of economic precepts on notions
of accountability at the business entity level is
nowhere more evident than in Benston’s (1982)
in?uential essay on accounting and corporate
accountability. Both the shape of Benston’s ana-
lysis, and the conclusions that he draws from it,
are premised on the unarticulated presupposition
that the collective good is de?ned and achieved by
the pursuit of private interest. As we have seen,
this conviction is underpinned by an economic
conception of the private, intersubjective relation-
ship, wherein each individual is conceived as an
autonomous, reciprocally situated subjectivity, to
whom the Other appears only as an object that
may or may not facilitate the subject’s interests.
These unarticulated presumptions guarantee the
logical integrity of the analysis, and hence legit-
imate the conclusions that Benston draws from it.
Benston makes evident in the opening pages of
the essay his presupposition that the collective
good can be none other than the outcome of the
[legal, and assuming for the moment perfect own-
ership rights and markets] pursuit of shareholders’
interests. He does so by claiming that proponents
of theories of corporate accountability implicitly
or explicitly assume that managers have discretion
to use shareholders’ resources in ways that do not
bene?t the shareholders. This claim, which pro-
vides the starting point for his analysis, clearly
reveals that Benston takes ‘‘corporate account-
ability’’ to mean ‘‘management accountability’’;
from this point of view, if management does not
24
Indeed, Levinas (1969) explicitly acknowledges that
‘‘need’’ stems from lack, and as such need negates alterity by
seeking to make what is ‘‘other’’ its own. ‘‘Need’’ is contrasted
with ‘‘metaphysical desire,’’ which ‘‘tends toward something
else entirely, toward the absolutely Other’’ (p. 33). Such desire,
Levinas (1969) argues, ‘‘does not coincide with an unsatis?ed
need; it is situated beyond satisfaction and non-satisfaction’’
(p. 179). Clearly, Levinas’s notion of need captures what the
economist refers to as ‘‘preferences,’’ while metaphysical desire
comes closer to the ‘‘other-a?rming desire’’ of the non-eco-
nomic relationship.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 561
have the discretion to use shareholders’ resources
to serve parties other than shareholders, then
‘‘corporate’’ accountability is not a meaningful
issue.
The obvious possibility of which Benston’s ana-
lysis does not admit is that ‘‘corporate account-
ability’’ might mean ‘‘shareholder accountability,’’
and that, as such, corporate accountability is a
meaningful issue whenever shareholders’ interests
do not serve the collective good of the wider com-
munity. The issue of shareholder accountability
does not depend upon the extent or resolution of
agency problems between management and own-
ers; rather, it depends upon the possibility that
society holds corporate owners accountable to a
‘‘good’’ that is not congruous with these owners’
private interests. Benston, however, fails to con-
sider the possibility that shareholders’ interests
may not serve the greater good, except to the
extent that incomplete ownership rights or market
imperfections are to blame. With regard to the
latter, Benston’s (1984) rejoinder to Schreuder and
Ramanathan (1984) makes clear that he places the
burden of proof for establishing such imperfec-
tions on those who would challenge his conclu-
sions. With regard to the former, Benston admits
incomplete ownership rights into the analysis to
the extent that these give rise to externalities.
Where externalities are present, managers who
serve shareholders’ interests may not adequately
serve the interests of non-contracting parties.
But Benston’s analysis is designed to demon-
strate that externalities are the only instances
where management, constrained to serve share-
holders, does not also serve all other members of
society (e.g. workers, suppliers, community mem-
bers, etc.) to whom accountability might be owed.
This allows him to narrow his consideration of the
usefulness of social accounting in discharging
accountability to those instances where [direct or
indirect] externalities are present. As is well
known, Benston concludes that subjectivity and
lack of measurement precision militate against
accountants’ involvement in the corporate
accountability undertaking.
Benston’s conclusion that externalities represent
the only cases where the pursuit of shareholder
interests will not achieve the collective good has
two important implications, one of which Benston
explicitly describes and illustrates, and one of
which remains unacknowledged and unarticu-
lated. Benston is forthright about his belief that
there are no supra-contractual obligations on the
part of business entities to parties with whom it
contracts, because contracting parties enter will-
ingly into relationships with the business entity,
and would not do so unless their interests were
advanced by such an arrangement. This means, to
take his example, that:
moke coming from a factory . . . chimney
may foul the air, but . . . f all of the area
residents are associated with the factory (say
as employees or suppliers), the disutility from
breathing polluted air is a cost of dealing with
the factory and will be re?ected in the wages
or prices for goods paid by the factory owners
(Benston, 1982, p. 94.)
Consequently, the factory owes no responsibility
for its pollution beyond that of maximizing its
own pro?ts; if the cost of compensating its
employees and suppliers exceeds at the margin the
cost of reducing its air-borne contaminants, then
the factory not only should but will reduce the
amount of air pollution that it generates. The fac-
tory’s responsibility for the air quality of the
community in which it operates is fully discharged
by the pursuit of its own economic interests. Con-
sequently, there is no role for ‘‘social accounting’’;
no role for accounting except to report on the
pro?t maximization e?orts of the ?rm.
Benston’s conclusion with respect to the
accountability proper to the economic entity
draws its legitimation from the economic con-
strual of the intersubjective relationship. It can
readily be seen that both parties to the contract
(e.g. the factory owners and the employees) are
presumed to be sovereign, reciprocally situated
subjectivities who are engaged in pursuing their
own private interests. Since each party enters the
contract of its own volition, each party is pre-
sumed thereby to maximize its own utility. If there
are no other parties impacted by the transaction
(i.e. if there are no externalities) then the contract
thus enacted will also serve the collective good,
562 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
inasmuch as it will be deemed to bene?t all parti-
cipants, and to hurt no one.
But Benston’s conclusion, standard in economic
theory, that any voluntary exchange between two
parties promotes the collective good, is a far cry
from the conclusion, implicit but unacknowledged
in Benston’s analysis, that the collective good is
only that which is attainable through self-inter-
ested and free exchange. Put simply, Benston
tacitly (and illogically) assumes that since A pro-
motes B, B is attainable only by means of A. To
translate this back into the language of corporate
accountability, Benston’s tacit assumption is that,
since the conditions of free exchange adequately
account for the interests of the corporation’s
exchange partners, society can have no interests
that would not be adequately accounted for in free
exchange with the corporation, if only markets
were perfect and ownership rights complete.
25
This explains why Benston identi?es an account-
ability issue only where externalities—which
ought, given a perfect world, to be incorporated
into the terms of the exchange and which would,
moreover, be so incorporated—exist. This further
explains why it does not cross Benston’s mind to
consider that corporate accountability might be a
meaningful issue simply because the pursuit of
shareholders’ interests does not or may not—even
if agency relationships and externalities are
assumed away—serve the collective good of the
community.
Benston’s tacit assumption can be understood as
a simple consequence of economic conceptions of
the intersubjective obligation. We have already
seen how the economic depiction of human agents
as sovereign, reciprocally situated subjectivities
leads Benston to conclude that any contractual
exchange between agents fully incorporates all
responsibility that either has for the interests of
the other, and hence advances the collective good.
But to conclude from this, as Benston does, that
there can be no obligation of accountability—even
at the societal level—that would not, under the
proper market conditions, be discharged by the
shareholders’ pursuit of their own interests,
requires the further presupposition that there
exists in society no Other whose interests override
the interests of the shareholders. And this, as we
have also seen, is a presupposition that follows
easily from the fact that the discourse of econom-
ics negates alterity, transforming the world of
others into a world of objects with which the
economic subject interacts.
These economic presuppositions on which Ben-
ston’s analysis rests lend powerful theoretical and
normative weight to his conclusion that economic
entities adequately discharge their obligations to
others with whom they transact by pursuing their
own private interests. Recall that we earlier iden-
ti?ed accountability as a relation of answerability,
or an intersubjective relationship whereby one is
obligated to demonstrate the reasonableness of
one’s actions to those to whom one is accountable.
Moreover, it is the community of others in rela-
tion to whom one is accountable that de?nes the
‘‘good’’ in terms of which ‘‘reasonableness’’ will be
judged. The e?ect of construing accountability in
exclusively economic terms is, therefore, to de?ne
the collective good as the outcome of free
exchange, and thereby to render ‘‘reasonable’’ all
[legal] e?orts to pursue one’s private interests,
without regard to the e?ect of one’s actions on
those with whom one transacts.
The consequences of such a monologic
approach to accountability can be tragic. The lives
of people, the existence of non-human life forms,
the integrity of ecosystems, and the sovereignty of
nations all are made subservient to the instru-
mental pursuit of pro?t or productive growth. For
example, Buarque (1993) and Waring (1988) both
speak from experience of the unacknowledged (i.e.
unmeasured and unaccounted for) human and
environmental costs that accrue when developing
25
To take a concrete example, Benston’s tacit assumption
would rule out society’s demands for accountability by Cana-
dian oil ?rms such as Talisman Oil for producing the revenues
that enable the Sudanese government to fund the civil war,
with its continuing and gross human rights violations. Such
demands for accountability do not stem from incomplete
property rights or other market imperfections; rather, they are
motivated by the conviction that Talisman’s shareholders’
rights to pro?t are in con?ict with a social good that demands
the protection of basic human rights. No amount of perfection
in the market will ensure that Talisman’s pursuit of pro?t will
adequately discharge accountability to this social interest.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 563
nations uncritically adopt agendas of economic
‘‘development’’ conceived in and appropriate to
the ‘‘developed’’ world. These agendas, Buarque
notes, are frequently ‘‘poorly suited to [a develop-
ing country’s] cultural and natural environment
and ill matched to the needs of the local popula-
tion’’ (p. 46). As a result, the adoption of devel-
opment programs often results in the destruction
of the adopting country’s natural resources, its
increasing economic dependence on foreign
capital, and the uncompensated destabilization
of traditional ways of life or means of sub-
sistence.
26
But such travesties of moral accountability are
not limited to developing nations. In developed
countries like the United States, for example, the
distribution of society’s wealth is becoming
increasingly polarized, an outcome that is justi?ed
at the national level by the imperative of economic
incentive, and an outcome that is not re?ected in
the national accounts that a government gives of
itself.
27
And at the corporate level, economic
rationales justify the relocation of manufacturing
plants to developing countries with lower wage
rates, exploitative employment practices with
respect to low-skilled or chronically unemployed
domestic workers, and the aggressive marketing,
both at home and abroad, of unsafe, unnecessary,
or unhealthy products. Except as they impact the
‘‘bottom line,’’ businesses are not held accoun-
table for the consequences of these decisions.
The impact of our collective failure to hold eco-
nomic agents accountable to purposes other than
their own interests has made itself felt on the
environment, as well. Pollution, the depletion of
natural resources, and the destruction or diminu-
tion of air, water, and ecosystems all are becoming
increasingly pressing social problems. Moreover,
the growing impetus towards removing barriers to
global free trade increasingly puts these problems
beyond the reach of citizen groups, and makes it
di?cult to tighten environmental standards, even
locally. Again, our systems of accountability
overwhelmingly fail to re?ect responsibility to
these environmental concerns.
28
Whether at the national or the corporate level,
the need to hold economic actors accountable to
purposes beyond their personal interests would
seem to be clear. To be sure, such wider account-
ability occasionally manifests itself in the tradi-
tional economic accounts that an entity renders of
itself. This will happen, for example, when rapid
depletion of a natural resource drives up the price
of this resource, causing a business’ input prices to
rise and pro?ts to fall, or perhaps motivating a
research and development campaign aimed at
identifying a substitute input. Similarly, a busi-
ness’ pro?ts may su?er if, for example, its
exploitative employment practices draw su?cient
public attention and outrage to prompt a boy-
cott of the company’s products. Partial
accountability will also occur to the extent that
national, state, and local governments impose
taxes, levies, ?nes, or legislation on economic
entities whose activities create signi?cant human
or environmental externalities. Indeed, where
property rights cannot easily be extended (as, for
example, with pollution-free air), government-
imposed fees that proxy for the cost of the eco-
nomic externalities are typically the economist’s
preferred form of accountability (see, for example,
Benston, 1982; Thornton, 1993).
26
For example, while the US government’s recent decision
to grant China permanent normal trade relation status is
viewed by both governments as a ?rst step in promoting eco-
nomic freedom and prosperity (i.e. ‘‘economic development’’)
for the Chinese citizenry, it is also expected to produce
‘‘immense social dislocations’’ (Cernetig, 2000) among the
country’s 800 million peasants and factory workers—already
disproportionately poor compared to the country’s 300 million
urbanites—who face the loss of their livelihoods due to com-
petition by US-produced commodities and consumer goods.
27
I recently read that the wealthiest 10% of Americans
control 90% of the nation’s wealth (Mokhiber & Weissman,
2000).
28
It is important to note that issues of environmental
accountability typically surround economic externalities,
whereas many of the other issues of accountability suggested
above are not related to economic externalities. While I believe
that both types of concerns are valid, only the latter require a
non-economic model of accountability in order to motivate the
concern. Where the issue is establishing accountability for an
externality, economic conceptions of accountability are quite
adequate to ground accountability, even if existing market
arrangements are inadequate to discharge it.
564 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
But such e?orts to hold economic actors more
broadly accountable are often too little and too
late. By the time that an economic entity’s socially
irresponsible behavior makes itself felt in the form
of noticeably lower pro?ts, signi?cant harm is
likely to have been already done; by the time that
government regulation is in place, environmental
damage or depletion may be irreversible. Even
more troublesome, however, is that such ‘‘eco-
nomic’’ solutions to the public accountability issue
‘‘solve’’ the problem by recourse to the same logic
that produced it—and hence fail to solve the pro-
blem at all. This is because the accountability
measures suggested above rely for their imposition
on the self-interest of individuals, groups, and
politicians—each of whom is presumed to apply a
distinctly economic decision logic to its demands
for accountability. In the economic theory of
regulation, for example, regulators and politi-
cians are not viewed as serving the public inter-
est, but rather as pursuing their own interests
(McCraw, 1975; Posner, 1974; Stigler, 1971).
Consequently, they will only be motivated to
impose restraints on ?rms and other economic
agents if some individual or group of individuals is
able to make it in the regulator’s interest to do so.
Usually, this is taken to mean that the politician
or regulator will take action only if she perceives
inaction as a threat to her ability to retain her
position or her political popularity. Because,
however, the bene?t of restrictive legislation to
any individual is likely to be small relative to the
cost of advocating the legislation, a socially sub-
optimal quantity of legislation is expected to
result. Watts and Zimmerman (1979) advance a
similar argument with respect to the regulation of
accounting information.
On the economic model, then, individuals and
groups whose interests are su?ciently impacted by
the activities of economic agents will—if the extent
to which they are impacted justi?es the cost—exert
pressure on politicians or apply market pressure
(e.g. consumer boycotts) to ?rms to express their
demands for accountability. If the expression of
such demands by individuals and groups in turn
threatens the interests of the economic agent
(e.g. its pro?ts) or of the politician (e.g. her or his
chances of reelection) then—if such is cost-justi-
?ed—laws will be passed or ?rms will mend their
ways.
The point is that it seems futile to suppose that
reliance on economic interests can produce an
accountability that transcends the narrow
demands of economic interest. In addition to
appearing logically suspect, such a supposition
importantly disregards the constitutive dimension
of economic discourse, whereby demands for
accountability (as well as the criteria that de?ne
what constitutes an adequate account) are shaped
by the same discursive practices that are employed
to produce the accounts. The problem is that the
more the rationale of economics pervades our
sense of ourselves as human subjects, the more we
begin to see ourselves, and our rights and obliga-
tions in relation to others, in economic terms. This
in turn leads to a lack of demand for account-
ability, except where one’s rights to ownership and
free exchange are at stake, and it serves to ensure
that where accountability is sought, the economics
of self-interested trade will be su?cient to its dis-
charge.
The discourse of economics is not, therefore,
ethically neutral, but rather ascribes moral justice
to self-interested actions by equating these actions
with the provision of the collective good. The
problem, of course, is that the end that ethics
seeks is this collective good, so that economic the-
ory contains within itself the conditions of its
moral probity. We may accept, with Schweiker,
the claim that the mere event of rendering an
account constitutes the identity of the agent as
intersubjectively dependent and hence morally
accountable to a wider scope of good than his
own. Yet even as we acknowledge this, the force
behind the obligation to accountability is dis-
sipated because economic discourse makes of the
collective good the outcome of the pursuit of pri-
vate interests. In other words, economic theory
necessitates and realizes a social order in which
each person’s freedom to pursue her or his own
interests both de?nes and achieves the collective
good. As a result, economics deems it ‘‘ethical’’
for the economic actor to pursue his private good.
On the basis of the foregoing analysis, I suggest
that what is needed is an infusion into our struc-
tures of accountability of a counterbalancing ethic
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 565
that takes seriously the obligation to the other,
and that possesses the potential to inscribe a
‘‘radical accountability’’ that is irreducible to
those purposes that are the economic agent’s own.
My claim is that an ethics such as Levinas o?ers,
in which being itself is subordinated to the ethical
obligation to the other, o?ers some hope of
achieving this broader accountability. This is
because the ethical encounter preempts the eco-
nomic agent’s subjectivity; the other demands a
response before the economic agent even assumes
a subjectivity. My response to this demand there-
fore precedes my constitution as an economic
agent; it is prior to and distinct from the economic
choice behaviors that constitute me as an eco-
nomic subject. In other words, the egoism that
de?nes the very being of the economic subject is
suspended or held at bay by this primordial
responsibility to the other.
I do not mean to suggest by this that the rules of
economic life can be set out in a manner that pre-
serves or captures the asymmetry and alterity of
Levinas’s face-to-face relation, wherein the origin
of ethical obligation resides. As rules of collective
life, no economic program or model—and no
account thereof—can escape the third-party
orientation that reduces alterity to sameness, and
asymmetry to the reciprocity of two facing I’s.
Indeed, this fundamental di?erence in orientation,
from the asymmetric immediacy of the face-to-
face to the symmetry bestowed by the third party
gaze, is what for Levinas (1986) distinguishes eth-
ics from morality—a distinction that becomes cri-
tical so soon as we move to consider the
obligations of individuals in commerce with one
another. Levinas explains the distinction and its
import:
When I talk of ethics as a ‘dis-inter-ested-
ness’, I do not mean that it is indi?erence; I
simply mean that it is a form of vigilant pas-
sivity to the call of the other, which precedes
our interest in being, our inter-est, as a being-
in-the-world attached to property and appro-
priating what is other than itself to itself.
Morality is what governs the world of poli-
tical ‘inter-estedness,’ the social interchanges
between citizens in a society. Ethics, as the
extreme exposure and sensitivity of one sub-
jectivity to another, becomes morality and
hardens its skin so soon as we move into the
political world of the impersonal ‘third’—the
world of government, institutions, tribunals,
prisons, schools, committees, and so on (p.
29).
Yet even as we acknowledge the inevitable
‘‘hardening’’ of ethics to morality in the domain of
commercial life, we must also acknowledge that if
ethics is to have any import whatever, it must be
allowed to inform those structures of account-
ability by which we de?ne moral life, must com-
prise some part of the normative criteria by which
we evaluate and judge the behavior of ourselves
and others. Moral agency, in short, must surely be
answerable to the requirements of ethics. Again,
Levinas o?ers some guidance here. Speaking of
the institutions of the ‘impersonal third’ as the
‘ontological world,’ Levinas notes:
Of course we inhabit an ontological world of
technological mastery and political self-pre-
servation. Indeed, without these political and
technological structures of organization we
would not be able to feed mankind. This is
the great paradox of human existence: we
must use the ontological for the sake of the
other; to ensure the survival of the other we
must resort to the technico-political systems
of means and ends (p. 28).
The question, then, is how we might put the
economic system of means and ends more in the
service of the other, how we might ensure that in
economic life we hold ourselves accountable to the
other—not as a reciprocal subjectivity, but as one
whose being obligates us. This, I argue in closing,
suggests the necessity of fundamental changes in
our formalized systems of account.
9. Implications for ‘‘social accounting’’
It is no secret that accounting practices rely
heavily on the theory of economics in general and
566 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
the economic de?nition of ‘‘value’’ in particular
(see, for example, Cooper & Sherer, 1984; Gray,
1992; Hines, 1989; Lukka, 1990; Mouck, 1995;
Preston et al., 1995; Reiter, 1994, 1995, 1998; Tin-
ker et al., 1982; Thompson, 1998). Moreover,
accountants have shown little inclination to ques-
tion the appropriateness of this reliance, even
though, as Gray (1992) argues:
Any reasoning. . . that fails to explicitly
explore the in?uence of traditional economic
thinking seems, by default, to adopt the lim-
itations and assumptions of traditional eco-
nomics, and all the baggage of the status quo,
the world of business and the roles of organi-
zations that currently pervade our world (p.
402).
The reluctance of accountants to question the
adequacy of economic theory to accounting prac-
tice is of particular concern in light of the obser-
vation that it is the practice of accounting,
manifest in the activity of rendering accounts, that
enacts economic identity as intersubjectively con-
stituted and morally obligated. The concern arises
because, as I have argued, economic theory radi-
cally restricts the potential for intersubjective
relations, thereby also imposing radical restric-
tions on the exercise of accountability. In parti-
cular, any system of accountability that is
restricted to a purely economic rationale is inade-
quate to discharge the obligation to the Other
because, within economics, the very existence of
the Other is subordinated to the instrumental
purposes of the egoist self. This means, as I sug-
gested earlier, that the accountability enacted in
economic accounts reduces to an accounting-for-
itself that is inadequate to the ethical requirement
of accountability to the Other.
But if economic discourse cannot accommodate
the encounter with the Other, it does not follow
that economic life cannot accommodate it. To
take seriously Levinas’s ethical challenge is to
recognize, as Peperzak (1993) notes, that:
The moral perspective itself, the very relation
of intersubjective asymmetry, not only
demands an in?nite respect for somebody
who confronts me as (a) You; it also imposes
a general care for all human others whose
face and word I cannot perceive personally
(pp. 30–31).
I suggest that an ethically adequate account-
ability on the part of economic entities demands
an answerability to the Other that cannot be
accommodated in the objectifying and other-
denying discourse of neoclassical economics. This
is so because the discourse itself transmutes all
relations of intersubjectivity into relationships of
symmetry in which moral obligation reduces to
accounting for oneself. Extant accounting prac-
tices are therefore inadequate to re?ect account-
ability to the Other because the discourse in which
they are conceived and rendered constructs the
moral identity of the economic entity as answer-
able only to itself.
29
But the activities that the accountant reports
upon are of course far from naturally determined,
and instead re?ect value judgments on the part of
accountants about to whom and for what an
entity is responsible. Indeed, the responsibility to
make these judgments is explicitly recognized by
the Financial Accounting Standards Board, whose
‘‘Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts
No. 2’’ (1984) describes the activity of ?nancial
accounting to include ‘‘the selection of transac-
tions, events, and circumstances to be accounted
for’’ (p. 4040). Our judgments, however, are
informed nearly exclusively by the theoretical pre-
cepts of neoclassical economics. This means that
there will be no accounting to the other except as a
29
I would argue that an entity’s ?nancial statements con-
tribute to the discursive portrayal of the entity as an economic
actor, despite the much-debated di?erences between account-
ing income and economic income. This is because, without
regard to the conventions employed to produce the income
number, its role appears to be the same: to legitimate the
organization’s activities by way of the ?nancial results pro-
duced. The presumption is that pro?t-producing activity is a
legitimate pursuit for the entity to be engaged in, and that
pro?t legally earned is evidence that the ?rm is doing the right
things. In short, there is very little in extant ?nancial account-
ing practices that would serve to constitute the entity as obli-
gated to anything other than its own ?nancial interests, despite
departures from pure economic income.
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 567
contracting party, and, as well, that an other who
does not contract in the marketplace will not be
accounted to at all.
I suggest that to e?ect an accountability to
‘‘wider human and environmental purposes,’’ we
must make our systems of account more respon-
sive to the Other, both the other who stands out-
side of the market transactions of the economic
agent and the subjectivity of the other as Other
who, entering into economic transactions, is
transmuted into a commodity whose only worth
inheres in appropriation. This position suggests
the need for an enhanced social reporting for
employee groups, customers, suppliers, and other
parties with whom the economic entity contracts,
as well as environmental concerns
30
and others
with whom the entity does not contract.
The close association between what we account
for and what we are accountable to is a direct
consequence of the fact that to render an account
is to discharge accountability. As Arrington and
Francis (1993) remark, ‘‘the giving of economic
accounts [is] the medium through which claims
about economic responsibility, agency, and
accountability are achieved and made reasonable’’
(p. 112). This observation suggests that if eco-
nomic entities are to be held accountable to the
other in ways that exceed responsibility for their
own self-interested pursuits, then we as accoun-
tants are going to have to search for ways to
broaden the scope of the accounts that we prepare
of these actors. Indeed, this search has already
begun. In the accounting journals alone, there
exists a large and growing literature on social
accounting, environmental accounting, and
‘‘emancipatory’’ accounting. Such e?orts are
necessary because accountability to the other can-
not be achieved so long as the accounts by which
the moral agency of the entity is constituted
remain exclusively economic in content.
This idea is, after all, far from new. In the 1975
discussion paper prepared by the Accounting
Standards Steering Committee of the Institute of
Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, it
was recommended that the annual reports of cor-
porations re?ect the entities’ accountability to a
wide range of a?ected parties, including, of
course, the investor and creditor groups to whom
North American businesses presently and exclu-
sively account, but also employees, the govern-
ment, and the public, to name but a few (p. 17).
Moreover, the discussion paper identi?es the nat-
ure of a business’ accountability to each of these
groups, and provides examples of the types of
information that might be reported to discharge
this accountability. Similarly, numerous envir-
onmentalist accountants have suggested methods
of accounting for an economic entity’s steward-
ship of the environment, in ways that re?ect a
responsibility that exceeds the economic interests
of the entity. For if the discourse of economic
value cannot accommodate the other as Other, it
does not follow that economic life cannot. And it
does not follow that accountants cannot create
accountability in ways that acknowledge both the
value of the Other and the corresponding obliga-
tion to the Other that is owed by the economic
agent for whom we account.
Admittedly, this conclusion is not entirely com-
fortable, for the reason suggested above: to enact
a broader scope of accountability to the other
necessitates as well a broader scope of accounting
for the other, with all of the appropriative and
objectifying implications that this latter entails.
The discomfort arises because extant accounting
practices are informed by an economic rationale
that admits of the other only on condition of the
other’s appropriation in exchange or in use. To
expand the scope of accounting threatens, there-
30
The obligation to the Other seems also to imply a morality
of preservation with respect to the non-human natural world
that is owed to the Other, for whom I am responsible. Pre-
servation value, it is true, remains implicated in the economy of
use and appropriation, but at least it escapes at a theoretical
level the logic of exchange which would increase the ‘‘value’’ of
an environmental ‘‘resource’’ even as more and more of it is
destroyed. It also suggests that a value accrues to the natural
order even where that order has not yet been appropriated—as
in a standing forest. Perhaps for these reasons, some measure
of preservation value (or sustainability) is the accounting
practice favored by most environmentalist accountants who
insist that a value must be assigned to the environment (e.g.
Gray, 1992; Rubenstein, 1992). Indeed, as an anonymous
reviewer of this paper pointed out, it may be that a Levinasian
ethic of the Other suggests that all of the assets of a business
should be reconceived as obligations to present society or
future generations.
568 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
fore, to proliferate the objecti?cation of the other
that is entailed by the appropriative act (Cooper,
1992).
At the same time, however, accounting practices
enact accountability; in the absence of some
measure of accounting for, the other remains a
mere object of appropriation and will not be
accounted to at all. Consequently, I suggest that it
is strategically necessary to expand the accounts
we prepare in an e?ort to be more accountable to
the other. Accounting, as Cooper (1992) correctly
notes, does not stand outside of the wider socio-
political economy. Consequently, there is no point
of departure for an elaboration of an accounting
that is not implicated in this economy. But there is
no point of departure outside of accounting that is
not implicated as well; to presume otherwise is, in
my opinion, to radically underestimate the con-
stitutive power of dominant discursive practices.
To be sure, accountants should be wary of per-
petrating the perversion by economic logic of an
ever-expanding sphere of human existence. But
this perversion, I submit, is a consequence of the
power of economic discourse to shape the way we
understand ourselves, the other, and the social
world we share. By restraining the scope of our
accountings we can avoid abetting this process,
but we cannot thereby check it. By contrast, I
argue, an expansion in the scope of our account-
ings that proceeds as far as possible to e?ect an
accountability to the Other possesses the potential
to challenge the monologic of economic appro-
priation, and to begin thereby to e?ect a change in
the moral identity of the economic agents for
whom we account.
10. Conclusion
The discourse of economics legitimates the dis-
charge of accountability by exclusive reference to
the interests of the economic agent. At all levels of
economic life, the absence of accountability to the
Other permits the unrestrained pursuit of eco-
nomic goals, and threatens, as Schweiker (1993)
notes, to make human beings ‘‘slaves to [our] own
corporate and economic creations’’ (p. 231).
Indeed, it is this concern that has compelled
Buarque (1993) to suggest that economics is in
need of a regulatory ethic that restricts its appli-
cation in situations where signi?cant and harmful
side e?ects are likely to occur. Such an ethic would
impose a corresponding accountability on the
economic agent to the community of others with
whom the agent is intersubjectively situated.
As Schweiker has shown, economic agents
properly assume accountability to a ‘‘wider scope
of good’’ than their own by virtue of the fact that
their identities as economic agents are inter-
subjectively constituted. The discourse of eco-
nomics, however, successfully dispels the
compulsory force of the accountability obligation
by subsuming the intersubjective good in the pur-
suit of private economic gain. This move, e?ected
by the ethical presuppositions of the discourse
itself, ensures that the self-interest of economic
agents carries the full normative force of moral
probity. Moreoever, this moral weight attaches to
self interest in the full range of human agency—
from the narrowly private or interpersonal, to the
collective activities of corporations and other
economic enterprises.
To achieve a wider obligation to accountability
on the part of economic agents, what is needed is
an ethic that is incapable of assimilation to the
logic of economics. However, if such an ethic is
successfully to compete with economic discourse,
it cannot be merely regulatory or prohibitive in its
aim, but must rather comprise a discourse of
human identity that is irreducibly distinct from
economic man, and it must be capable of infusing
our self-understanding as economic subjects with a
moral obligation that exceeds our own self-inter-
est. This is so, I argue, because as a discourse,
economic theory can never be merely descriptive,
but rather it always already serves to constitute the
human subject as a sovereign, self-interested max-
imizer. But when all human subjects are so con-
strued, self-interest becomes the means to the
attainment not only of the actor’s private good,
but of the collective or interpersonal good as well.
In other words, economics is not an ethically neu-
tral discipline that might be brought to moral rec-
titude by the simple addition of a few regulatory
or prohibitive norms; rather, and more
insidiously, economic theory ?rst creates a com-
T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573 569
munity of sovereign and independent subjects, and
then instantiates those ethical norms and moral
codes appropriate to such a community. So long
as the discourse that constitutes the economic
subject remains unchallenged, so too will the
ethics that govern that subject.
As a discourse both of what it means to be a
human subject and of what ethics demands of the
human subject, Levinas’s project seems to me to
provide a point of resistance to the imperialism of
economic discourse. Levinas’s project, which
grounds ethics in the encounter with the Other, is
resistant to the imperialism of economic theory for
two reasons. First, in Levinas’s metaphysics, the
Other confronts the self as a non-reciprocal sub-
jectivity whose very being forbids the commodi?-
cation and objecti?cation of the economic
relationship. Second, this non-reciprocity instates
an asymmetry in the self-other relationship that
subordinates the self to the Other and hence per-
mits the Other to make claims on the self. This
latter consequence is crucial because it disrupts the
self-interested intentionality that de?nes the very
being of the economic subject, and supplants it
with a compulsion or imperative that is irreducible
to the instrumental motives of economic man.
But if Levinas’s ethical project o?ers a point of
resistance to the imperialism of economic theory,
it does not seek to supplant the theory. For as
Levinas appreciates, the institutions of social,
political, and economic life necessarily impose a
reciprocity and equality among subjects that
destroys the asymmetry of the interpersonal ethi-
cal relation. As a result, the moral codes that
govern these spheres of collective life necessarily
infuse both the subject and the other with an
equality and sovereignty for which economic doc-
trine is uniquely well suited. What Levinas’s pro-
ject does highlight, however, is that the equality
and reciprocity on which our economic institu-
tions are based is derivative of the fundamental
asymmetry of the ethical face-to-face. As a result,
economic institutions and agents also owe an
obligation to the other that cannot be discharged
by the pursuit of private economic interests. This
obligation is not discretionary; it is transcendent
of the very constitution of the economic agent.
From a Levinasian perspective, therefore, the
claim of the other always already supersedes the
economic interests of the self.
I have argued that economic theory needs to be
counterbalanced by an ethical discourse such as
Levinas o?ers that takes seriously the obligation
to the other. Such a discourse is necessary if we are
to hold economic agents accountable to a wider
scope of good than their own private interests. But
to e?ect this wider accountability will require
changes in those systems of account by which
economic accountability is discharged. This, I
have argued, requires the institution of accounting
practices that seek to make our economic institu-
tions more accountable to the needs of the other.
To do this, it is necessary to broaden the scope of
our accounting to re?ect the moral responsibility
that is owed by the economic agent to parties
other than the entity’s owners.
To be sure, any ‘‘wider’’ structure of account-
ability that is imposed by accountants will neces-
sarily be removed from the immediacy of the face-
to-face ethical obligation that it seeks to recognize.
As what is quite literally a third-party reconstruc-
tion, there clearly is no form of accounting that
can capture the unwilled response to the other that
forms the genuine ethical relation to the other. Yet
accountants can help to make our economic insti-
tutions more responsive to the other, by seeking an
accountability that formally recognizes the obli-
gation to the other– even if it does not and cannot
re?ect the originary relationship from which this
obligation derives. Jeremy Barris (1990, p. 206)
suggests the spirit in which we might try:
We are not in a position to know whether the
di?culty, when we’re dealing with a whole
understanding, can be solved or not. The only
way to solve it is to assume that it’s already
solved, and then go ahead and ?nd out what
one has assumed.
This is circular, but that’s not the point.
The point is that one makes a decision either
way: one takes a risk that it can be solved, and
by so doing ensures that it will be; or one takes
the risk that it can’t be solved, and by so doing
ensures that it will not be. Either way is circular.
570 T. Shearer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 27 (2002) 541–573
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following individuals for
comments, critique, advice, and encouragement:
Deirdre McCloskey, Jere Francis, David Klemm,
David Cooper, Michael Gibbins, and Norman
Macintosh. Each has her or his complaint with the
analysis, for the shortcomings of which I take full
responsibility.
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