Description
This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New
York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of
transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of accountability
as subjection explored through Lacan’s account of the social dynamics of recognition,
and Freud’s account of guilt. This analysis then informs an exploration of what is
argued to be our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency as a form of accountability.
The final section of the paper investigates the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ form of
accountability, grounded in an ethic of humility and generosity, made possible by a conscious
acknowledgement of the ways in which I can never quite know what it is that I
am doing.
No one is perfect: The limits of transparency and an ethic
for ‘intelligent’ accountability
John Roberts
*
Faculty of Economics and Business, Accounting Discipline, University of Sydney, Building H69, Cnr. Codrington and Rose Streets, Darlington NSW 2006, Australia
a b s t r a c t
This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New
York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of
transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of account-
ability as subjection explored through Lacan’s account of the social dynamics of recogni-
tion, and Freud’s account of guilt. This analysis then informs an exploration of what is
argued to be our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency as a form of accountability.
The ?nal section of the paper investigates the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ form of
accountability, grounded in an ethic of humility and generosity, made possible by a con-
scious acknowledgement of the ways in which I can never quite know what it is that I
am doing.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Now that the tide has gone out, the state of undress of
many participants in ?nancial markets is there for all to
see: bare bottoms all over the place. Nobody can be proud
of some of the ugliness that this credit crisis has exposed.
Transparency requirements have many dimensions within
the ?nancial market regulatory framework. . . In appropri-
ate circumstances, transparency has a useful role to play;
for example, when it comes to dealing with opaque ?nan-
cial instruments. But I have always been of the view that
when the stability of a ?nancial institution is at risk, the
situation is best resolved behind closed doors. Unfortu-
nately, in recent weeks, gold-plated transparency rules
stood in the way of a quiet resolution of a problem before
it became a crisis. The result was that transparency rules
that were intended to underpin investor con?dence, when
put to the test, actually promoted investor panic. It would
surely be irresponsible for the regulators not to re?ect on
this experience and not to draw the appropriate lessons.
Clearly transparency that culminates in panic, followed
by a rescue, followed by the proliferation of moral hazard
is transparency that we would be better off without.
Charlie McCreevy, European Internal Market Commis-
sioner, 26 October 2007.
The context for the above re?ections was the rules that
prevented Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England,
from discretely intervening as covert lender of last resort
to forestall a run on the Northern Rock Bank. I have intro-
duced them here since they serve as a summary of the
themes that I wish to explore in the paper that follows.
On the one hand, these comments rehearse the positive
potentials of transparency as a regulatory instrument; the
assumed capacities of transparency to counter opaqueness
and, as McCreevy puts it, to thereby ‘underpin’ investor
con?dence. This is precisely the promise of transparency
as a mechanism of accountability; to cast light upon what
would otherwise remain obscure or invisible, and to do so
in order to provide the basis for con?dence for distant oth-
ers. What must be observed ?rst is that regulators have in-
vested heavily in the potentials of transparency; the rules
have been ‘gold plated’ as if an ideal of complete transpar-
ency is being pursued. We seem to believe in transparency,
and with every failure of governance, we have been prone
to invest in yet further transparency as the assumed
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.04.005
* Fax: +61 2 9351 6638.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
remedy for all failures. This paper starts from the counter
assumption that the ideal of a complete transparency is
an impossible fantasy, but one that is nevertheless widely
shared.
The ideal of transparency pretends to a mere making
visible. But what McCreevy describes here is what we
might call the ‘performativity’ of transparency (MacKenzie,
2006). In this instance transparency did not reassure but
rather was the cause of panic, crisis and moral hazard.
Transparency has unintended effects such that the making
visible starts to change that which is rendered transparent.
In what follows I want to explore quite how transparency
works back upon those subject to it in ways that are often
counter productive, or at least far exceeds the passive im-
age of a simple making visible.
In setting out to explore the effects of transparency on
the subject some clues can be taken from McCreevy’s refer-
ence to ‘pride’, ‘bare bottoms’ and ‘ugliness’. Transparency
contains these dual and contrasting potentials and perhaps
in binary form; it promises and threatens to reveal or dis-
cover the self as good or bad, clothed or naked, beautiful or
ugly. In what follows, I explore how transparency works to
advertise an ideal against which we will always fail so that
it plays with my fears of being exposed and humiliated
whilst at the same time encouraging me to take pride in
what is disclosed.
The ?nal focus of the paper concerns the kind of
accountability that McCreevy suggests should go on ‘be-
hind closed doors’. Once doors are closed and transparency
ceases to be a possibility then we are obliged to trust those
on the other side, and yet the whole point of transparency
is to obviate the need for such trust or to furnish distant
others with good reasons for such trust. The implication
of McCreevy’s comments is that only exceptional and very
important matters should escape the obligations of trans-
parency – in this case global ?nancial stability. In contrast,
here I seek to develop a more nuanced view of transpar-
ency’s capabilities and limitations, and suggest that at best
it should serve as a supplement to the neglected potentials
of what O’Neill (2002) calls ‘intelligent’ accountability.
Whilst the metaphor of transparency suggests the
capacity to see within or behind closed doors – to abolish
such private and con?dential space – in practical terms
the effects of transparency depend upon how it changes
conduct behind closed doors. In what follows I trace two
contrasting potentials. The positive and arguably essential
function of transparency is to counter the negative poten-
tials of local collusion for distant others. As O’Neill (2006)
argues, by giving a local presence to the interests of distant
others, transparency can serve as a very effective ‘antidote’
to secrecy. But in what follows I argue that if we rely only
on transparency as a form of accountability then these po-
sitive effects are often countered by serious distortions to
communication which, paradoxically, serve to weaken
the effectiveness of accountability. Drawing upon psycho-
analytic accounts of recognition and guilt, I argue that
the subjective correlate of the pursuit of an ever more com-
plete transparency is often the embrace of an ideal of a per-
fect-able and fully transparent self. I argue that
accountability is then typically self absorbed and driven
by the narcissistic imperative to garner praise/reward to
the self or absolve the self of blame, rather than by the col-
lective need to manage organisational interdependencies.
In contrast to these self-defensive or assertive poten-
tials of accountability as transparency, I then seek to ex-
plore the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ and
compassionate formof accountability grounded in the con-
scious acknowledgement of the impossibility of this ideal
of a self that is fully transparent to itself and others.
The stimulus for writing this paper came from reading
Butler’s (2005) book Giving an Account of Oneself. Here But-
ler argues that it is simply impossible to give a full account
of oneself; any account fails by virtue of that which is
unavoidably opaque to the self both in relation to the ori-
gins and drivers of my own agency and the social norms
and categories which furnish me with the frames within
which I structure any account. Rather than taking this as
an evidence of a sort of moral nihilism, she argues that
the conscious acknowledgement of the impossibility of a
self that is fully transparent to itself (and therefore others)
could be the basis for a very different sense of responsibil-
ity and ethics grounded in humility and generosity, which
in turn might allow for a very different enactment of
accountability.
In developing these arguments Butler draws very
widely upon both psychoanalytic theory and philosophy,
and in the context of this paper I can only follow some of
the strands of her argument. The paper begins with an
exploration of the importance and complexity of the prac-
tice of accountability. Here I follow Butler’s reading of
Freud on the nature of guilt and of Lacan on recognition
to capture some of the emotional force and paranoia which
is arguably a routine part of the moment of being held to
account. The paper then moves to explore the operation
of transparency as a form of accountability within organi-
sations. Drawing upon the existing literature I observe
both the allure of the idea(l) of a complete transparency
and the typically perverse organisational consequences
that ?ow from the pursuit of this. The themes of recogni-
tion and guilt are used to explore what is argued to be
our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency. In the ?-
nal substantive part of the paper I return to Butler’s analy-
sis of why it is impossible to give a full account of oneself,
and the Levinasian version of ethics through which she
seeks to outline the potential for an arguably more realistic
and compassionate practice of accountability.
The scene of accountability; subjection, guilt and
recognition
Accountability as subjection
One of the resources for Butler’s exploration of account-
ability is Althusser’s version of accountability as interpella-
tion (Althusser, 1971). Althusser imagines a street scene in
which an individual is hailed with a ‘Hey, you there!’ It is
possibly a policeman who does the hailing and its effect
is that the hailed person turns around. For Althusser this
interpellation and its resultant turning is an allegory for
the creation of the subject; in turning the individual ‘be-
comes a subject’. Subject here has its full ambiguity as both
958 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
‘(1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who sub-
mits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all
freedom except that of freely accepting his submission’
(1971).
The question Althusser then pursues concerns what is
compelling about this interpellation and its consequent
turning. He points to two factors that together produce this
effect. Guilt, he suggests, is one part of what makes for this
turning. It is in this sense a guilty turning to face the law;
or a ?nding of oneself as already guilty in the face of the
law. Butler suggests that this turning towards the law is
also a turning against the self; that the ‘turn towards the
law is in this respect a turning back on oneself that consti-
tutes the movement of conscience’ (1997, p.107). But, fol-
lowing Lacan, Althusser suggests that it is also recognition
that is at work here; he has recognised that the hail was
‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who
was hailed’ (and not someone else). Or as Butler puts it,
what is compelling in accountability, and what possibly
blunts the critical interrogation of the law, is that it prom-
ises identity (Butler, 1997).
So already we can say that rather than a mere giving of
an account by an already formed subject, accountability is
the condition of becoming a subject who might be able to
give an account. It is the endlessly repeated moment of
subjection. We can see why the discussion of power is
so often accompanied by concerns for accountability since
power provides an escape from subjection; that a person
or group becomes a law unto itself (Monks & Minnow,
1991). However, subjection also seeks to secure my recog-
nition by this big Other as a guarantor of my status as a
subject. In order to open up our understanding of account-
ability in this fuller sense in what follows I want to ex-
plore the theorisation of recognition and guilt as these
inform Althusser and Butler’s discussion of the force of
accountability. Whilst the psychoanalytic ideas they fol-
low are complex, my aim is to more adequately ground
our understanding of the practice of accountability, as
the basis for the subsequent exploration of the limits of
transparency as a form of organisational accountability,
and the potential for a more intelligent practice of
accountability.
Recognition
To say that recognition is at stake in processes of
accountability seems important but non-controversial.
However, the subjection in this process in part lies in the
way in which accountability involves being recognised on
the other’s terms. Lacan begins his account of these pro-
cesses and indeed of the origins of subjectivity through
an analysis of what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ of develop-
ment in the young infant.
‘what demonstrates the phenomenon of recognition,
which involves subjectivity, are the signs of triumphant
jubilation and playful discovery that characterise, from
the sixth month, the child’s encounter with his image in
the mirror. This behaviour contrasts strikingly with the
indifference shown even by animals that perceive this
image, the chimpanzee for example, when they have
tested its objectal vanity. . .’ (1977, p.18).
Here Lacan pictures a child, six to eighteen months old,
in front of the mirror. The child is at this point still physi-
cally dependent and is yet to acquire language and its asso-
ciated distinctions between self and other, past and future.
He or she is simply immersed in the bodily experience of
being in the world. His ?rst version implied that the child
was on his or her own in front of the mirror; later accounts
had the child with an approving and encouraging parent
(Fink, 1997). What Lacan insists is a peculiarly human trait
is the moment of recognition that occurs in this scene; the
child recognises as his own the image in the mirror which
gives him or her the ?rst experience of seemingly ‘seeing
oneself seeing oneself’. Chimpanzees, he suggests, see only
a potential rival in the mirror but then quickly become
bored by the image once it is discovered to be empty. By
contrast the child is jubilant at this experience of self rec-
ognition. Part of this jubilation is the hint of mastery/con-
trol that is involved in the re?ection; the external image
moves as if in response to the child’s movement. Lacan
contrasts the physical immaturity of the child with this
apparent experience of mastery; as such the identi?cation
of self with the image hints at the future potentials of the
self as agent.
For Lacan the child’s identi?cation with the image is the
founding moment of the ego. Freud had talked of the ego as
a bodily ego or the projection of a surface. Lacan’s analysis
conceives of this process not so much as a projection but as
a ?nding or recognising of oneself in the image. This identi-
?cation then serves as a unifying image around which the
child can begin to organise experience. It paves the way for
the acquisition of language, and future capacities for
re?exivity and agency. But these positive elements are
tempered by Lacan through an exploration of this ?rst mo-
ment of recognition as also an experience of alienation.
Some of this alienation is no doubt welcome; whilst
lived experience for the child knows of no separation be-
tween subject and object, the mirror image, and identi?ca-
tion with the image, suggests a self that is unitary and
enclosed. Identifying with the mirror image relocates the
self from a lived immersion in the body out into the image;
the self is grasped as it were from the outside. Lacan insists
here that recognition always involves what he calls a fate-
ful ‘meconnaissance’ or misrecognition; it is as if our very
existence is misplaced out into the ephemeral substance
of a mere re?ection. In this sense recognition is a process
in which we humans are prone to be captured by the ‘lure’
of the image in which we seek, ?nd and lose ourselves. The
alienation also goes further, for Lacan insists that in the im-
age we misrecognise the self by coming to conceive of the
self as if I were an entity or object of substance; the image
of the self as an heroic statue. We grasp the self as substan-
tial and then spend the rest of our lives trying to make a
reality of this misrecognised sense of self, so that this ?rst
identi?cation is also the beginnings of what Lacan calls the
‘armour of alienating identity’.
Whilst the mirror stage is offered as the founding mo-
ment of the ego and subjectivity by Lacan, the force of
his analysis only comes into its own when the scene is
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 959
transposed to inter-personal processes of recognition. One
infamous Lacanian formulation of this is that desire is al-
ways the desire of/for the other. Others too offer us the
same lure of recognition. In the mirror the mistake is to lo-
cate the self’s existence in the image. Socially and organi-
sationally recognition acquires a similar existential force
for my very existence seems to depend upon recognition
by others. In contrast to the mirror, however, there is al-
ways something enigmatic about the response of the
other; a permanent question mark as to what exactly the
other wants of me. The social dynamic of recognition is
therefore one in which I am constantly seeking to make
myself into the object of the other’s desire, and the force
of recognition as we pursue it in this way lies precisely
in the fact that I have misplaced my very existence into
the image. I ?nd myself in the response of the other and,
enigmatic as it is, I am prone for the sake of their recogni-
tion to seek to make myself into what will allow me to be
recognised by the other. Again we can say that the look of
the other has the power to capture; it is a constant lure. La-
can explains both love and aggression in these terms. Love
from this perspective is ‘the desire to be loved’ (1979,
p.253) whilst aggression is explained in terms of a compet-
itive rivalry for the approving look of the other; as if atten-
tion given to another might rob me of my very existence
(1979, p.116).
So if we return to Althusser’s street scene of interpella-
tion, part of what produces this turning towards the other
is the promise of authoritative recognition. But the price of
such recognition, upon which my very existence seems to
depend, is the need to make myself into the object of the
other’s desire. My sense of self and the value of myself
are put into play in accountability; it is as if, in order to ex-
ist, I must secure others’ recognition. The social dynamic of
recognition in accountability threatens to disturb the fun-
damental misrecognition of the self as coherent and
autonomous.
The genesis of guilt
Let us now turn to look at the other element within
interpellation that, as it were, compels me into turning
around – the dynamics of guilt. Here I want to introduce
Freud’s account of the differentiation of the ego into the
‘ego’ and ‘ego-ideal’ or ‘super-ego’. Freud’s ?rst discussion
of the ego ideal is in his 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism’. There
are strong resonances here with Lacan’s later view of the
mirror stage. Primary narcissism, Freud insists, is dif?cult
to observe directly but can be inferred in the affectionate
attitude of parents towards their children. As he puts it:-
‘they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection
to the child – which sober observation would ?nd no
occasion to do – and to conceal and forget all his short-
comings. . . Moreover they are inclined to suspend in
the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acqui-
sitions which their own narcissism has been forced to
respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privi-
leges which were long ago given up by themselves. The
child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall
not be subject to the necessities which they have recog-
nised as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation
of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not
touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be
abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the cen-
tre and core of creation – ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we
once fancied ourselves’ (1984, p.87).
The term that Freud gives to this inferred primary nar-
cissism is the ‘ideal ego’. This ?gure is worth observing in
detail for it is about a founding conception of the self as al-
ready perfect; a perfection that is of course an idealisation
or over valuation of the self ‘aggrandized and exalted in the
subject’s mind’. Part of the genesis of rage lies in any per-
ception that threatens this imagined perfection. It is argu-
ably a resource, a source of con?dence to be drawn upon in
later life, but also in itself deadly since it recognises no
need for development, learning, nor indeed any obligation
or need for accountability to others. It is a long-lost mo-
ment of perfection; of a self that can do no wrong.
Freud suggests that such is the allure of this sense of
perfection that we are incapable of giving it up. He sug-
gests that as we grow up and are disturbed by the admoni-
tions of others and by our own critical judgment so that we
cannot retain that perfection, we seek to recover it in the
form of what he calls an ‘ego ideal’; an ideal set up within
the self. At this point Freud speaks not of the ‘super-ego’
but only of some ‘special psychical agency’ whose role is
to see that ‘narcissistic satisfaction fromthe ego ideal is en-
sured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches
the actual ego and measures it by that ideal’ (1984, p.89).
He notes the paranoid sense of being watched and super-
vised with which this is associated; ‘a power of this kind,
watching, discovering, and criticising all our intentions,
does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in nor-
mal life’ (1984, p.90).
The further development of Freud’s ideas about the
‘ego-ideal/super-ego’ came in two subsequent papers. In
‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud argues that this differentiation
of the ego takes place through a process of ‘identi?cation’
which he sees as the ‘earliest expression of an emotional
tie with another person’. He suggests that identi?cation
‘behaves like a derivative of the ?rst, oral phase of the
organisation of the libido, in which an object that we long
for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way
annihilated as such’ (1984, p.135). Identi?cation is con-
trasted with ‘object choice’; the desire for a relationship
with another. Freud suggests that identi?cation is a regres-
sive way in which we cope with the loss of an object or
relationship through, as it were, installing the lost object
within the ego. In later life identi?cation can arise ‘with
any newperception of a common quality shared with some
other person’, but in childhood parental ?gures are the fo-
cus of our identi?cations.
Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus complex is hopefully too
well known to dwell upon here. Freud suggests that for the
little boy identi?cation with the father involves taking the
father as an ideal that he would like to be like and grow up
to be. The boy’s growing attachment to the mother, how-
ever, then creates a ‘hostile colouring’ to the identi?cation
with the father which ‘changes into a wish to get rid of the
father in order to take his place with his mother’ (1984,
960 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
p.371). In this simple form the resolution of Oedipus is rea-
lised through repression of the wish for the mother and
rivalry with the father, which is achieved through an inten-
si?cation of the identi?cation with the father. It is this
identi?cation that forms the ego ideal. In this way, for
Freud, the ‘ego ideal’ is the heir to the Oedipus complex.
1
As such it has a double aspect as both an ideal of what
one ought to be like and a prohibition of what one may
not do.
‘As a child grows up, the role of the father is carried on
by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions
and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and
continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise moral
censorship. The tension between the demands of con-
science and the actual performance of the ego is experi-
enced as a sense of guilt’ (1984, p.377).
This strictly psychological account of the Oedipal roots
of the ego ideal/super-ego is mirrored in the more socio-
logical account Freud gives of the primal horde in ‘Group
Psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (Freud, 1985). The
de?ning feature of group as opposed to individual psychol-
ogy, for Freud, lies in the intensi?cation of affect and dim-
inution of the powers of the intellect once we are members
of a group. The dynamics of group psychology are again
tied to processes of identi?cation but here it is the leader
or ‘leading idea’ that, he suggests, can take the place
of the ego ideal for members of a group. This then provides
the basis for an identi?cation amongst the members of the
group on the basis of their sharing of a common ideal (see
Casey, 1999; Swartz, 1990 for their discussions of the oper-
ation of an ‘organisation ideal’).
Recognition, guilt and accountability
So how do these psychoanalytic views of processes of
recognition and guilt help us to understand the complexity
and dynamic of accountability as a social practice, and in-
deed our understanding of ethics? Perhaps at its simplest
level they can be taken as a description of the inter- and in-
tra-personal processes of accountability. The two are
inseparable. Accountability is never just a social relation-
ship, nor purely an internal relationship. Instead, each re-
?ects and animates the other. Intra-personally
accountability involves a re?exive relationship with the
self in which I judge myself against an ideal that, through
identi?cation, I take as my standard of what I should, and
should not be and do. Conscience is in this sense the ideal
against which I judge myself. However, in contrast to a
Foucauldian account of ethics, this psychoanalytic account
suggests and explains something of the cruelty (and plea-
sure) that we can enact upon ourselves as part of
accountability.
In so far as we identify with this ideal it is a demand for
perfection. Ethics then appears in the less than obvious
form of a violent attack upon the self; an endlessly critical
agency through which we berate the self for being less
than we should be. Whilst consciously the severity of con-
science is typically associated with high ethical ideals
which Freud suggests can be the source of humility, his
analysis also ties such high ideals to the strength of an ori-
ginal violent rivalry, which, through identi?cation, is now
turned back upon the self. Such unconscious rivalry/guilt/
envy is then prone to reappear in the formof a transference
within authority relationships in later adult life so that to
each new authority relationship I bring the emotional
and often unconscious residues of earlier parental relation-
ships (Zaleznick & Kets de Vries, 1985).
It is perhaps for this reason that the scene of account-
ability is almost invariably highly charged emotionally
and includes an anxious compulsion to ‘acquit oneself’
(Butler, 1997). A conscious account of conscience or guilt
could be simply about going against or failing to meet
some personal moral standard. The Freudian account of
guilt as the gap between ideal and reality contains much
of this sense but also explains the emotional excess in con-
science; its paranoid edges. So accountability frequently
arouses both longings for love and acceptance and parallel
fears of being attacked and turned upon, and I would argue
that it is this emotional edge to accountability that gives it
its force. There is often something of an emotional short
circuit at work in accountability such that the present
comes to be imbued with these earlier emotional reso-
nances. This in turn can prove somewhat disabling within
accountability. I am prone to rehearse all sorts of argu-
ments with the powerful in my mind only to ?nd myself,
for the sake of their recognition, being graciously syco-
phantic once in their presence. It seemingly requires re-
serves of courage to traverse these fantasies and risk
speaking truth to power.
Then there is the ideal itself. Perhaps in my saner mo-
ments I can recognise an ideal for what it is – something
that by de?nition is not realistic. Yet my own narcissism
encourages me to expect only the best from myself and
still be unsatis?ed. Is this not the impossible meaning
and allure of the recent organisational demand for ‘contin-
uous improvement’ – that good will never be good en-
ough? The ideal also appears in what we project, or are
prone to project onto our leaders; a projection that will al-
ways disappoint but which nevertheless leads us to end-
lessly seek the new messiah (Bion, 1961). In a recent
book on the death of Freud, Edmundson (2007) argues
forcefully that Freud’s concerns were with authority gone
bad; our desire to grasp after the tyranny of leadership pre-
cisely because of the recognition it confers and the release
it offers us from our normal con?icts and ambivalences.
Finally there is the question of how recognition and
guilt work in relation to each other. Giddens (1991) draws
a sharp distinction between guilt and shame, but to my
mind the two processes are interwoven. Freud and Lacan
each offer different versions of narcissism and yet the rec-
ognition we crave typically has the form of an idealised
version of the self. That we must endlessly fail against
the standard of an ideal then makes accountability into a
1
The Lacanian version of Oedipus seeks to avoid the essentialism of
Freud’s account whilst insisting on the importance for development of the
intervention of a third into the dyad of the mother–child relationship. In
Lacan’s account the father is an incarnation or delegate of the ‘symbolic
father’ who represents the law to which all are subject. Only this intrusion
frees the child to assume his or her place in the symbolic order. For a lucid
account of the ambivalent relationship between feminist writers and Lacan
see Grosz (1990).
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 961
potentially very painful process for what am I to do with all
that is inadequate in the self.
In the sections that follow I explore how these themes
get played out in processes of organisational accountabil-
ity; ?rst in the allure of the idea(l) of transparency and
the ethical violence and moral narcissism that it induces,
and second, in Butler’s alternative and possibly more real-
istic conception of ethics as humility and generosity to-
wards both oneself and others in a process of
accountability that embraces rather than seeks to deny
that I never quite know what it is that I am doing.
Accountability as transparency
‘The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible
for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central
point would be both a source of light illuminating every-
thing that.. must be known, a perfect eye that nothing
would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would
be turned’ (Foucault, 1979, p.173).
The possibility of transparency, and indeed of a com-
plete transparency, is an alluring but also terrifying idea(l).
Its dictionary de?nition offers some sight of this. In its lit-
eral, physical sense transparency is about the ability of
light to pass through something so that objects behind it
can be seen. McCreevy’s closed doors in other words, can
with the appropriate technology be rendered see-through.
But as Foucault suggests it also evokes the spectre of an all
seeing and all knowing God. Part of the allure of transpar-
ency is that it seems to promise the user such omniscience
at the same time as it makes him or her subject to such a
terrifying scrutiny; albeit that this is now to be realised
through the mundane mechanisms of organisational
transparency.
For our purposes here the technology is accounting and
its capacities to allow us to see behind or within the corpo-
rate entity. The core image is of casting light into shadows
that allows others to see. Accounting’s claim in relation to
producing a ‘true and fair’ view of organisational results is
presumably pertinent here. In this literal sense the prepa-
ration and publication of Accounts can be seen as account-
ability for, as transparency, all that accountability requires
is this laying bare or making visible of ‘what is’.
The force of this metaphor of laying bare also offers
some explanation for the endless elaboration of transpar-
ency. It suggests that any failure of governance can be rem-
edied through yet more transparency – greater disclosure
or new objects of disclosure – as if the solution lies simply
in ?nding ways of seeing more sharply or more completely.
This is the logic that Power ?rst explored in the ‘audit
explosion’ and the faith that the following quote from Gray
expresses in relation to the potential of greater transpar-
ency to create environmental responsibility.
‘The development of accountability. . . increases the
transparency of organisations. That is it increases
the number of things that are made visible, increases
the number of ways in which things are made visible,
and in doing so encourages a greater openness. The
inside of the organisation becomes more visible, that
is transparent’ (1992, p.415).
In recent years, there has been a constant elaboration of
new forms of ?nancial and non-?nancial disclosures by
organisations to their stakeholders, arguably re?ecting
our growing faith in transparency as a source of trust for
distant others. Yet as Power has more recently observed,
in turning organisations ‘inside out’ transparency has also
created a new ideal of organisational ‘self-control and
self-observation’ (2007, p.60). Power traces the develop-
ment of this new ideal of auditable (self) governance in
the emergence of new high level organisational processes
and systems of internal control and risk management.
But the ideal of self control, framed as ‘empowerment’
and ‘accountability’, has arguably come to achieve a perva-
sive presence at every level of organisations (Ogden, Glais-
er, & Marginson, 2006). From a managerial perspective,
Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard (1992) embodies
a faith in the potentials for enhanced control offered by
the extension of transparency to new domains. Whilst
from a more critical perspective, Miller and O’Leary’s
(1994) Caterpillar study describes the multiple and shifting
initiatives and programmes, driven by an ideal of ‘pure
customer driven manufacturing’, and enforced by new vis-
ibilities like competitor benchmarking, through which a
‘fundamental transformation of the ?eld of accountability
within the plant’ was being attempted. More intimately
yet, Townley’s (1993) Foucauldian account of modern
HRM practices observes the raft of processes of examina-
tion – selection, training, development, appraisal and feed-
back – through which ideals for employee conduct are
advertised and then enforced. In sum, our increasing
investment in the technologies of transparency suggests
a deep and enduring belief that transparency is suf?cient
to realise organisational (self) control.
At the same time, however, and in seeming contradic-
tion to this belief in transparency, lie all the ways in which
we also seem to know that the allure of transparency is
false or misleading. We know, for example, that the meta-
phor of shedding light is a gross simpli?cation of the com-
plex labour that is involved in the manufacture of
transparency (Chua, 1995). Even in positivist theory,
accounting as an instrument of representation depends
upon complex processes of quanti?cation and associated
methodological rigour. Constructivist accounts of mea-
surement complicate matters further in so far as they insist
that measurement itself is implicated in the constitution of
its objects, and is inseparable from social/political interests
which invest in it as an instrument of control (McKernan,
2007; Power, 2004; Robson, 1992).
Strathern (2000) seeks to puncture the illusion of trans-
parency by asking ‘what does visibility conceal’. She ob-
serves that transparency typically ‘works backwards’
from categories of relevance which are assumed to be
‘known in advance’ to the measurement of evidence in
terms of these categories. This explains part of our discom-
fort with transparency for at best its categories seem only
half relevant to our more ?nely grained technical, personal
and local knowledge. Transparency then becomes account-
ability by turning measures into targets; ‘the system of
measurement into a device that also sets the ideal levels
of attainment’. Again this is a vital move which, by means
of incentives and sanctions, transforms a mere making
962 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
visible into a norm against which I will be judged and
should judge myself. In reality, however, Strathern sug-
gests that transparency involves processes of abstraction
and de-contextualisation that merely conceal the real
workings of the institution; ‘its social structure, cultural
values, and modes of organisation’ much of which is
embedded in tacit, shared but taken for granted knowledge
(Strathern, 2004). Transparency from this perspective in-
volves a sort of masking of the complexity of organisa-
tional reality and its reduction to a few simple indicators.
But if the organisational production of transparency is
complex and laborious, and if it also involves radical
abstraction from context, its failings are perhaps most
obvious in its often perverse organisational effects.
Power’s seminal account of such potentials in The Audit
Society (1997) suggests two possible paths of failure in
relation to the transparency created by performance
audits. The ?rst involves a process of ‘decoupling’ where
transparency is managed in such a way as to project the
appearance of control externally whilst leaving actual
operational ef?ciency untouched. Transparency here is a
mere theatre of good performance manufactured for others
but decoupled from actual performance. At the other ex-
treme lies the possibility for what Power terms ‘coloniza-
tion’ in which the effects of audit/transparency ‘penetrate
deep into the core of operational practices’ and result in
‘the creation over time of new mentalities, new incentives
and perceptions of signi?cance’. The danger he explores
here is that ‘the imposition of audit and related measures
of auditable performance leads to the opposite of what
was intended, i.e. it creates forms of dysfunction for the au-
dited service itself’ (1997, p.98). Transparency begins to
transform the subjectivity of those whom it renders visible
in ways that distort organisational performance. Or as Tso-
ukas puts it:- ‘management becomes tantamount to keep-
ing up appearances, and ?ghting shadows: managing via
league tables leads to managing the league tables them-
selves’ (1997, p.838).
It is this latter theme that O’Neill takes up in her more
recent critique of new forms of transparency. These, she
suggests, are widely experienced ‘not just as changing
but (I think) as distorting the proper aims of professional
practice and indeed as damaging professional pride and
integrity’. She suggests that, whilst justi?ed in terms of
making professionals and institutions more accountable
for good performance, in practice, organisational perfor-
mance is itself distorted by ‘the race to improve perfor-
mance indicators’. ‘Perverse incentives’, O’Neill insists,
are nevertheless ‘real incentives’ and the pursuit of an ever
more complete transparency has, as its unintended conse-
quence, the creation of a ‘culture of suspicion, low morale
and professional cynicism’. Despite its good intentions the
demand for universal transparency is ‘likely to encourage
the evasions, hypocrisies, and half truths that we usually
refer to as ‘political correctness’, but which might more
forthrightly be called either ‘self-censorship’ or ‘deception’
(2002, p.73).
In a related analysis Hood (2007) has explored various
forms of transparency and how these interact with ‘blame
avoidance’ as a force that underlies much of political and
institutional practice. He develops a threefold categoriza-
tion of blame avoidance strategies; ‘Agency’ strategies that
essentially involve mechanisms that seek a scapegoat for
blame; ‘presentational’ strategies that seek to ‘spin’ their
way out of trouble; and ‘policy’ strategies that seek no or
low blame options in order to avoid all possibility of blame.
In relation to bureaucratic forms of transparency the obvi-
ous presentational strategy is that of ‘gaming’ or the
manipulation of performance numbers; a phenomenon
that has long been observed in budgetary processes (Hop-
wood, 1972). Other strategies include ‘snowing’ – seeking
to ?ood others with information –, ‘venue shifting’ so that
important decision making is moved to a different and
undocumented setting, and the rigid following of proce-
dures with associated audit trails. Such strategies suggest
that blame avoidance becomes a rational choice in the face
of ever increasing demands for transparency.
So in opposition to the allure of the idea(l) of transpar-
ency is the seemingly widespread recognition of the nega-
tive organisational consequences that arise from its use.
Why then do we continue to invest ever more heavily in
both the rhetoric and mechanisms of transparency in the
full knowledge of its practical impossibility and conse-
quent distortions?
Our ambivalent embrace of transparency
Strathern describes this ambivalent embrace of trans-
parency in the following way:-
‘To auditor and auditee alike, the language of assess-
ment, in purporting to be a language that makes output
transparent, hides many dimensions of the output pro-
cess; as we have seen, this, too, is standard (self) criti-
cism. The rhetoric of transparency appears to conceal
that very process of concealment, yet in so far as ‘every-
one knows’ this, it would be hard to say it ‘really’ does
so. Realities are knowingly eclipsed’ (2000, p.315).
Power observes a similar ambivalence in relation to ide-
als of auditability when he notes that:-
‘Practitioner humour, irony, and stories of absurd side
effects are replaced at the world–level by earnest ideal-
ism, perfectionism and design optimism – often by the
very practitioners who would privately side with the
critics’ (2007, p.168).
Like O’Neill, both Strathern and Power are describing a
form of self censorship associated with transparency that
potentially robs accountability of much of its communica-
tive value. In what follows I suggest that it is this very
ambivalence itself which allows transparency to achieve
its illusory grip upon us.
Ambivalence involves a strange admixture of belief and
simultaneous disbelief in relation to my own and others’
beliefs. An English phrase used by colleagues to describe
a person who is well perceived by superiors in an organisa-
tion is that the ‘sun shines out of his arse’. Condensed in
this inelegant phrase is much of how transparency works
upon us; it promises/threatens to lay bare the self. Ambiv-
alence is created in the ways in which someone can
seemingly appear so perfect to distant but less informed
others. It is unrealistic in that his colleagues know better
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 963
(disbelief), but are nevertheless themselves stained by
comparison in the eyes of superiors (belief). At the same
time it is envious (belief) of the attention and admiration
attracted by their peerless peer, which seems only to con-
?rm what is lacking in themselves (disbelief).
O’Neill traces our embrace of new forms of transpar-
ency to what she calls ‘a fantasy of total control’. The prob-
lem but power of transparency lies in its use as an
instrument of hierarchy, large-scale organisation, and con-
trol at a distance. The visual metaphor of transparency
immediately places us in the realm of narcissus. It is not
just that our conduct is rendered visible to others. Rather
the power of transparency lies in the possibility that I
and/or others will identify with the image of the self that
such transparency offers; that I will recognise myself
and/or be recognised in its categories. A factional example
will perhaps help here. At a recent departmental meeting
the annual accounts were on the agenda and the conversa-
tion quickly fell to exploring the ways in which the ?gures
were in various ways nonsensical. Transparency in this lo-
cal context offered no great dif?culties for its omissions
and abstractions could quickly be concretised and re-con-
textualised by virtue of everyone’s rich and elaborate local
knowledge. But despite the pleasures of this conversation –
perhaps arising from the obvious superiority of our local
knowledge and the consequent foolishness of some ele-
ments of the ?gures – the meeting was silenced by the
chair’s observation that whilst we knew that the ?gures
were rubbish, the trouble was that our (absent) boss be-
lieved in them.
The problem is real. The boss does not have our local
knowledge and knows the local only through the ways in
which accounting ?gures render it transparent. Without
the transparency he is blind and dependent on the local,
with it he is potent for he can compare us with others,
challenge past conduct and set demanding targets. We
could say that transparency makes being a boss possible,
and indeed as ‘coach’ and ‘mentor’ being a boss is now pre-
sented not as the control of others but rather as embodying
an ideal for others to emulate (Wageman, 2001). However,
there is also a sense in which the boss knows only too well
that the numbers probably cannot be believed but deploys
belief in the numbers as a tactic which allows him to dem-
onstrate his capabilities as a boss. We can see in this sce-
nario how dif?cult it is to introduce reality into
‘accountability as transparency’ for narcissus keeps getting
in the way. Narcissus, in this instance, is indeed the fantasy
of total control and personal competence, and the denial of
dependence that it supports.
Force is given to this fantasy by the way that the boss is
him/herself subject to a similar transparency. As one
moves up the hierarchy, results and the consequent ‘suc-
cess’ of the self are often constituted largely within this vir-
tual sea of representations, which are now ‘second order’
numbers thoroughly divorced from the messy context
within which they were produced and to which they refer
(Power, 2004). In this sense management does indeed be-
come no more than ‘managing the league tables’. Plans,
budgets, assurance statements, and audits become the only
currency of managerial exchange. Unless things go very
wrong, they are taken at face value and relied upon as
the basis for decision making, resource allocation and the
rituals of symbolic praise and humiliation. The boss’s boss
too can claim with some force that it would be ‘irresponsi-
ble’ not to take such transparency seriously, inadequate as
it may be, for yet more distant others also believe in it. In
this way accountability as transparency takes on a self-ful-
?lling life of its own that is all too easily decoupled from
the realities it is supposed to disclose.
But I think that there are possibly good reasons to
question whether it is really only the belief of the boss,
and/or the boss’s boss, in the reality of the ?gures that
is the problem. In the factional meeting, our eager discus-
sion of the nonsensical elements of the accounts was pos-
sibly motivated by more than a desire for the truth and
amounted to an urgent need to distance ourselves from
the image of the self that our transparency offered. Part
of what makes the validity of the ?gures un-discussable
with the boss is our anticipation of the sense that he will
make of our objections. If there is anything less than per-
fect in the ?gures he may all too easily read our objec-
tions as just mere excuses for our own inadequacies; to
believe in the ?gures rather than us. If the ?gures are
perfect then we will perhaps also be all too ready to be-
lieve in them and will have no strongly felt need to inter-
rogate their accuracy. Our local and cynical ‘dis-
identi?cation’ with the annual accounts could be taken
as evidence of the partial failure of control and seen as
the site for possible resistance. However, as Fleming
and Spicer (2003) have argued, such dis-identi?cation
can itself be seen to be narcissistically motivated. Our
discussion of the nonsensical accounts possibly provided
us with reassurance that we retained our critical capaci-
ties and autonomy since we did not really believe in the
?gures, but perhaps this also made our practical confor-
mity more possible. As Zizek puts it:- ‘cynical distance
is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring
power of ideological fantasy; even if we do not take
things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance,
we are still doing them’ (1989, p.32).
The alienation that Lacan observes in my identi?cation
with the mirror image is threefold. Firstly, I grasp the self
as something substantive; conceive of myself as a some-
one. The wisdom of the chimpanzee is that he knows the
image to be empty but for us humans it is hard not to iden-
tify – to not keep losing myself in the images that the
world offers me. Such identi?cation has become the basis
for new forms of control within organisations that use
‘selective recognition’ to shape individual identity (Karr-
eman & Alvesson, 2001; Luthans & Stajkovic, 2000). Within
such processes performance metrics are grasped as an
authoritative recognition of my existence; I am my results
and I ?nd my own value re?ected in them. Such identi?ca-
tion itself ensures that I lock myself into the insatiable lo-
gic of continuous self improvement. Force is then added to
this identi?cation in the ways in which in a hierarchy my
transparent self slips beyond my control. Perhaps I can ar-
gue with my boss but not my boss’s boss. My transparent
self travels so that in the ?gures or indicators others will
recognise me as this or that in a way that is authoritative
and consequential and yet completely beyond my in?u-
ence. Part of the power of transparency is that it threatens
964 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
this loss of control over the self at the same time as it offers
authoritative recognition of the self. Again to quote Zizek:-
‘My very awareness of the fact that ‘the truth is out
there’, that ?les on me circulate which, even if they
are factually ‘inaccurate’, none the less performatively
determine my socio-symbolic status, is what gives rise
to the speci?c proto-paranoiac mode of subjectivization
characteristic of today’s subject; it constitutes me as a
subject inherently related to and hassled by an elusive
piece of database in which, beyond my reach, ‘my fate
is writ large’ (1999, p.260).
It is then just a small step to persuade myself of the
necessity to give at least part of my energies to the careful
stage-management of the ways in which I amrendered vis-
ible to distant others. In my own mind this can be ration-
alised pragmatically as a way to secure the resources and
autonomy that will allow me to manage local complexity.
Happily, however, this also serves to secure my recognition
by the distant organisational ‘Other’ even if it requires
‘self-censorship’ or even ‘deception’.
The second sense of alienation that Lacan sees pre?g-
ured in the mirror stage is alienation by others. Transpar-
ency comes to constitute, either directly or through the
comparisons it makes possible, an ideal of what the self
should be. Since transparency offers recognition I will then
work hard to make myself into the object of its desire; to
present the self as already wanting what is desired of
me. When compared with a concrete other transparency
is perhaps less enigmatic in terms of its demands. As
Knights and McCabe found in their study of teamwork,
staff ‘can point to their performance ?gures as evidence
of having ful?lled management expectations and this pro-
vides some security for their identity’ (2003, p.1608). At
the other end of the hierarchy, senior executives’ embrace
of the ideal of delivering shareholder value may offer a
similar comfort (Roberts, Sanderson, Barker, & Hendry,
2006). Perhaps this is part of the attraction of transpar-
ency’s simplistic abstractions; that at least I know what
is wanted of me and with luck will be able to deliver it
(even if this requires a little creativity on my part). Perhaps
the objecti?cations of the self that transparency allows
seem to make me more substantial, and thereby release
me from the anxiety of interaction.
The third sense of alienation that Lacan discusses is the
alienation of self not by but from others. The comparative
space that transparency makes possible, the disciplinary
processes that Foucault (1979) observes in terms of pro-
cesses of differentiation, homogenisation, ranking, and
exclusion, serves to cast the self into a competitive relation
with others. The self is at risk here from being overlooked,
exceeded, ignored, eclipsed by the performance of others.
In the snapshot that transparency offers, others appear
only as competitors and rivals. Here the analysis of recog-
nition can be joined to that of guilt. Butler, drawing upon
Freud, observes what she calls the ‘ethical violence’ and
‘moral narcissism’ that characterises the conduct of the
transparent subject. This has two dimensions. In so far as
I identify with the ideal offered by transparency (or let
my practices or others believe in my place) then transpar-
ency sets up a rivalry both within myself and with others.
As a competitive, rivalrous relationship within my self this
involves the turning of aggressive criticism back on the self
for the ways in which I fail to meet the ideal. The narcis-
sism here is in part my preoccupation with my perfection
or perfect-ability. At the same time, however, the severity
of self-criticism can also create the need to ?nd others
upon whom I can project all that is bad or inadequate in or-
der to protect and preserve my own sense of perfection –
this is the less than rational need that drives the blame
avoidance that Hood observes.
Casey’s (1999) study of teamwork in a multinational,
Hephaestus, illustrates both dimensions of such ethical
violence and moral narcissism. In so far as staff at the com-
pany come to identify with the new ‘organisation ideal’
promoted through the metaphors of ‘team’ and ‘family’,
rather than criticise the organisation when it fails to live
up to its ideals, staff criticise themselves for failing to meet
the ideal. For individuals, she suggests, this can result in
stress as ‘anger is sublimely transposed into guilt’. How-
ever, she also observes the team as a group attacking one
of its members for the betrayal of the team ideal, and
demanding and obtaining a confession from colleagues
who have let the team down. In such processes one can ob-
serve a dynamic of ?ight – a powerful and intensely per-
sonal imperative to avoid or rid the self of all that might
be judged inadequate. This I think is the hook of transpar-
ency – the ideal it advertises and the humiliation it threat-
ens when I am revealed to be less than ideal. I want to be
recognised, and to recognise myself as coherent, good,
competent, and rational. The ‘fantasy of total control’ is
not simply that of the boss; it is a fantasy of what it is,
could, and should be, to be a self.
The dynamics of recognition and guilt then explain
something of our ambivalent embrace of transparency.
Cynical dis-identi?cation preserves the mental illusion of
autonomy, whilst my going along with, my conformity
with the terms of transparency, seeks to secure my recog-
nition. As an individualizing practice the focus of concern
is with securing the self in others’ eyes. In the process,
however, much of the communicative potential and indeed
rationale for accountability is lost. To repeat Strathern’s
phrase, we can say that under the in?uence of accountabil-
ity as transparency ‘realities are knowingly eclipsed’ and
rendered undiscussable. Or in Power’s terms practitioner
critique seldom becomes organised because this would
be seen ‘as an attack on ideals of governance itself’
(2007, p.168). In the section that follows I return to Butler’s
recent work to explore the possibility of our doing
accountability differently on the basis of a conscious and
deeply realistic rejection of this ideal of a self that is fully
transparent to itself. The rationale for accountability lies
not in the pursuit of my own or other’s perfection, but
rather in the fact that I do not and can never know quite
what it is that I am doing.
An ethic for intelligent accountability
In the light of her critique of the unintended conse-
quences of transparency, O’Neill points to the potentials
of what she calls ‘intelligent accountability’. ‘Well placed
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 965
trust’, she argues, ‘grows out of active enquiry rather than
blind acceptance. In traditional relations of trust, active en-
quiry was usually extended over time by talking and ask-
ing questions, by listening and seeing how well claims to
know and undertakings to act held up over time’ (2002,
p.76).
O’Neill’s version of intelligent accountability can be
seen as a counter to many of the de?ciencies of ‘account-
ability as transparency’. Accountability, in its intelligent
form, is in a particular context. It is not a mere showing
or making visible of the self against a pre-determined set
of categories, but rather involves active enquiry – listening,
asking questions, and talking – through which the rele-
vance or accuracy of indicators can be understood in con-
text. Whilst transparency must rely on periodic
snapshots that capture performance at a moment of time,
intelligent accountability extends over time and thereby
affords the opportunity to test commitments against out-
comes in a way that makes the manipulation of perfor-
mance less easy, and promotes understanding of the
complex interdependencies that underlie discrete indica-
tors. It is typically a face-to-face encounter, rich with infor-
mation, in which communication is less easily stage-
managed and rhetoric can be constantly compared to ac-
tual practice.
Transparency and face-to-face accountability always
coexist and it is all too possible for the subjective effects
of transparency to invade the scene of intelligent account-
ability such that it too becomes a self-defensive or aggres-
sive space full of self-blame and/or attempts to displace
blame onto others. What I want to explore here is the
necessity of a different notion of ethics as the basis for
intelligent accountability. Here, I return to Butler’s ideas
for rethinking accountability not as the violent pursuit of
an ideal, but rather on the basis of a conscious acknowl-
edgement of the constitutional impossibility of a ‘self fully
transparent to itself’ (2005, p.83).
Her starting point is to observe all the ways in which I
cannot give an account of myself; the ways in which I
can never quite know what it is that I am doing.
‘There is (1) a non-narrativizable exposure that estab-
lishes my singularity, and there are (2) primary relations,
irrecoverable, that form lasting and recurrent impres-
sions in the history of my life, and so (3) a history that
establishes my partial opacity to myself. Lastly there are
(4) norms that facilitate my telling about myself but that
I do not author and that render me substitutable at the
very moment that I seek to establish the history of my
singularity. The last dispossession in language is inten-
si?ed by the fact that I give an account of myself to
someone, so that the narrative structure of my account
is superseded by (5) the structure of address in which it
takes place’ (2005, p.39).
I will return to the ethical aspect of exposure in a mo-
ment but one part of this is the body and what I cannot ac-
count for as an embodied self. Part of my exposure is the
pre-history of the self; the primary relations which pre-
cede any self consciousness, and the ways in which these
are active within my conduct in ways that will always be
unconscious. Then there are the norms in terms of which
I seek to give an account of myself. Giddens (1976) talks
of accountability in terms of ‘the rationalisation of action’;
to give an account of myself I must perforce draw upon a
normative structure that precedes and exceeds me. Finally,
the very setting – the scene of accountability – will be
working back upon my ability to give an account of myself.
As a subject of transparency it is the potential incoher-
ence of my self that is at risk of exposure. I am then drawn
to account for my conduct as if I did indeed know exactly
what I was doing – the rationality so prized in manage-
ment; as if I was indeed transparent to myself and could
grasp the actual reasons for my conduct rather than offer
mere rationalisations. Further, in transparency I am
encouraged to speak as if I know unambiguously what is
the proper standard in terms of which to account for my-
self; as if this were self evident, singular and my own
rather than current convention. In other words, in trans-
parent regimes of accountability I seek to present myself
as if I am coherent and fully transparent to myself. This
is perhaps just another way to observe the lack of self
re?exivity in transparency; repairing or defending the self
image is privileged over learning and communication. The
scene of address is also crucial, in particular the ‘ethical
violence’ or ‘moral narcissism’ of transparency, in the ways
in which it enforces and keeps me pre-occupied with my
presentation of self as coherent and peerless.
Yet as Butler argues, condemnation of my self or others
always works against self knowledge. As she observes:-
‘What is striking about such extremes of self-berate-
ment is the grandiose notion of the transparent ‘I’ that
is presupposed as the ethical ideal. This is hardly a
belief in which self acceptance (a humility about one’s
constitutive limitations) or generosity (a disposition
towards the limits of others) might ?nd room to ?our-
ish’ (2005, p.80).
Butler’s move is to insist that these different dimen-
sions of self-opaqueness are constitutional and to try to
re-conceive of ethical responsibility and accountability on
this basis.
‘Precisely my opaqueness to myself occasions my
capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on oth-
ers. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared,
invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves. The
recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same
as how one presents oneself in the available discourse,
might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that
would suspend the demand that they be self-same at
every moment’ (2005, p.42).
So a different kind of ethics emerges here on the basis of
an acknowledgement of what will always be opaque in
relation to the self. What is dangerous about the ideal of
transparency is that I identify or wish to identify only with
my perfection or perfectability. I refuse to recognise my
own incoherence but instead must constantly seek ?ight
from it. Viewed obliquely through the lens of Butler’s fram-
ing of her ideas this ?ight seems both impossible and dee-
ply destructive. Recognition of one’s own (partial)
incoherence changes the nature of the game; the very idea
is itself a narcissistic wound but possibly a productive one
966 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
precisely in the way that it fosters both humility and
acceptance in relation to the self and generosity in relation
to similarly limited others.
But Butler pushes further with her analysis of ethics and
responsibility. In transparency I have argued that ethics
has a less than ?attering quality. Again to quote Butler:-
‘one might arrive at a fully cynical view of morality and
conclude that human conduct that seeks to follow
norms of prescriptive value is motivated less by any
desire to do good than by a terrorized fear of punish-
ment and its injurious effects’ (2005, p.16).
Morality here is self absorbed; pre-occupied with the
protection and projection of an image of self. Others are
relevant only as potential rivals or in the ways in which
they recognise me. Ethics here is the ‘ethics of narcissus’;
the manufacture of good appearances through reputation
management with no necessary reference to conduct and
its actual effects (Roberts, 2003). In the development of
her counter view of accountability Butler looks to alterna-
tive theorisations of ethics; notably that of Levinas. The
Freudian account of ethics as a turning of an original vio-
lence back onto the self depends upon a differentiation
within the ego; the superego attacks the ego for being less
than ideal, or seeks to project blame onto others in order to
shore up the self. Levinas’ (1991) version of ethics is out-
side the ego or ‘otherwise than being’. He draws a distinc-
tion between the ego and the psyche and insists that the
psyche is ‘the soul of the other in me’. He offers a relational
view of the self in which responsibility is held to be not the
product of choice or ethical reasoning, but rather is
grounded in human sensibility and simply assigned in
the vulnerability of the encounter with the face of the
other. Ethics in this sense is not a norm to be followed
but an encounter. It is always despite the self, it goes
‘one way’; my responsibility towards the other. It is un-
iquely my responsibility, and it knows no limits since there
is always ‘one more response to give’ (for a fuller discus-
sion of Levinas in relation to accounting see Roberts
(2001); Schearer (2002)).
Part of the product of transparency – the self defensive-
ness or assertiveness that it encourages – is a ?ctional be-
lief in the self as an autonomous entity. In so far as we
identify with images we grasp the self not as vulnerable
but as enclosed, ideally with shiny surfaces which can be
defended and protected from others. If there is responsibil-
ity here it is only a responsibility for the self; in this way
transparency reproduces the self-interested opportunism
that economics takes as natural and given. The alternative,
Levinasian version of responsibility is a responsibility for
the other which is inescapable since ‘from the start the
other affects us despite ourselves’. Such a capability for
responsibility is grounded in our sentience; our vulnerabil-
ity to others vulnerability. Here we can point to a possible
narcissism in Butler’s list of the ways in which I am opaque
to myself. To her list could be added the opaqueness of the
consequences of my actions for others and, beyond these,
my responsibility for others.
What might the potentials of such an alternative form
of accountability be? Firstly, it opens up the potential for
a more re?exive form of accountability. Under transpar-
ency I am defensive or assertive of self in ways that miti-
gate against learning and thought. Released from the
pressure to be, or at least appear perfect – a project that
can never be realised – it is perhaps more possible to ques-
tion and challenge myself and the system of relevancies
within which I act. As Weick argues ‘in a ?uid world, wise
people know that they don’t fully understand what is
happening right now. Extreme con?dence and extreme
caution both can destroy what organisations most need
in changing times, namely curiosity, openness, and
complex sensing’ (1993; 641). By ‘knowing in advance’
transparency refuses to recognise the potential for its
own fallibility, whilst in fearing to question the ideals it
advertises we collude in transparency’s ignorance.
Secondly, the conscious acknowledgement of my own
partial incoherence would perhaps also release me from
some of the paranoia which characterises the emotional
edge of much of what counts as accountability within
organisations, and create a greater shared resilience based
on reciprocal understanding. At the same time it might re-
quire us to ask less of our bosses in the way that we cur-
rently idealise/demonise them and take back some of the
responsibility/authority that we project onto them. Mant’s
(1983) distinction between egocentric ‘binary’ leaders
whose power depends upon personal loyalty, and ‘ternary’
leaders who promote identi?cation with institutional
rather than individual interests is pertinent here, as is
Grint’s (2000) focus on the centrality of communication
in understanding the dynamics of leadership. In both cases
leadership eschews transparency’s promise of omnipo-
tence and omniscience and instead seeks to promote
shared learning. Different others can then be encountered
not so much as a threat to my centrality, but rather as a re-
source upon which I need to draw in order to re?ne and ex-
pand my own capacities for thought and action.
Thirdly, there is the potential for accountability to re-
cover its full social signi?cance. In the context of organisa-
tions, it is the reality of interdependence that needs to be
managed. I am inevitably ignorant of many of the conse-
quences of my conduct for others and I am in constant
need of accountability in order to understand the actual ef-
fects of what I do. The individualizing effects of transpar-
ency often only undermine or subvert this inter-
dependence by keeping me pre-occupied only with the de-
fence or success of my self (Roberts, 1991). Fourthly, it has
the potential to be a more compassionate form of account-
ability which expresses and enacts our responsibility for
others, and for each other, rather than just for myself. If a
Levinasian view of ethics is entertained then I am not the
self-interested opportunist of economic thought but rather
an irretrievably relational entity who cannot but be caught
up in responsibility for my neighbour. Finally, it would be
perhaps in all respects a more provisional form of account-
ability; less certain of the truth, and the relevance or ade-
quacy of existing standards of judgement, and more
conscious of my own and others vulnerability.
Concluding comments
‘The more information we have about the world, the more
we distance ourselves from what is going on and the less
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 967
able we become in comprehending its full complexity.
Information becomes a surrogate for the world – what is
actually going on tends to be equated with what the rele-
vant indicators (or images) say is going on’ (Tsoukas,
1997, p.833).
This paper began with an extract from McCreevy’s
re?ections on the role of transparency in relation to the
credit crisis. Writ all too large the crisis exempli?es Tso-
ukas’ observations. With the wisdom of hindsight, we were
all too willing to believe that we knew what was going on,
or at least that the credit rating agencies, salesmen, and
regulators did. We were all too ready to believe that new
ways of diffusing risk resulted in its dissipation, and we
are still struggling to understand the complexity of the
interdependencies created by markets for new credit prod-
ucts. McCreevy’s argument is that the conduct of regula-
tors was itself compromised by the gold-plated
transparency rules that now govern their conduct; that
their important work should be excused from the rigours
of transparency. My own argument here has involved a
much more extensive critique which has sought to suggest
the constitutional limits of accountability as transparency,
and to explore the possibility of our doing accountability
differently.
I do not think that we can manage without trans-
parency – it is an important check on local collusion and
as such an essential source of con?dence for distant others.
In the context of the recent crisis it is evident that in some
areas there was a dangerous lack of transparency; notably
in relation to the over-the-counter credit default swap
market and off balance sheet entities. Panic was arguably
stimulated by this lack of transparency; by the fact that
no one knew what exposures their counter-parties had,
and in this way risk that had apparently been widely dissi-
pated was suddenly everywhere. However, I have also
sought to argue that we cannot manage only with transpar-
ency – our instinct to invest in yet more transparency as
the only remedy for the failures of transparency – but
rather should see transparency as at best a supplement
to more context speci?c ‘intelligent’ accountability. The
transparency of ‘fair value’, coupled with intense individual
performance incentives, was arguably itself part of the
problem; feeding ‘over optimism’ in ?nancial markets, as
well as the subsequent panic as asset values were written
down (see Roberts & Jones, 2009). Signi?cantly, informed
insiders to the credit crisis have subsequently suggested
the need not only for enhanced transparency, but also for
new forms of accountability that supplement reliance on
risk management models with institution wide brain
storming around sources of risk, and that supplement
institutional disclosure against Basel 11 with regular
meetings between central bankers and individual institu-
tions to review systemic risk (CRMPG, 2008).
In such suggestions there is possibly a tacit acknowl-
edgement that, whilst high rewards ?owed on the basis
of positive performance indicators, intelligence was self-
censored out of organisational processes. As Strathern
has observed, what is odd about our embrace of transpar-
ency is that ‘everyone knows’ about its inadequacies: that
transparency involves a simplistic abstraction and de-con-
textualisation from the complexity of the world (Strath-
ern), that it undermines trust as it seeks to create it
(Tsoukas), encourages deception as it seeks to make possi-
ble a complete visibility (O’Neill), promotes blame avoid-
ance (Hood), and transforms organisational purpose into
the mere management of performance indicators (Power).
In my own analysis I have drawn upon Lacan’s account
of the importance of recognition in the formation of the
subject, and Freud’s account of the genesis of guilt to ex-
plain why we continue to invest in transparency despite
the fact that ‘everyone knows’ of its limitations. The
meconnaissance that Lacan insists is founded in the child’s
identi?cation with the mirror image describes the ways in
which I am prone to be caught in the lure of images; to
locate my very existence in the image and to grasp the self
as a coherent, autonomous and substantial entity. I have
argued that it is this illusion of recognition that gives trans-
parency its power over us. The promise/threat of authorita-
tive recognition, of possible success and/or humiliation,
acts to ensnare us. The snare does not even need my own
belief as long as I believe that others might believe in what
transparency discloses about my self. Distance, both spa-
tial and hierarchical, only reinforces these effects as my
transparent self travels beyond all possibility of elabora-
tion, explanation or justi?cation and yet continues to
attract consequences to itself. I must then, to secure this
transparent self, work hard to meet the ideal transparency
establishes, or at least work hard to create the appearance
of my conformity to the ideal.
This imperative to meet the ideals of transparency gives
rise to a particular form of ethics, aptly described by Butler
as ‘ethical violence’ and ‘moral narcissism’. We do not typ-
ically associate the pursuit of high ideals with violence and
yet I think that accountability as transparency is often
characterised by an anxious paranoia. Violence describes
my own relationship to myself – the ways in which I con-
stantly berate the self for being less than ideal – as well as
the ways in which I seek temporary relief from such self-
persecution through ?nding opportunities to attack the
failures of others. Similarly, narcissism seems not to belong
with morality. Yet the effect of accountability as transpar-
ency seems all too often to be a defensive or assertive pre-
occupation only with myself, and my own continuous self-
improvement and advancement, which has as its correlate
an indifference to, or neglect of the interdependencies
within which my own self interest is nested. Cynical dis-
identi?cation can seemingly offer me some distance from
the threat of transparency but often serves only to make
my practical conformity easier. The subjective correlate
of the pursuit of a complete transparency is the pursuit,
or at least presentation, of an already perfect self; of a self
that knows what it is doing.
Again it is important to emphasise the value of trans-
parency as a source of con?dence to distant others and,
precisely because of the recognition that it threatens, as a
powerful counter to local collusion. Transparency becomes
problematic only when we believe in its perfection; when
we believe or act as if all there is to accountability is trans-
parency; that transparency is adequate and suf?cient as a
form of accountability. As we have seen, O’Neill traces this
tendency to a ‘fantasy of total control’. For the boss this can
968 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
take the form of repeated investment in ever more exten-
sive measures in an attempt to fabricate the certainties of
knowing in advance and at a distance, and thereby escape
the anxiety of real dependence. But I have suggested that
the boss’s fantasy requires, as its necessary complement,
my own desire for authoritative recognition of myself as
a coherent, and autonomous entity.
What my narcissism misses, part of its own perform-
ativity, is the recognition it confers on transparency itself;
the way that it reproduces the status quo in an all too eager
and plastic collusion. There is, in a sense, much less to wor-
ry about if I assume that ‘they’ must know what they are
doing and thereby avoid the risks and responsibility of
challenging the relevance or adequacy of the standards
which transparency advertises and enforces. It is precisely
in this avoidance of risk (to my recognition) that account-
ability loses it potential force as a vital social practice, and
instead slips into a narcissistic preoccupation with my own
beauty and perfection as re?ected in and rewarded by per-
formance indicators.
In developmental terms Lacan’s account of what he calls
the ‘imaginary’, which I have explored here in terms of
(mis)recognition, must be followed by the further alien-
ation of the subject in the ‘symbolic’. O’Neill’s elaboration
of a notion of ‘intelligent’ accountability similarly points
to the necessity to go beyond the mesmerizing demand
for authoritative recognition in order to reclaim the full
discursive power of the practice of accountability. Signi?-
cantly Kaplan and Norton, whom we might be tempted
to blame for the proliferation of transparencies similarly
point in this direction when they insist that ‘The
Balanced Scorecard should be used as a communication,
informing, and learning system, not as a controlling sys-
tem’ (1992). Transparency can at best signal the need for
intelligent accountability, but it cannot furnish us with
the terms of such a conversation.
The value of Butler’s insistence on the impossibility of
my giving a full account of myself lies not only in the
way that it brings into sharp relief the anxiety, violence
and narcissism that are a routine part of accountability
as transparency, but also in the way that it furnishes us
with an ethic of humility and generosity with which to
approach intelligent accountability. In relation to myself
there is a certain compassion to be demanded if I can
acknowledge that I can never quite know what it is that
I am doing. I may then be more modest about myself
and more willing to acknowledge the value of the abilities
and capacities of different others, and my dependence
upon them. To acknowledge my own incoherence is, how-
ever, to discover others’ incoherence – the always frail and
partial grounds upon which their own demands on me are
built. What emerges in this space is something of the
weight of our practical dependence upon each other which
accountability as talk, listening, and asking questions then
allows us to explore and investigate. Accountability is
thereby reconstituted as a vital social practice – an
exercise of care in relation to self and others, a caution
to compassion in relation to both self and others, and an
ongoing necessity as a social practice through which to
insist upon and discover the nature of our responsibility
to and for each other.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants at the UNSW
workshop on ‘Accountability, Organisations and Institu-
tions’ (January 2008), the ‘Shadow line of Accountability’
workshop (Venice April 2008), two anonymous reviewers
and Amanda Sinclair for their comments on earlier ver-
sions of this paper. I would like to thank the ESRC (RES-
000-23-1501) for funding the empirical research on the
principle of comply or explain that informed the develop-
ment of this conceptual paper.
References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin
and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in groups. London, Tavistock.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power; theories in subjection. Stamford:
Stamford University Press.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Casey, C. (1999). ‘‘Come join our family”: Discipline and integration in
corporate organizational culture. Human Relations, 52(2), 155–178.
Chua, W. F. (1995). Experts, networks and inscriptions in the fabrication
of accounting images: A story of the representation of three public
hospitals. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2/3), 111–
145.
Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group III (2008). Containing
systemic risk: The road to reform, August.
Edmundson, M. (2007). The death of Sigmund Freud; fascism, psychoanalysis
and the rise of fundamentalism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory
and technique. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2003). Working at a cynical distance:
Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization,
10(1), 157–179.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1984a). On narcissism. In On metapsychology the theory of
psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1984b). The ego and the Id. In On metapsychology; the theory of
psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1985). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In
Civilization society and religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Heinemann.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gray, R. (1992). Accounting and environmentalism: An exploration of the
challenge of gently accounting for accountability, transparency and
sustainability. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(5), 399–425.
Grint, K. (2000). The arts of leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. London: Routledge.
Hood, C. (2007). What happens when transparency meets blame
avoidance? Public Management Review, 9(2), 191–210.
Hopwood, A. (1972). An empirical study of the role of accounting data in
performance evaluation. Journal of Accounting Research, 10, 156–182.
Kaplan, S., & Norton, D. (1992). The balanced scorecard. Harvard Business
Review, 71–79.
Karreman, D., & Alvesson, M. (2001). On cages in tandem: Management
control, social identity, and identi?cation in a knowledge-intensive
?rm. Organization, 11(1), 149–175.
Knights, D., & McCabe, D. (2003). Governing through teamwork:
Reconstituting subjectivity in a call centre. Journal of Management
Studies, 40(7), 1587–1619.
Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits; a selection. London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1979). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Levinas, E. (1991). Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Luthans, F., & Stajkovic, A. (2000). Provide recognition for performance
improvement. In E. Locke (Ed.), The Blackwell handbook of principles of
organizational behaviour. Oxford: Blackwell.
MacKenzie, D. (2006). An engine not a camera; how ?nancial models shape
markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mant, A. (1983). Leaders we deserve. Oxford: Blackwell.
McKernan, J. (2007). Objectivity in accounting. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 32(1–2), 155–180.
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 969
Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (1994). Accounting, ‘economic citizenship’ and the
spatial reordering of manufacture. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 19(1), 15–43.
Monks, R., & Minnow, N. (1991). Power and accountability. New York:
Harper Collins.
O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
O’Neill, O. (2006). Transparency and the ethics of communication. In C.
Hood & D. Heald (Eds.), Transparency; the key to better governance?
(pp 75–90). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ogden, S., Glaiser, K., & Marginson, D. (2006). Empowerment and
accountability; evidence from the UK water industry. Journal of
Management Studies, 43(3), 521–555.
Power, M. (1997). The audit society; rituals of veri?cation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Power, M. (2004). Counting, control and calculation: Re?ections on
measuring and management. Humans Relations, 57(6), 765–783.
Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, J. (1991). The possibilities of accountability. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 16(4), 355–368.
Roberts, J. (2001). Corporate governance and the ethics of narcissus.
Business Ethics Quarterly, 11(1), 109–125.
Roberts, J. (2003). The manufacture of corporate social responsibility;
constructing corporate sensibility. Organization, 10(2), 249–265.
Roberts, J., & Jones, M. (2009). Accounting for self interest in the
credit crisis. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(6–7), 856–
867.
Roberts, J., Sanderson, P., Barker, R., & Hendry, J. (2006). In the mirror of
the market: the disciplinary effects of company/fund manager
meetings. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 31, 277–294.
Robson, K. (1992). Accounting numbers as ‘inscription’: Action at a
distance and the development of accounting. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 17(4), 685–708.
Schearer, T. (2002). Ethics and accountability: From the for-itself to the
for-the-other. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 27(6), 541–573.
Strathern, M. (2000). The tyranny of transparency. British Educational
Research Journal, 26(3), 309–321.
Strathern, M. (2004). Abstraction and decontextualisation: An
anthropological comment. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Virtual society?
Technology, Cyberbole, reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swartz, H. (1990). Narcissistic processes and corporate decay. New York:
NYU Press.
Townley, B. (1993). Reframing human resource management: Power, ethics,
and the subject at work. London: Sage.
Tsoukas, H. (1997). The tyranny of light. Futures, 29(9), 827–843.
Wageman, R. (2001). How leaders foster self-managing team
effectiveness: Design choices versus hands-on coaching.
Organization Science, 12(5), 559–577.
Weick, K. (1993). The collapse of sense-making in organisations; the
Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652.
Zaleznick, A., & Kets de Vries, M. (1985). Power and the corporate mind.
Chicago, IL: Bonus Books.
Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1999). The ticklish subject. London: Verso.
970 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
doc_209837840.pdf
This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New
York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of
transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of accountability
as subjection explored through Lacan’s account of the social dynamics of recognition,
and Freud’s account of guilt. This analysis then informs an exploration of what is
argued to be our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency as a form of accountability.
The final section of the paper investigates the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ form of
accountability, grounded in an ethic of humility and generosity, made possible by a conscious
acknowledgement of the ways in which I can never quite know what it is that I
am doing.
No one is perfect: The limits of transparency and an ethic
for ‘intelligent’ accountability
John Roberts
*
Faculty of Economics and Business, Accounting Discipline, University of Sydney, Building H69, Cnr. Codrington and Rose Streets, Darlington NSW 2006, Australia
a b s t r a c t
This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New
York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of
transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of account-
ability as subjection explored through Lacan’s account of the social dynamics of recogni-
tion, and Freud’s account of guilt. This analysis then informs an exploration of what is
argued to be our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency as a form of accountability.
The ?nal section of the paper investigates the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ form of
accountability, grounded in an ethic of humility and generosity, made possible by a con-
scious acknowledgement of the ways in which I can never quite know what it is that I
am doing.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Now that the tide has gone out, the state of undress of
many participants in ?nancial markets is there for all to
see: bare bottoms all over the place. Nobody can be proud
of some of the ugliness that this credit crisis has exposed.
Transparency requirements have many dimensions within
the ?nancial market regulatory framework. . . In appropri-
ate circumstances, transparency has a useful role to play;
for example, when it comes to dealing with opaque ?nan-
cial instruments. But I have always been of the view that
when the stability of a ?nancial institution is at risk, the
situation is best resolved behind closed doors. Unfortu-
nately, in recent weeks, gold-plated transparency rules
stood in the way of a quiet resolution of a problem before
it became a crisis. The result was that transparency rules
that were intended to underpin investor con?dence, when
put to the test, actually promoted investor panic. It would
surely be irresponsible for the regulators not to re?ect on
this experience and not to draw the appropriate lessons.
Clearly transparency that culminates in panic, followed
by a rescue, followed by the proliferation of moral hazard
is transparency that we would be better off without.
Charlie McCreevy, European Internal Market Commis-
sioner, 26 October 2007.
The context for the above re?ections was the rules that
prevented Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England,
from discretely intervening as covert lender of last resort
to forestall a run on the Northern Rock Bank. I have intro-
duced them here since they serve as a summary of the
themes that I wish to explore in the paper that follows.
On the one hand, these comments rehearse the positive
potentials of transparency as a regulatory instrument; the
assumed capacities of transparency to counter opaqueness
and, as McCreevy puts it, to thereby ‘underpin’ investor
con?dence. This is precisely the promise of transparency
as a mechanism of accountability; to cast light upon what
would otherwise remain obscure or invisible, and to do so
in order to provide the basis for con?dence for distant oth-
ers. What must be observed ?rst is that regulators have in-
vested heavily in the potentials of transparency; the rules
have been ‘gold plated’ as if an ideal of complete transpar-
ency is being pursued. We seem to believe in transparency,
and with every failure of governance, we have been prone
to invest in yet further transparency as the assumed
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.04.005
* Fax: +61 2 9351 6638.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
remedy for all failures. This paper starts from the counter
assumption that the ideal of a complete transparency is
an impossible fantasy, but one that is nevertheless widely
shared.
The ideal of transparency pretends to a mere making
visible. But what McCreevy describes here is what we
might call the ‘performativity’ of transparency (MacKenzie,
2006). In this instance transparency did not reassure but
rather was the cause of panic, crisis and moral hazard.
Transparency has unintended effects such that the making
visible starts to change that which is rendered transparent.
In what follows I want to explore quite how transparency
works back upon those subject to it in ways that are often
counter productive, or at least far exceeds the passive im-
age of a simple making visible.
In setting out to explore the effects of transparency on
the subject some clues can be taken from McCreevy’s refer-
ence to ‘pride’, ‘bare bottoms’ and ‘ugliness’. Transparency
contains these dual and contrasting potentials and perhaps
in binary form; it promises and threatens to reveal or dis-
cover the self as good or bad, clothed or naked, beautiful or
ugly. In what follows, I explore how transparency works to
advertise an ideal against which we will always fail so that
it plays with my fears of being exposed and humiliated
whilst at the same time encouraging me to take pride in
what is disclosed.
The ?nal focus of the paper concerns the kind of
accountability that McCreevy suggests should go on ‘be-
hind closed doors’. Once doors are closed and transparency
ceases to be a possibility then we are obliged to trust those
on the other side, and yet the whole point of transparency
is to obviate the need for such trust or to furnish distant
others with good reasons for such trust. The implication
of McCreevy’s comments is that only exceptional and very
important matters should escape the obligations of trans-
parency – in this case global ?nancial stability. In contrast,
here I seek to develop a more nuanced view of transpar-
ency’s capabilities and limitations, and suggest that at best
it should serve as a supplement to the neglected potentials
of what O’Neill (2002) calls ‘intelligent’ accountability.
Whilst the metaphor of transparency suggests the
capacity to see within or behind closed doors – to abolish
such private and con?dential space – in practical terms
the effects of transparency depend upon how it changes
conduct behind closed doors. In what follows I trace two
contrasting potentials. The positive and arguably essential
function of transparency is to counter the negative poten-
tials of local collusion for distant others. As O’Neill (2006)
argues, by giving a local presence to the interests of distant
others, transparency can serve as a very effective ‘antidote’
to secrecy. But in what follows I argue that if we rely only
on transparency as a form of accountability then these po-
sitive effects are often countered by serious distortions to
communication which, paradoxically, serve to weaken
the effectiveness of accountability. Drawing upon psycho-
analytic accounts of recognition and guilt, I argue that
the subjective correlate of the pursuit of an ever more com-
plete transparency is often the embrace of an ideal of a per-
fect-able and fully transparent self. I argue that
accountability is then typically self absorbed and driven
by the narcissistic imperative to garner praise/reward to
the self or absolve the self of blame, rather than by the col-
lective need to manage organisational interdependencies.
In contrast to these self-defensive or assertive poten-
tials of accountability as transparency, I then seek to ex-
plore the potential for a more ‘intelligent’ and
compassionate formof accountability grounded in the con-
scious acknowledgement of the impossibility of this ideal
of a self that is fully transparent to itself and others.
The stimulus for writing this paper came from reading
Butler’s (2005) book Giving an Account of Oneself. Here But-
ler argues that it is simply impossible to give a full account
of oneself; any account fails by virtue of that which is
unavoidably opaque to the self both in relation to the ori-
gins and drivers of my own agency and the social norms
and categories which furnish me with the frames within
which I structure any account. Rather than taking this as
an evidence of a sort of moral nihilism, she argues that
the conscious acknowledgement of the impossibility of a
self that is fully transparent to itself (and therefore others)
could be the basis for a very different sense of responsibil-
ity and ethics grounded in humility and generosity, which
in turn might allow for a very different enactment of
accountability.
In developing these arguments Butler draws very
widely upon both psychoanalytic theory and philosophy,
and in the context of this paper I can only follow some of
the strands of her argument. The paper begins with an
exploration of the importance and complexity of the prac-
tice of accountability. Here I follow Butler’s reading of
Freud on the nature of guilt and of Lacan on recognition
to capture some of the emotional force and paranoia which
is arguably a routine part of the moment of being held to
account. The paper then moves to explore the operation
of transparency as a form of accountability within organi-
sations. Drawing upon the existing literature I observe
both the allure of the idea(l) of a complete transparency
and the typically perverse organisational consequences
that ?ow from the pursuit of this. The themes of recogni-
tion and guilt are used to explore what is argued to be
our typically ambivalent embrace of transparency. In the ?-
nal substantive part of the paper I return to Butler’s analy-
sis of why it is impossible to give a full account of oneself,
and the Levinasian version of ethics through which she
seeks to outline the potential for an arguably more realistic
and compassionate practice of accountability.
The scene of accountability; subjection, guilt and
recognition
Accountability as subjection
One of the resources for Butler’s exploration of account-
ability is Althusser’s version of accountability as interpella-
tion (Althusser, 1971). Althusser imagines a street scene in
which an individual is hailed with a ‘Hey, you there!’ It is
possibly a policeman who does the hailing and its effect
is that the hailed person turns around. For Althusser this
interpellation and its resultant turning is an allegory for
the creation of the subject; in turning the individual ‘be-
comes a subject’. Subject here has its full ambiguity as both
958 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
‘(1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who sub-
mits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all
freedom except that of freely accepting his submission’
(1971).
The question Althusser then pursues concerns what is
compelling about this interpellation and its consequent
turning. He points to two factors that together produce this
effect. Guilt, he suggests, is one part of what makes for this
turning. It is in this sense a guilty turning to face the law;
or a ?nding of oneself as already guilty in the face of the
law. Butler suggests that this turning towards the law is
also a turning against the self; that the ‘turn towards the
law is in this respect a turning back on oneself that consti-
tutes the movement of conscience’ (1997, p.107). But, fol-
lowing Lacan, Althusser suggests that it is also recognition
that is at work here; he has recognised that the hail was
‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who
was hailed’ (and not someone else). Or as Butler puts it,
what is compelling in accountability, and what possibly
blunts the critical interrogation of the law, is that it prom-
ises identity (Butler, 1997).
So already we can say that rather than a mere giving of
an account by an already formed subject, accountability is
the condition of becoming a subject who might be able to
give an account. It is the endlessly repeated moment of
subjection. We can see why the discussion of power is
so often accompanied by concerns for accountability since
power provides an escape from subjection; that a person
or group becomes a law unto itself (Monks & Minnow,
1991). However, subjection also seeks to secure my recog-
nition by this big Other as a guarantor of my status as a
subject. In order to open up our understanding of account-
ability in this fuller sense in what follows I want to ex-
plore the theorisation of recognition and guilt as these
inform Althusser and Butler’s discussion of the force of
accountability. Whilst the psychoanalytic ideas they fol-
low are complex, my aim is to more adequately ground
our understanding of the practice of accountability, as
the basis for the subsequent exploration of the limits of
transparency as a form of organisational accountability,
and the potential for a more intelligent practice of
accountability.
Recognition
To say that recognition is at stake in processes of
accountability seems important but non-controversial.
However, the subjection in this process in part lies in the
way in which accountability involves being recognised on
the other’s terms. Lacan begins his account of these pro-
cesses and indeed of the origins of subjectivity through
an analysis of what he calls the ‘mirror stage’ of develop-
ment in the young infant.
‘what demonstrates the phenomenon of recognition,
which involves subjectivity, are the signs of triumphant
jubilation and playful discovery that characterise, from
the sixth month, the child’s encounter with his image in
the mirror. This behaviour contrasts strikingly with the
indifference shown even by animals that perceive this
image, the chimpanzee for example, when they have
tested its objectal vanity. . .’ (1977, p.18).
Here Lacan pictures a child, six to eighteen months old,
in front of the mirror. The child is at this point still physi-
cally dependent and is yet to acquire language and its asso-
ciated distinctions between self and other, past and future.
He or she is simply immersed in the bodily experience of
being in the world. His ?rst version implied that the child
was on his or her own in front of the mirror; later accounts
had the child with an approving and encouraging parent
(Fink, 1997). What Lacan insists is a peculiarly human trait
is the moment of recognition that occurs in this scene; the
child recognises as his own the image in the mirror which
gives him or her the ?rst experience of seemingly ‘seeing
oneself seeing oneself’. Chimpanzees, he suggests, see only
a potential rival in the mirror but then quickly become
bored by the image once it is discovered to be empty. By
contrast the child is jubilant at this experience of self rec-
ognition. Part of this jubilation is the hint of mastery/con-
trol that is involved in the re?ection; the external image
moves as if in response to the child’s movement. Lacan
contrasts the physical immaturity of the child with this
apparent experience of mastery; as such the identi?cation
of self with the image hints at the future potentials of the
self as agent.
For Lacan the child’s identi?cation with the image is the
founding moment of the ego. Freud had talked of the ego as
a bodily ego or the projection of a surface. Lacan’s analysis
conceives of this process not so much as a projection but as
a ?nding or recognising of oneself in the image. This identi-
?cation then serves as a unifying image around which the
child can begin to organise experience. It paves the way for
the acquisition of language, and future capacities for
re?exivity and agency. But these positive elements are
tempered by Lacan through an exploration of this ?rst mo-
ment of recognition as also an experience of alienation.
Some of this alienation is no doubt welcome; whilst
lived experience for the child knows of no separation be-
tween subject and object, the mirror image, and identi?ca-
tion with the image, suggests a self that is unitary and
enclosed. Identifying with the mirror image relocates the
self from a lived immersion in the body out into the image;
the self is grasped as it were from the outside. Lacan insists
here that recognition always involves what he calls a fate-
ful ‘meconnaissance’ or misrecognition; it is as if our very
existence is misplaced out into the ephemeral substance
of a mere re?ection. In this sense recognition is a process
in which we humans are prone to be captured by the ‘lure’
of the image in which we seek, ?nd and lose ourselves. The
alienation also goes further, for Lacan insists that in the im-
age we misrecognise the self by coming to conceive of the
self as if I were an entity or object of substance; the image
of the self as an heroic statue. We grasp the self as substan-
tial and then spend the rest of our lives trying to make a
reality of this misrecognised sense of self, so that this ?rst
identi?cation is also the beginnings of what Lacan calls the
‘armour of alienating identity’.
Whilst the mirror stage is offered as the founding mo-
ment of the ego and subjectivity by Lacan, the force of
his analysis only comes into its own when the scene is
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 959
transposed to inter-personal processes of recognition. One
infamous Lacanian formulation of this is that desire is al-
ways the desire of/for the other. Others too offer us the
same lure of recognition. In the mirror the mistake is to lo-
cate the self’s existence in the image. Socially and organi-
sationally recognition acquires a similar existential force
for my very existence seems to depend upon recognition
by others. In contrast to the mirror, however, there is al-
ways something enigmatic about the response of the
other; a permanent question mark as to what exactly the
other wants of me. The social dynamic of recognition is
therefore one in which I am constantly seeking to make
myself into the object of the other’s desire, and the force
of recognition as we pursue it in this way lies precisely
in the fact that I have misplaced my very existence into
the image. I ?nd myself in the response of the other and,
enigmatic as it is, I am prone for the sake of their recogni-
tion to seek to make myself into what will allow me to be
recognised by the other. Again we can say that the look of
the other has the power to capture; it is a constant lure. La-
can explains both love and aggression in these terms. Love
from this perspective is ‘the desire to be loved’ (1979,
p.253) whilst aggression is explained in terms of a compet-
itive rivalry for the approving look of the other; as if atten-
tion given to another might rob me of my very existence
(1979, p.116).
So if we return to Althusser’s street scene of interpella-
tion, part of what produces this turning towards the other
is the promise of authoritative recognition. But the price of
such recognition, upon which my very existence seems to
depend, is the need to make myself into the object of the
other’s desire. My sense of self and the value of myself
are put into play in accountability; it is as if, in order to ex-
ist, I must secure others’ recognition. The social dynamic of
recognition in accountability threatens to disturb the fun-
damental misrecognition of the self as coherent and
autonomous.
The genesis of guilt
Let us now turn to look at the other element within
interpellation that, as it were, compels me into turning
around – the dynamics of guilt. Here I want to introduce
Freud’s account of the differentiation of the ego into the
‘ego’ and ‘ego-ideal’ or ‘super-ego’. Freud’s ?rst discussion
of the ego ideal is in his 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism’. There
are strong resonances here with Lacan’s later view of the
mirror stage. Primary narcissism, Freud insists, is dif?cult
to observe directly but can be inferred in the affectionate
attitude of parents towards their children. As he puts it:-
‘they are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection
to the child – which sober observation would ?nd no
occasion to do – and to conceal and forget all his short-
comings. . . Moreover they are inclined to suspend in
the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acqui-
sitions which their own narcissism has been forced to
respect, and to renew on his behalf the claims to privi-
leges which were long ago given up by themselves. The
child shall have a better time than his parents; he shall
not be subject to the necessities which they have recog-
nised as paramount in life. Illness, death, renunciation
of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not
touch him; the laws of nature and of society shall be
abrogated in his favour; he shall once more be the cen-
tre and core of creation – ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we
once fancied ourselves’ (1984, p.87).
The term that Freud gives to this inferred primary nar-
cissism is the ‘ideal ego’. This ?gure is worth observing in
detail for it is about a founding conception of the self as al-
ready perfect; a perfection that is of course an idealisation
or over valuation of the self ‘aggrandized and exalted in the
subject’s mind’. Part of the genesis of rage lies in any per-
ception that threatens this imagined perfection. It is argu-
ably a resource, a source of con?dence to be drawn upon in
later life, but also in itself deadly since it recognises no
need for development, learning, nor indeed any obligation
or need for accountability to others. It is a long-lost mo-
ment of perfection; of a self that can do no wrong.
Freud suggests that such is the allure of this sense of
perfection that we are incapable of giving it up. He sug-
gests that as we grow up and are disturbed by the admoni-
tions of others and by our own critical judgment so that we
cannot retain that perfection, we seek to recover it in the
form of what he calls an ‘ego ideal’; an ideal set up within
the self. At this point Freud speaks not of the ‘super-ego’
but only of some ‘special psychical agency’ whose role is
to see that ‘narcissistic satisfaction fromthe ego ideal is en-
sured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches
the actual ego and measures it by that ideal’ (1984, p.89).
He notes the paranoid sense of being watched and super-
vised with which this is associated; ‘a power of this kind,
watching, discovering, and criticising all our intentions,
does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in nor-
mal life’ (1984, p.90).
The further development of Freud’s ideas about the
‘ego-ideal/super-ego’ came in two subsequent papers. In
‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud argues that this differentiation
of the ego takes place through a process of ‘identi?cation’
which he sees as the ‘earliest expression of an emotional
tie with another person’. He suggests that identi?cation
‘behaves like a derivative of the ?rst, oral phase of the
organisation of the libido, in which an object that we long
for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way
annihilated as such’ (1984, p.135). Identi?cation is con-
trasted with ‘object choice’; the desire for a relationship
with another. Freud suggests that identi?cation is a regres-
sive way in which we cope with the loss of an object or
relationship through, as it were, installing the lost object
within the ego. In later life identi?cation can arise ‘with
any newperception of a common quality shared with some
other person’, but in childhood parental ?gures are the fo-
cus of our identi?cations.
Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus complex is hopefully too
well known to dwell upon here. Freud suggests that for the
little boy identi?cation with the father involves taking the
father as an ideal that he would like to be like and grow up
to be. The boy’s growing attachment to the mother, how-
ever, then creates a ‘hostile colouring’ to the identi?cation
with the father which ‘changes into a wish to get rid of the
father in order to take his place with his mother’ (1984,
960 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
p.371). In this simple form the resolution of Oedipus is rea-
lised through repression of the wish for the mother and
rivalry with the father, which is achieved through an inten-
si?cation of the identi?cation with the father. It is this
identi?cation that forms the ego ideal. In this way, for
Freud, the ‘ego ideal’ is the heir to the Oedipus complex.
1
As such it has a double aspect as both an ideal of what
one ought to be like and a prohibition of what one may
not do.
‘As a child grows up, the role of the father is carried on
by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions
and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and
continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise moral
censorship. The tension between the demands of con-
science and the actual performance of the ego is experi-
enced as a sense of guilt’ (1984, p.377).
This strictly psychological account of the Oedipal roots
of the ego ideal/super-ego is mirrored in the more socio-
logical account Freud gives of the primal horde in ‘Group
Psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (Freud, 1985). The
de?ning feature of group as opposed to individual psychol-
ogy, for Freud, lies in the intensi?cation of affect and dim-
inution of the powers of the intellect once we are members
of a group. The dynamics of group psychology are again
tied to processes of identi?cation but here it is the leader
or ‘leading idea’ that, he suggests, can take the place
of the ego ideal for members of a group. This then provides
the basis for an identi?cation amongst the members of the
group on the basis of their sharing of a common ideal (see
Casey, 1999; Swartz, 1990 for their discussions of the oper-
ation of an ‘organisation ideal’).
Recognition, guilt and accountability
So how do these psychoanalytic views of processes of
recognition and guilt help us to understand the complexity
and dynamic of accountability as a social practice, and in-
deed our understanding of ethics? Perhaps at its simplest
level they can be taken as a description of the inter- and in-
tra-personal processes of accountability. The two are
inseparable. Accountability is never just a social relation-
ship, nor purely an internal relationship. Instead, each re-
?ects and animates the other. Intra-personally
accountability involves a re?exive relationship with the
self in which I judge myself against an ideal that, through
identi?cation, I take as my standard of what I should, and
should not be and do. Conscience is in this sense the ideal
against which I judge myself. However, in contrast to a
Foucauldian account of ethics, this psychoanalytic account
suggests and explains something of the cruelty (and plea-
sure) that we can enact upon ourselves as part of
accountability.
In so far as we identify with this ideal it is a demand for
perfection. Ethics then appears in the less than obvious
form of a violent attack upon the self; an endlessly critical
agency through which we berate the self for being less
than we should be. Whilst consciously the severity of con-
science is typically associated with high ethical ideals
which Freud suggests can be the source of humility, his
analysis also ties such high ideals to the strength of an ori-
ginal violent rivalry, which, through identi?cation, is now
turned back upon the self. Such unconscious rivalry/guilt/
envy is then prone to reappear in the formof a transference
within authority relationships in later adult life so that to
each new authority relationship I bring the emotional
and often unconscious residues of earlier parental relation-
ships (Zaleznick & Kets de Vries, 1985).
It is perhaps for this reason that the scene of account-
ability is almost invariably highly charged emotionally
and includes an anxious compulsion to ‘acquit oneself’
(Butler, 1997). A conscious account of conscience or guilt
could be simply about going against or failing to meet
some personal moral standard. The Freudian account of
guilt as the gap between ideal and reality contains much
of this sense but also explains the emotional excess in con-
science; its paranoid edges. So accountability frequently
arouses both longings for love and acceptance and parallel
fears of being attacked and turned upon, and I would argue
that it is this emotional edge to accountability that gives it
its force. There is often something of an emotional short
circuit at work in accountability such that the present
comes to be imbued with these earlier emotional reso-
nances. This in turn can prove somewhat disabling within
accountability. I am prone to rehearse all sorts of argu-
ments with the powerful in my mind only to ?nd myself,
for the sake of their recognition, being graciously syco-
phantic once in their presence. It seemingly requires re-
serves of courage to traverse these fantasies and risk
speaking truth to power.
Then there is the ideal itself. Perhaps in my saner mo-
ments I can recognise an ideal for what it is – something
that by de?nition is not realistic. Yet my own narcissism
encourages me to expect only the best from myself and
still be unsatis?ed. Is this not the impossible meaning
and allure of the recent organisational demand for ‘contin-
uous improvement’ – that good will never be good en-
ough? The ideal also appears in what we project, or are
prone to project onto our leaders; a projection that will al-
ways disappoint but which nevertheless leads us to end-
lessly seek the new messiah (Bion, 1961). In a recent
book on the death of Freud, Edmundson (2007) argues
forcefully that Freud’s concerns were with authority gone
bad; our desire to grasp after the tyranny of leadership pre-
cisely because of the recognition it confers and the release
it offers us from our normal con?icts and ambivalences.
Finally there is the question of how recognition and
guilt work in relation to each other. Giddens (1991) draws
a sharp distinction between guilt and shame, but to my
mind the two processes are interwoven. Freud and Lacan
each offer different versions of narcissism and yet the rec-
ognition we crave typically has the form of an idealised
version of the self. That we must endlessly fail against
the standard of an ideal then makes accountability into a
1
The Lacanian version of Oedipus seeks to avoid the essentialism of
Freud’s account whilst insisting on the importance for development of the
intervention of a third into the dyad of the mother–child relationship. In
Lacan’s account the father is an incarnation or delegate of the ‘symbolic
father’ who represents the law to which all are subject. Only this intrusion
frees the child to assume his or her place in the symbolic order. For a lucid
account of the ambivalent relationship between feminist writers and Lacan
see Grosz (1990).
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 961
potentially very painful process for what am I to do with all
that is inadequate in the self.
In the sections that follow I explore how these themes
get played out in processes of organisational accountabil-
ity; ?rst in the allure of the idea(l) of transparency and
the ethical violence and moral narcissism that it induces,
and second, in Butler’s alternative and possibly more real-
istic conception of ethics as humility and generosity to-
wards both oneself and others in a process of
accountability that embraces rather than seeks to deny
that I never quite know what it is that I am doing.
Accountability as transparency
‘The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible
for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central
point would be both a source of light illuminating every-
thing that.. must be known, a perfect eye that nothing
would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would
be turned’ (Foucault, 1979, p.173).
The possibility of transparency, and indeed of a com-
plete transparency, is an alluring but also terrifying idea(l).
Its dictionary de?nition offers some sight of this. In its lit-
eral, physical sense transparency is about the ability of
light to pass through something so that objects behind it
can be seen. McCreevy’s closed doors in other words, can
with the appropriate technology be rendered see-through.
But as Foucault suggests it also evokes the spectre of an all
seeing and all knowing God. Part of the allure of transpar-
ency is that it seems to promise the user such omniscience
at the same time as it makes him or her subject to such a
terrifying scrutiny; albeit that this is now to be realised
through the mundane mechanisms of organisational
transparency.
For our purposes here the technology is accounting and
its capacities to allow us to see behind or within the corpo-
rate entity. The core image is of casting light into shadows
that allows others to see. Accounting’s claim in relation to
producing a ‘true and fair’ view of organisational results is
presumably pertinent here. In this literal sense the prepa-
ration and publication of Accounts can be seen as account-
ability for, as transparency, all that accountability requires
is this laying bare or making visible of ‘what is’.
The force of this metaphor of laying bare also offers
some explanation for the endless elaboration of transpar-
ency. It suggests that any failure of governance can be rem-
edied through yet more transparency – greater disclosure
or new objects of disclosure – as if the solution lies simply
in ?nding ways of seeing more sharply or more completely.
This is the logic that Power ?rst explored in the ‘audit
explosion’ and the faith that the following quote from Gray
expresses in relation to the potential of greater transpar-
ency to create environmental responsibility.
‘The development of accountability. . . increases the
transparency of organisations. That is it increases
the number of things that are made visible, increases
the number of ways in which things are made visible,
and in doing so encourages a greater openness. The
inside of the organisation becomes more visible, that
is transparent’ (1992, p.415).
In recent years, there has been a constant elaboration of
new forms of ?nancial and non-?nancial disclosures by
organisations to their stakeholders, arguably re?ecting
our growing faith in transparency as a source of trust for
distant others. Yet as Power has more recently observed,
in turning organisations ‘inside out’ transparency has also
created a new ideal of organisational ‘self-control and
self-observation’ (2007, p.60). Power traces the develop-
ment of this new ideal of auditable (self) governance in
the emergence of new high level organisational processes
and systems of internal control and risk management.
But the ideal of self control, framed as ‘empowerment’
and ‘accountability’, has arguably come to achieve a perva-
sive presence at every level of organisations (Ogden, Glais-
er, & Marginson, 2006). From a managerial perspective,
Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard (1992) embodies
a faith in the potentials for enhanced control offered by
the extension of transparency to new domains. Whilst
from a more critical perspective, Miller and O’Leary’s
(1994) Caterpillar study describes the multiple and shifting
initiatives and programmes, driven by an ideal of ‘pure
customer driven manufacturing’, and enforced by new vis-
ibilities like competitor benchmarking, through which a
‘fundamental transformation of the ?eld of accountability
within the plant’ was being attempted. More intimately
yet, Townley’s (1993) Foucauldian account of modern
HRM practices observes the raft of processes of examina-
tion – selection, training, development, appraisal and feed-
back – through which ideals for employee conduct are
advertised and then enforced. In sum, our increasing
investment in the technologies of transparency suggests
a deep and enduring belief that transparency is suf?cient
to realise organisational (self) control.
At the same time, however, and in seeming contradic-
tion to this belief in transparency, lie all the ways in which
we also seem to know that the allure of transparency is
false or misleading. We know, for example, that the meta-
phor of shedding light is a gross simpli?cation of the com-
plex labour that is involved in the manufacture of
transparency (Chua, 1995). Even in positivist theory,
accounting as an instrument of representation depends
upon complex processes of quanti?cation and associated
methodological rigour. Constructivist accounts of mea-
surement complicate matters further in so far as they insist
that measurement itself is implicated in the constitution of
its objects, and is inseparable from social/political interests
which invest in it as an instrument of control (McKernan,
2007; Power, 2004; Robson, 1992).
Strathern (2000) seeks to puncture the illusion of trans-
parency by asking ‘what does visibility conceal’. She ob-
serves that transparency typically ‘works backwards’
from categories of relevance which are assumed to be
‘known in advance’ to the measurement of evidence in
terms of these categories. This explains part of our discom-
fort with transparency for at best its categories seem only
half relevant to our more ?nely grained technical, personal
and local knowledge. Transparency then becomes account-
ability by turning measures into targets; ‘the system of
measurement into a device that also sets the ideal levels
of attainment’. Again this is a vital move which, by means
of incentives and sanctions, transforms a mere making
962 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
visible into a norm against which I will be judged and
should judge myself. In reality, however, Strathern sug-
gests that transparency involves processes of abstraction
and de-contextualisation that merely conceal the real
workings of the institution; ‘its social structure, cultural
values, and modes of organisation’ much of which is
embedded in tacit, shared but taken for granted knowledge
(Strathern, 2004). Transparency from this perspective in-
volves a sort of masking of the complexity of organisa-
tional reality and its reduction to a few simple indicators.
But if the organisational production of transparency is
complex and laborious, and if it also involves radical
abstraction from context, its failings are perhaps most
obvious in its often perverse organisational effects.
Power’s seminal account of such potentials in The Audit
Society (1997) suggests two possible paths of failure in
relation to the transparency created by performance
audits. The ?rst involves a process of ‘decoupling’ where
transparency is managed in such a way as to project the
appearance of control externally whilst leaving actual
operational ef?ciency untouched. Transparency here is a
mere theatre of good performance manufactured for others
but decoupled from actual performance. At the other ex-
treme lies the possibility for what Power terms ‘coloniza-
tion’ in which the effects of audit/transparency ‘penetrate
deep into the core of operational practices’ and result in
‘the creation over time of new mentalities, new incentives
and perceptions of signi?cance’. The danger he explores
here is that ‘the imposition of audit and related measures
of auditable performance leads to the opposite of what
was intended, i.e. it creates forms of dysfunction for the au-
dited service itself’ (1997, p.98). Transparency begins to
transform the subjectivity of those whom it renders visible
in ways that distort organisational performance. Or as Tso-
ukas puts it:- ‘management becomes tantamount to keep-
ing up appearances, and ?ghting shadows: managing via
league tables leads to managing the league tables them-
selves’ (1997, p.838).
It is this latter theme that O’Neill takes up in her more
recent critique of new forms of transparency. These, she
suggests, are widely experienced ‘not just as changing
but (I think) as distorting the proper aims of professional
practice and indeed as damaging professional pride and
integrity’. She suggests that, whilst justi?ed in terms of
making professionals and institutions more accountable
for good performance, in practice, organisational perfor-
mance is itself distorted by ‘the race to improve perfor-
mance indicators’. ‘Perverse incentives’, O’Neill insists,
are nevertheless ‘real incentives’ and the pursuit of an ever
more complete transparency has, as its unintended conse-
quence, the creation of a ‘culture of suspicion, low morale
and professional cynicism’. Despite its good intentions the
demand for universal transparency is ‘likely to encourage
the evasions, hypocrisies, and half truths that we usually
refer to as ‘political correctness’, but which might more
forthrightly be called either ‘self-censorship’ or ‘deception’
(2002, p.73).
In a related analysis Hood (2007) has explored various
forms of transparency and how these interact with ‘blame
avoidance’ as a force that underlies much of political and
institutional practice. He develops a threefold categoriza-
tion of blame avoidance strategies; ‘Agency’ strategies that
essentially involve mechanisms that seek a scapegoat for
blame; ‘presentational’ strategies that seek to ‘spin’ their
way out of trouble; and ‘policy’ strategies that seek no or
low blame options in order to avoid all possibility of blame.
In relation to bureaucratic forms of transparency the obvi-
ous presentational strategy is that of ‘gaming’ or the
manipulation of performance numbers; a phenomenon
that has long been observed in budgetary processes (Hop-
wood, 1972). Other strategies include ‘snowing’ – seeking
to ?ood others with information –, ‘venue shifting’ so that
important decision making is moved to a different and
undocumented setting, and the rigid following of proce-
dures with associated audit trails. Such strategies suggest
that blame avoidance becomes a rational choice in the face
of ever increasing demands for transparency.
So in opposition to the allure of the idea(l) of transpar-
ency is the seemingly widespread recognition of the nega-
tive organisational consequences that arise from its use.
Why then do we continue to invest ever more heavily in
both the rhetoric and mechanisms of transparency in the
full knowledge of its practical impossibility and conse-
quent distortions?
Our ambivalent embrace of transparency
Strathern describes this ambivalent embrace of trans-
parency in the following way:-
‘To auditor and auditee alike, the language of assess-
ment, in purporting to be a language that makes output
transparent, hides many dimensions of the output pro-
cess; as we have seen, this, too, is standard (self) criti-
cism. The rhetoric of transparency appears to conceal
that very process of concealment, yet in so far as ‘every-
one knows’ this, it would be hard to say it ‘really’ does
so. Realities are knowingly eclipsed’ (2000, p.315).
Power observes a similar ambivalence in relation to ide-
als of auditability when he notes that:-
‘Practitioner humour, irony, and stories of absurd side
effects are replaced at the world–level by earnest ideal-
ism, perfectionism and design optimism – often by the
very practitioners who would privately side with the
critics’ (2007, p.168).
Like O’Neill, both Strathern and Power are describing a
form of self censorship associated with transparency that
potentially robs accountability of much of its communica-
tive value. In what follows I suggest that it is this very
ambivalence itself which allows transparency to achieve
its illusory grip upon us.
Ambivalence involves a strange admixture of belief and
simultaneous disbelief in relation to my own and others’
beliefs. An English phrase used by colleagues to describe
a person who is well perceived by superiors in an organisa-
tion is that the ‘sun shines out of his arse’. Condensed in
this inelegant phrase is much of how transparency works
upon us; it promises/threatens to lay bare the self. Ambiv-
alence is created in the ways in which someone can
seemingly appear so perfect to distant but less informed
others. It is unrealistic in that his colleagues know better
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 963
(disbelief), but are nevertheless themselves stained by
comparison in the eyes of superiors (belief). At the same
time it is envious (belief) of the attention and admiration
attracted by their peerless peer, which seems only to con-
?rm what is lacking in themselves (disbelief).
O’Neill traces our embrace of new forms of transpar-
ency to what she calls ‘a fantasy of total control’. The prob-
lem but power of transparency lies in its use as an
instrument of hierarchy, large-scale organisation, and con-
trol at a distance. The visual metaphor of transparency
immediately places us in the realm of narcissus. It is not
just that our conduct is rendered visible to others. Rather
the power of transparency lies in the possibility that I
and/or others will identify with the image of the self that
such transparency offers; that I will recognise myself
and/or be recognised in its categories. A factional example
will perhaps help here. At a recent departmental meeting
the annual accounts were on the agenda and the conversa-
tion quickly fell to exploring the ways in which the ?gures
were in various ways nonsensical. Transparency in this lo-
cal context offered no great dif?culties for its omissions
and abstractions could quickly be concretised and re-con-
textualised by virtue of everyone’s rich and elaborate local
knowledge. But despite the pleasures of this conversation –
perhaps arising from the obvious superiority of our local
knowledge and the consequent foolishness of some ele-
ments of the ?gures – the meeting was silenced by the
chair’s observation that whilst we knew that the ?gures
were rubbish, the trouble was that our (absent) boss be-
lieved in them.
The problem is real. The boss does not have our local
knowledge and knows the local only through the ways in
which accounting ?gures render it transparent. Without
the transparency he is blind and dependent on the local,
with it he is potent for he can compare us with others,
challenge past conduct and set demanding targets. We
could say that transparency makes being a boss possible,
and indeed as ‘coach’ and ‘mentor’ being a boss is now pre-
sented not as the control of others but rather as embodying
an ideal for others to emulate (Wageman, 2001). However,
there is also a sense in which the boss knows only too well
that the numbers probably cannot be believed but deploys
belief in the numbers as a tactic which allows him to dem-
onstrate his capabilities as a boss. We can see in this sce-
nario how dif?cult it is to introduce reality into
‘accountability as transparency’ for narcissus keeps getting
in the way. Narcissus, in this instance, is indeed the fantasy
of total control and personal competence, and the denial of
dependence that it supports.
Force is given to this fantasy by the way that the boss is
him/herself subject to a similar transparency. As one
moves up the hierarchy, results and the consequent ‘suc-
cess’ of the self are often constituted largely within this vir-
tual sea of representations, which are now ‘second order’
numbers thoroughly divorced from the messy context
within which they were produced and to which they refer
(Power, 2004). In this sense management does indeed be-
come no more than ‘managing the league tables’. Plans,
budgets, assurance statements, and audits become the only
currency of managerial exchange. Unless things go very
wrong, they are taken at face value and relied upon as
the basis for decision making, resource allocation and the
rituals of symbolic praise and humiliation. The boss’s boss
too can claim with some force that it would be ‘irresponsi-
ble’ not to take such transparency seriously, inadequate as
it may be, for yet more distant others also believe in it. In
this way accountability as transparency takes on a self-ful-
?lling life of its own that is all too easily decoupled from
the realities it is supposed to disclose.
But I think that there are possibly good reasons to
question whether it is really only the belief of the boss,
and/or the boss’s boss, in the reality of the ?gures that
is the problem. In the factional meeting, our eager discus-
sion of the nonsensical elements of the accounts was pos-
sibly motivated by more than a desire for the truth and
amounted to an urgent need to distance ourselves from
the image of the self that our transparency offered. Part
of what makes the validity of the ?gures un-discussable
with the boss is our anticipation of the sense that he will
make of our objections. If there is anything less than per-
fect in the ?gures he may all too easily read our objec-
tions as just mere excuses for our own inadequacies; to
believe in the ?gures rather than us. If the ?gures are
perfect then we will perhaps also be all too ready to be-
lieve in them and will have no strongly felt need to inter-
rogate their accuracy. Our local and cynical ‘dis-
identi?cation’ with the annual accounts could be taken
as evidence of the partial failure of control and seen as
the site for possible resistance. However, as Fleming
and Spicer (2003) have argued, such dis-identi?cation
can itself be seen to be narcissistically motivated. Our
discussion of the nonsensical accounts possibly provided
us with reassurance that we retained our critical capaci-
ties and autonomy since we did not really believe in the
?gures, but perhaps this also made our practical confor-
mity more possible. As Zizek puts it:- ‘cynical distance
is just one way to blind ourselves to the structuring
power of ideological fantasy; even if we do not take
things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance,
we are still doing them’ (1989, p.32).
The alienation that Lacan observes in my identi?cation
with the mirror image is threefold. Firstly, I grasp the self
as something substantive; conceive of myself as a some-
one. The wisdom of the chimpanzee is that he knows the
image to be empty but for us humans it is hard not to iden-
tify – to not keep losing myself in the images that the
world offers me. Such identi?cation has become the basis
for new forms of control within organisations that use
‘selective recognition’ to shape individual identity (Karr-
eman & Alvesson, 2001; Luthans & Stajkovic, 2000). Within
such processes performance metrics are grasped as an
authoritative recognition of my existence; I am my results
and I ?nd my own value re?ected in them. Such identi?ca-
tion itself ensures that I lock myself into the insatiable lo-
gic of continuous self improvement. Force is then added to
this identi?cation in the ways in which in a hierarchy my
transparent self slips beyond my control. Perhaps I can ar-
gue with my boss but not my boss’s boss. My transparent
self travels so that in the ?gures or indicators others will
recognise me as this or that in a way that is authoritative
and consequential and yet completely beyond my in?u-
ence. Part of the power of transparency is that it threatens
964 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
this loss of control over the self at the same time as it offers
authoritative recognition of the self. Again to quote Zizek:-
‘My very awareness of the fact that ‘the truth is out
there’, that ?les on me circulate which, even if they
are factually ‘inaccurate’, none the less performatively
determine my socio-symbolic status, is what gives rise
to the speci?c proto-paranoiac mode of subjectivization
characteristic of today’s subject; it constitutes me as a
subject inherently related to and hassled by an elusive
piece of database in which, beyond my reach, ‘my fate
is writ large’ (1999, p.260).
It is then just a small step to persuade myself of the
necessity to give at least part of my energies to the careful
stage-management of the ways in which I amrendered vis-
ible to distant others. In my own mind this can be ration-
alised pragmatically as a way to secure the resources and
autonomy that will allow me to manage local complexity.
Happily, however, this also serves to secure my recognition
by the distant organisational ‘Other’ even if it requires
‘self-censorship’ or even ‘deception’.
The second sense of alienation that Lacan sees pre?g-
ured in the mirror stage is alienation by others. Transpar-
ency comes to constitute, either directly or through the
comparisons it makes possible, an ideal of what the self
should be. Since transparency offers recognition I will then
work hard to make myself into the object of its desire; to
present the self as already wanting what is desired of
me. When compared with a concrete other transparency
is perhaps less enigmatic in terms of its demands. As
Knights and McCabe found in their study of teamwork,
staff ‘can point to their performance ?gures as evidence
of having ful?lled management expectations and this pro-
vides some security for their identity’ (2003, p.1608). At
the other end of the hierarchy, senior executives’ embrace
of the ideal of delivering shareholder value may offer a
similar comfort (Roberts, Sanderson, Barker, & Hendry,
2006). Perhaps this is part of the attraction of transpar-
ency’s simplistic abstractions; that at least I know what
is wanted of me and with luck will be able to deliver it
(even if this requires a little creativity on my part). Perhaps
the objecti?cations of the self that transparency allows
seem to make me more substantial, and thereby release
me from the anxiety of interaction.
The third sense of alienation that Lacan discusses is the
alienation of self not by but from others. The comparative
space that transparency makes possible, the disciplinary
processes that Foucault (1979) observes in terms of pro-
cesses of differentiation, homogenisation, ranking, and
exclusion, serves to cast the self into a competitive relation
with others. The self is at risk here from being overlooked,
exceeded, ignored, eclipsed by the performance of others.
In the snapshot that transparency offers, others appear
only as competitors and rivals. Here the analysis of recog-
nition can be joined to that of guilt. Butler, drawing upon
Freud, observes what she calls the ‘ethical violence’ and
‘moral narcissism’ that characterises the conduct of the
transparent subject. This has two dimensions. In so far as
I identify with the ideal offered by transparency (or let
my practices or others believe in my place) then transpar-
ency sets up a rivalry both within myself and with others.
As a competitive, rivalrous relationship within my self this
involves the turning of aggressive criticism back on the self
for the ways in which I fail to meet the ideal. The narcis-
sism here is in part my preoccupation with my perfection
or perfect-ability. At the same time, however, the severity
of self-criticism can also create the need to ?nd others
upon whom I can project all that is bad or inadequate in or-
der to protect and preserve my own sense of perfection –
this is the less than rational need that drives the blame
avoidance that Hood observes.
Casey’s (1999) study of teamwork in a multinational,
Hephaestus, illustrates both dimensions of such ethical
violence and moral narcissism. In so far as staff at the com-
pany come to identify with the new ‘organisation ideal’
promoted through the metaphors of ‘team’ and ‘family’,
rather than criticise the organisation when it fails to live
up to its ideals, staff criticise themselves for failing to meet
the ideal. For individuals, she suggests, this can result in
stress as ‘anger is sublimely transposed into guilt’. How-
ever, she also observes the team as a group attacking one
of its members for the betrayal of the team ideal, and
demanding and obtaining a confession from colleagues
who have let the team down. In such processes one can ob-
serve a dynamic of ?ight – a powerful and intensely per-
sonal imperative to avoid or rid the self of all that might
be judged inadequate. This I think is the hook of transpar-
ency – the ideal it advertises and the humiliation it threat-
ens when I am revealed to be less than ideal. I want to be
recognised, and to recognise myself as coherent, good,
competent, and rational. The ‘fantasy of total control’ is
not simply that of the boss; it is a fantasy of what it is,
could, and should be, to be a self.
The dynamics of recognition and guilt then explain
something of our ambivalent embrace of transparency.
Cynical dis-identi?cation preserves the mental illusion of
autonomy, whilst my going along with, my conformity
with the terms of transparency, seeks to secure my recog-
nition. As an individualizing practice the focus of concern
is with securing the self in others’ eyes. In the process,
however, much of the communicative potential and indeed
rationale for accountability is lost. To repeat Strathern’s
phrase, we can say that under the in?uence of accountabil-
ity as transparency ‘realities are knowingly eclipsed’ and
rendered undiscussable. Or in Power’s terms practitioner
critique seldom becomes organised because this would
be seen ‘as an attack on ideals of governance itself’
(2007, p.168). In the section that follows I return to Butler’s
recent work to explore the possibility of our doing
accountability differently on the basis of a conscious and
deeply realistic rejection of this ideal of a self that is fully
transparent to itself. The rationale for accountability lies
not in the pursuit of my own or other’s perfection, but
rather in the fact that I do not and can never know quite
what it is that I am doing.
An ethic for intelligent accountability
In the light of her critique of the unintended conse-
quences of transparency, O’Neill points to the potentials
of what she calls ‘intelligent accountability’. ‘Well placed
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 965
trust’, she argues, ‘grows out of active enquiry rather than
blind acceptance. In traditional relations of trust, active en-
quiry was usually extended over time by talking and ask-
ing questions, by listening and seeing how well claims to
know and undertakings to act held up over time’ (2002,
p.76).
O’Neill’s version of intelligent accountability can be
seen as a counter to many of the de?ciencies of ‘account-
ability as transparency’. Accountability, in its intelligent
form, is in a particular context. It is not a mere showing
or making visible of the self against a pre-determined set
of categories, but rather involves active enquiry – listening,
asking questions, and talking – through which the rele-
vance or accuracy of indicators can be understood in con-
text. Whilst transparency must rely on periodic
snapshots that capture performance at a moment of time,
intelligent accountability extends over time and thereby
affords the opportunity to test commitments against out-
comes in a way that makes the manipulation of perfor-
mance less easy, and promotes understanding of the
complex interdependencies that underlie discrete indica-
tors. It is typically a face-to-face encounter, rich with infor-
mation, in which communication is less easily stage-
managed and rhetoric can be constantly compared to ac-
tual practice.
Transparency and face-to-face accountability always
coexist and it is all too possible for the subjective effects
of transparency to invade the scene of intelligent account-
ability such that it too becomes a self-defensive or aggres-
sive space full of self-blame and/or attempts to displace
blame onto others. What I want to explore here is the
necessity of a different notion of ethics as the basis for
intelligent accountability. Here, I return to Butler’s ideas
for rethinking accountability not as the violent pursuit of
an ideal, but rather on the basis of a conscious acknowl-
edgement of the constitutional impossibility of a ‘self fully
transparent to itself’ (2005, p.83).
Her starting point is to observe all the ways in which I
cannot give an account of myself; the ways in which I
can never quite know what it is that I am doing.
‘There is (1) a non-narrativizable exposure that estab-
lishes my singularity, and there are (2) primary relations,
irrecoverable, that form lasting and recurrent impres-
sions in the history of my life, and so (3) a history that
establishes my partial opacity to myself. Lastly there are
(4) norms that facilitate my telling about myself but that
I do not author and that render me substitutable at the
very moment that I seek to establish the history of my
singularity. The last dispossession in language is inten-
si?ed by the fact that I give an account of myself to
someone, so that the narrative structure of my account
is superseded by (5) the structure of address in which it
takes place’ (2005, p.39).
I will return to the ethical aspect of exposure in a mo-
ment but one part of this is the body and what I cannot ac-
count for as an embodied self. Part of my exposure is the
pre-history of the self; the primary relations which pre-
cede any self consciousness, and the ways in which these
are active within my conduct in ways that will always be
unconscious. Then there are the norms in terms of which
I seek to give an account of myself. Giddens (1976) talks
of accountability in terms of ‘the rationalisation of action’;
to give an account of myself I must perforce draw upon a
normative structure that precedes and exceeds me. Finally,
the very setting – the scene of accountability – will be
working back upon my ability to give an account of myself.
As a subject of transparency it is the potential incoher-
ence of my self that is at risk of exposure. I am then drawn
to account for my conduct as if I did indeed know exactly
what I was doing – the rationality so prized in manage-
ment; as if I was indeed transparent to myself and could
grasp the actual reasons for my conduct rather than offer
mere rationalisations. Further, in transparency I am
encouraged to speak as if I know unambiguously what is
the proper standard in terms of which to account for my-
self; as if this were self evident, singular and my own
rather than current convention. In other words, in trans-
parent regimes of accountability I seek to present myself
as if I am coherent and fully transparent to myself. This
is perhaps just another way to observe the lack of self
re?exivity in transparency; repairing or defending the self
image is privileged over learning and communication. The
scene of address is also crucial, in particular the ‘ethical
violence’ or ‘moral narcissism’ of transparency, in the ways
in which it enforces and keeps me pre-occupied with my
presentation of self as coherent and peerless.
Yet as Butler argues, condemnation of my self or others
always works against self knowledge. As she observes:-
‘What is striking about such extremes of self-berate-
ment is the grandiose notion of the transparent ‘I’ that
is presupposed as the ethical ideal. This is hardly a
belief in which self acceptance (a humility about one’s
constitutive limitations) or generosity (a disposition
towards the limits of others) might ?nd room to ?our-
ish’ (2005, p.80).
Butler’s move is to insist that these different dimen-
sions of self-opaqueness are constitutional and to try to
re-conceive of ethical responsibility and accountability on
this basis.
‘Precisely my opaqueness to myself occasions my
capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on oth-
ers. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared,
invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves. The
recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same
as how one presents oneself in the available discourse,
might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that
would suspend the demand that they be self-same at
every moment’ (2005, p.42).
So a different kind of ethics emerges here on the basis of
an acknowledgement of what will always be opaque in
relation to the self. What is dangerous about the ideal of
transparency is that I identify or wish to identify only with
my perfection or perfectability. I refuse to recognise my
own incoherence but instead must constantly seek ?ight
from it. Viewed obliquely through the lens of Butler’s fram-
ing of her ideas this ?ight seems both impossible and dee-
ply destructive. Recognition of one’s own (partial)
incoherence changes the nature of the game; the very idea
is itself a narcissistic wound but possibly a productive one
966 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
precisely in the way that it fosters both humility and
acceptance in relation to the self and generosity in relation
to similarly limited others.
But Butler pushes further with her analysis of ethics and
responsibility. In transparency I have argued that ethics
has a less than ?attering quality. Again to quote Butler:-
‘one might arrive at a fully cynical view of morality and
conclude that human conduct that seeks to follow
norms of prescriptive value is motivated less by any
desire to do good than by a terrorized fear of punish-
ment and its injurious effects’ (2005, p.16).
Morality here is self absorbed; pre-occupied with the
protection and projection of an image of self. Others are
relevant only as potential rivals or in the ways in which
they recognise me. Ethics here is the ‘ethics of narcissus’;
the manufacture of good appearances through reputation
management with no necessary reference to conduct and
its actual effects (Roberts, 2003). In the development of
her counter view of accountability Butler looks to alterna-
tive theorisations of ethics; notably that of Levinas. The
Freudian account of ethics as a turning of an original vio-
lence back onto the self depends upon a differentiation
within the ego; the superego attacks the ego for being less
than ideal, or seeks to project blame onto others in order to
shore up the self. Levinas’ (1991) version of ethics is out-
side the ego or ‘otherwise than being’. He draws a distinc-
tion between the ego and the psyche and insists that the
psyche is ‘the soul of the other in me’. He offers a relational
view of the self in which responsibility is held to be not the
product of choice or ethical reasoning, but rather is
grounded in human sensibility and simply assigned in
the vulnerability of the encounter with the face of the
other. Ethics in this sense is not a norm to be followed
but an encounter. It is always despite the self, it goes
‘one way’; my responsibility towards the other. It is un-
iquely my responsibility, and it knows no limits since there
is always ‘one more response to give’ (for a fuller discus-
sion of Levinas in relation to accounting see Roberts
(2001); Schearer (2002)).
Part of the product of transparency – the self defensive-
ness or assertiveness that it encourages – is a ?ctional be-
lief in the self as an autonomous entity. In so far as we
identify with images we grasp the self not as vulnerable
but as enclosed, ideally with shiny surfaces which can be
defended and protected from others. If there is responsibil-
ity here it is only a responsibility for the self; in this way
transparency reproduces the self-interested opportunism
that economics takes as natural and given. The alternative,
Levinasian version of responsibility is a responsibility for
the other which is inescapable since ‘from the start the
other affects us despite ourselves’. Such a capability for
responsibility is grounded in our sentience; our vulnerabil-
ity to others vulnerability. Here we can point to a possible
narcissism in Butler’s list of the ways in which I am opaque
to myself. To her list could be added the opaqueness of the
consequences of my actions for others and, beyond these,
my responsibility for others.
What might the potentials of such an alternative form
of accountability be? Firstly, it opens up the potential for
a more re?exive form of accountability. Under transpar-
ency I am defensive or assertive of self in ways that miti-
gate against learning and thought. Released from the
pressure to be, or at least appear perfect – a project that
can never be realised – it is perhaps more possible to ques-
tion and challenge myself and the system of relevancies
within which I act. As Weick argues ‘in a ?uid world, wise
people know that they don’t fully understand what is
happening right now. Extreme con?dence and extreme
caution both can destroy what organisations most need
in changing times, namely curiosity, openness, and
complex sensing’ (1993; 641). By ‘knowing in advance’
transparency refuses to recognise the potential for its
own fallibility, whilst in fearing to question the ideals it
advertises we collude in transparency’s ignorance.
Secondly, the conscious acknowledgement of my own
partial incoherence would perhaps also release me from
some of the paranoia which characterises the emotional
edge of much of what counts as accountability within
organisations, and create a greater shared resilience based
on reciprocal understanding. At the same time it might re-
quire us to ask less of our bosses in the way that we cur-
rently idealise/demonise them and take back some of the
responsibility/authority that we project onto them. Mant’s
(1983) distinction between egocentric ‘binary’ leaders
whose power depends upon personal loyalty, and ‘ternary’
leaders who promote identi?cation with institutional
rather than individual interests is pertinent here, as is
Grint’s (2000) focus on the centrality of communication
in understanding the dynamics of leadership. In both cases
leadership eschews transparency’s promise of omnipo-
tence and omniscience and instead seeks to promote
shared learning. Different others can then be encountered
not so much as a threat to my centrality, but rather as a re-
source upon which I need to draw in order to re?ne and ex-
pand my own capacities for thought and action.
Thirdly, there is the potential for accountability to re-
cover its full social signi?cance. In the context of organisa-
tions, it is the reality of interdependence that needs to be
managed. I am inevitably ignorant of many of the conse-
quences of my conduct for others and I am in constant
need of accountability in order to understand the actual ef-
fects of what I do. The individualizing effects of transpar-
ency often only undermine or subvert this inter-
dependence by keeping me pre-occupied only with the de-
fence or success of my self (Roberts, 1991). Fourthly, it has
the potential to be a more compassionate form of account-
ability which expresses and enacts our responsibility for
others, and for each other, rather than just for myself. If a
Levinasian view of ethics is entertained then I am not the
self-interested opportunist of economic thought but rather
an irretrievably relational entity who cannot but be caught
up in responsibility for my neighbour. Finally, it would be
perhaps in all respects a more provisional form of account-
ability; less certain of the truth, and the relevance or ade-
quacy of existing standards of judgement, and more
conscious of my own and others vulnerability.
Concluding comments
‘The more information we have about the world, the more
we distance ourselves from what is going on and the less
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 967
able we become in comprehending its full complexity.
Information becomes a surrogate for the world – what is
actually going on tends to be equated with what the rele-
vant indicators (or images) say is going on’ (Tsoukas,
1997, p.833).
This paper began with an extract from McCreevy’s
re?ections on the role of transparency in relation to the
credit crisis. Writ all too large the crisis exempli?es Tso-
ukas’ observations. With the wisdom of hindsight, we were
all too willing to believe that we knew what was going on,
or at least that the credit rating agencies, salesmen, and
regulators did. We were all too ready to believe that new
ways of diffusing risk resulted in its dissipation, and we
are still struggling to understand the complexity of the
interdependencies created by markets for new credit prod-
ucts. McCreevy’s argument is that the conduct of regula-
tors was itself compromised by the gold-plated
transparency rules that now govern their conduct; that
their important work should be excused from the rigours
of transparency. My own argument here has involved a
much more extensive critique which has sought to suggest
the constitutional limits of accountability as transparency,
and to explore the possibility of our doing accountability
differently.
I do not think that we can manage without trans-
parency – it is an important check on local collusion and
as such an essential source of con?dence for distant others.
In the context of the recent crisis it is evident that in some
areas there was a dangerous lack of transparency; notably
in relation to the over-the-counter credit default swap
market and off balance sheet entities. Panic was arguably
stimulated by this lack of transparency; by the fact that
no one knew what exposures their counter-parties had,
and in this way risk that had apparently been widely dissi-
pated was suddenly everywhere. However, I have also
sought to argue that we cannot manage only with transpar-
ency – our instinct to invest in yet more transparency as
the only remedy for the failures of transparency – but
rather should see transparency as at best a supplement
to more context speci?c ‘intelligent’ accountability. The
transparency of ‘fair value’, coupled with intense individual
performance incentives, was arguably itself part of the
problem; feeding ‘over optimism’ in ?nancial markets, as
well as the subsequent panic as asset values were written
down (see Roberts & Jones, 2009). Signi?cantly, informed
insiders to the credit crisis have subsequently suggested
the need not only for enhanced transparency, but also for
new forms of accountability that supplement reliance on
risk management models with institution wide brain
storming around sources of risk, and that supplement
institutional disclosure against Basel 11 with regular
meetings between central bankers and individual institu-
tions to review systemic risk (CRMPG, 2008).
In such suggestions there is possibly a tacit acknowl-
edgement that, whilst high rewards ?owed on the basis
of positive performance indicators, intelligence was self-
censored out of organisational processes. As Strathern
has observed, what is odd about our embrace of transpar-
ency is that ‘everyone knows’ about its inadequacies: that
transparency involves a simplistic abstraction and de-con-
textualisation from the complexity of the world (Strath-
ern), that it undermines trust as it seeks to create it
(Tsoukas), encourages deception as it seeks to make possi-
ble a complete visibility (O’Neill), promotes blame avoid-
ance (Hood), and transforms organisational purpose into
the mere management of performance indicators (Power).
In my own analysis I have drawn upon Lacan’s account
of the importance of recognition in the formation of the
subject, and Freud’s account of the genesis of guilt to ex-
plain why we continue to invest in transparency despite
the fact that ‘everyone knows’ of its limitations. The
meconnaissance that Lacan insists is founded in the child’s
identi?cation with the mirror image describes the ways in
which I am prone to be caught in the lure of images; to
locate my very existence in the image and to grasp the self
as a coherent, autonomous and substantial entity. I have
argued that it is this illusion of recognition that gives trans-
parency its power over us. The promise/threat of authorita-
tive recognition, of possible success and/or humiliation,
acts to ensnare us. The snare does not even need my own
belief as long as I believe that others might believe in what
transparency discloses about my self. Distance, both spa-
tial and hierarchical, only reinforces these effects as my
transparent self travels beyond all possibility of elabora-
tion, explanation or justi?cation and yet continues to
attract consequences to itself. I must then, to secure this
transparent self, work hard to meet the ideal transparency
establishes, or at least work hard to create the appearance
of my conformity to the ideal.
This imperative to meet the ideals of transparency gives
rise to a particular form of ethics, aptly described by Butler
as ‘ethical violence’ and ‘moral narcissism’. We do not typ-
ically associate the pursuit of high ideals with violence and
yet I think that accountability as transparency is often
characterised by an anxious paranoia. Violence describes
my own relationship to myself – the ways in which I con-
stantly berate the self for being less than ideal – as well as
the ways in which I seek temporary relief from such self-
persecution through ?nding opportunities to attack the
failures of others. Similarly, narcissism seems not to belong
with morality. Yet the effect of accountability as transpar-
ency seems all too often to be a defensive or assertive pre-
occupation only with myself, and my own continuous self-
improvement and advancement, which has as its correlate
an indifference to, or neglect of the interdependencies
within which my own self interest is nested. Cynical dis-
identi?cation can seemingly offer me some distance from
the threat of transparency but often serves only to make
my practical conformity easier. The subjective correlate
of the pursuit of a complete transparency is the pursuit,
or at least presentation, of an already perfect self; of a self
that knows what it is doing.
Again it is important to emphasise the value of trans-
parency as a source of con?dence to distant others and,
precisely because of the recognition that it threatens, as a
powerful counter to local collusion. Transparency becomes
problematic only when we believe in its perfection; when
we believe or act as if all there is to accountability is trans-
parency; that transparency is adequate and suf?cient as a
form of accountability. As we have seen, O’Neill traces this
tendency to a ‘fantasy of total control’. For the boss this can
968 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
take the form of repeated investment in ever more exten-
sive measures in an attempt to fabricate the certainties of
knowing in advance and at a distance, and thereby escape
the anxiety of real dependence. But I have suggested that
the boss’s fantasy requires, as its necessary complement,
my own desire for authoritative recognition of myself as
a coherent, and autonomous entity.
What my narcissism misses, part of its own perform-
ativity, is the recognition it confers on transparency itself;
the way that it reproduces the status quo in an all too eager
and plastic collusion. There is, in a sense, much less to wor-
ry about if I assume that ‘they’ must know what they are
doing and thereby avoid the risks and responsibility of
challenging the relevance or adequacy of the standards
which transparency advertises and enforces. It is precisely
in this avoidance of risk (to my recognition) that account-
ability loses it potential force as a vital social practice, and
instead slips into a narcissistic preoccupation with my own
beauty and perfection as re?ected in and rewarded by per-
formance indicators.
In developmental terms Lacan’s account of what he calls
the ‘imaginary’, which I have explored here in terms of
(mis)recognition, must be followed by the further alien-
ation of the subject in the ‘symbolic’. O’Neill’s elaboration
of a notion of ‘intelligent’ accountability similarly points
to the necessity to go beyond the mesmerizing demand
for authoritative recognition in order to reclaim the full
discursive power of the practice of accountability. Signi?-
cantly Kaplan and Norton, whom we might be tempted
to blame for the proliferation of transparencies similarly
point in this direction when they insist that ‘The
Balanced Scorecard should be used as a communication,
informing, and learning system, not as a controlling sys-
tem’ (1992). Transparency can at best signal the need for
intelligent accountability, but it cannot furnish us with
the terms of such a conversation.
The value of Butler’s insistence on the impossibility of
my giving a full account of myself lies not only in the
way that it brings into sharp relief the anxiety, violence
and narcissism that are a routine part of accountability
as transparency, but also in the way that it furnishes us
with an ethic of humility and generosity with which to
approach intelligent accountability. In relation to myself
there is a certain compassion to be demanded if I can
acknowledge that I can never quite know what it is that
I am doing. I may then be more modest about myself
and more willing to acknowledge the value of the abilities
and capacities of different others, and my dependence
upon them. To acknowledge my own incoherence is, how-
ever, to discover others’ incoherence – the always frail and
partial grounds upon which their own demands on me are
built. What emerges in this space is something of the
weight of our practical dependence upon each other which
accountability as talk, listening, and asking questions then
allows us to explore and investigate. Accountability is
thereby reconstituted as a vital social practice – an
exercise of care in relation to self and others, a caution
to compassion in relation to both self and others, and an
ongoing necessity as a social practice through which to
insist upon and discover the nature of our responsibility
to and for each other.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants at the UNSW
workshop on ‘Accountability, Organisations and Institu-
tions’ (January 2008), the ‘Shadow line of Accountability’
workshop (Venice April 2008), two anonymous reviewers
and Amanda Sinclair for their comments on earlier ver-
sions of this paper. I would like to thank the ESRC (RES-
000-23-1501) for funding the empirical research on the
principle of comply or explain that informed the develop-
ment of this conceptual paper.
References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin
and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bion, W. (1961). Experiences in groups. London, Tavistock.
Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power; theories in subjection. Stamford:
Stamford University Press.
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Casey, C. (1999). ‘‘Come join our family”: Discipline and integration in
corporate organizational culture. Human Relations, 52(2), 155–178.
Chua, W. F. (1995). Experts, networks and inscriptions in the fabrication
of accounting images: A story of the representation of three public
hospitals. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 20(2/3), 111–
145.
Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group III (2008). Containing
systemic risk: The road to reform, August.
Edmundson, M. (2007). The death of Sigmund Freud; fascism, psychoanalysis
and the rise of fundamentalism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory
and technique. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2003). Working at a cynical distance:
Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization,
10(1), 157–179.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Freud, S. (1984a). On narcissism. In On metapsychology the theory of
psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1984b). The ego and the Id. In On metapsychology; the theory of
psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Freud, S. (1985). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In
Civilization society and religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Heinemann.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gray, R. (1992). Accounting and environmentalism: An exploration of the
challenge of gently accounting for accountability, transparency and
sustainability. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(5), 399–425.
Grint, K. (2000). The arts of leadership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. London: Routledge.
Hood, C. (2007). What happens when transparency meets blame
avoidance? Public Management Review, 9(2), 191–210.
Hopwood, A. (1972). An empirical study of the role of accounting data in
performance evaluation. Journal of Accounting Research, 10, 156–182.
Kaplan, S., & Norton, D. (1992). The balanced scorecard. Harvard Business
Review, 71–79.
Karreman, D., & Alvesson, M. (2001). On cages in tandem: Management
control, social identity, and identi?cation in a knowledge-intensive
?rm. Organization, 11(1), 149–175.
Knights, D., & McCabe, D. (2003). Governing through teamwork:
Reconstituting subjectivity in a call centre. Journal of Management
Studies, 40(7), 1587–1619.
Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits; a selection. London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1979). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Levinas, E. (1991). Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Luthans, F., & Stajkovic, A. (2000). Provide recognition for performance
improvement. In E. Locke (Ed.), The Blackwell handbook of principles of
organizational behaviour. Oxford: Blackwell.
MacKenzie, D. (2006). An engine not a camera; how ?nancial models shape
markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mant, A. (1983). Leaders we deserve. Oxford: Blackwell.
McKernan, J. (2007). Objectivity in accounting. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 32(1–2), 155–180.
J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970 969
Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (1994). Accounting, ‘economic citizenship’ and the
spatial reordering of manufacture. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 19(1), 15–43.
Monks, R., & Minnow, N. (1991). Power and accountability. New York:
Harper Collins.
O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
O’Neill, O. (2006). Transparency and the ethics of communication. In C.
Hood & D. Heald (Eds.), Transparency; the key to better governance?
(pp 75–90). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ogden, S., Glaiser, K., & Marginson, D. (2006). Empowerment and
accountability; evidence from the UK water industry. Journal of
Management Studies, 43(3), 521–555.
Power, M. (1997). The audit society; rituals of veri?cation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Power, M. (2004). Counting, control and calculation: Re?ections on
measuring and management. Humans Relations, 57(6), 765–783.
Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, J. (1991). The possibilities of accountability. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 16(4), 355–368.
Roberts, J. (2001). Corporate governance and the ethics of narcissus.
Business Ethics Quarterly, 11(1), 109–125.
Roberts, J. (2003). The manufacture of corporate social responsibility;
constructing corporate sensibility. Organization, 10(2), 249–265.
Roberts, J., & Jones, M. (2009). Accounting for self interest in the
credit crisis. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(6–7), 856–
867.
Roberts, J., Sanderson, P., Barker, R., & Hendry, J. (2006). In the mirror of
the market: the disciplinary effects of company/fund manager
meetings. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 31, 277–294.
Robson, K. (1992). Accounting numbers as ‘inscription’: Action at a
distance and the development of accounting. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 17(4), 685–708.
Schearer, T. (2002). Ethics and accountability: From the for-itself to the
for-the-other. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 27(6), 541–573.
Strathern, M. (2000). The tyranny of transparency. British Educational
Research Journal, 26(3), 309–321.
Strathern, M. (2004). Abstraction and decontextualisation: An
anthropological comment. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Virtual society?
Technology, Cyberbole, reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swartz, H. (1990). Narcissistic processes and corporate decay. New York:
NYU Press.
Townley, B. (1993). Reframing human resource management: Power, ethics,
and the subject at work. London: Sage.
Tsoukas, H. (1997). The tyranny of light. Futures, 29(9), 827–843.
Wageman, R. (2001). How leaders foster self-managing team
effectiveness: Design choices versus hands-on coaching.
Organization Science, 12(5), 559–577.
Weick, K. (1993). The collapse of sense-making in organisations; the
Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 628–652.
Zaleznick, A., & Kets de Vries, M. (1985). Power and the corporate mind.
Chicago, IL: Bonus Books.
Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1999). The ticklish subject. London: Verso.
970 J. Roberts / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 957–970
doc_209837840.pdf