Fear, desire, and lack in Deegan and Soltys’s “Social accounting research: An Australasian perspective”
If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. (Derrida, 1994, p. 176)
There are a number of ways to comment on Craig Deegan and Sharon Soltys’s paper, the most likely of which is to focus on the authors’ stated objectives and ask whether these were satisfactorily achieved. Thus one might ask if the paper sufficiently made the case, as stated in the introductory section, that there is a disproportionate though highly concentrated number of Australasians (AA) publishing in the social accounting literature (I would answer this with a qualified yes, pointing to a somewhat problematic sampling of journals). One might also ask if the authors did an adequate job, as stated in their abstract, of examining the nature and extent of AA social accounting research (here I’d be more hesitant as I don’t think the paper discusses in any substantive way how AA social accounting research differs from the non-AA variety). My own preference however is to take on a more ‘discursive’ reading of the paper, since I continually found myself asking the question why, in a paper that is ostensibly about the Australasian perspective on social accounting research (that is after all the title), do the authors devote most of the paper’s space to demonstrating Australasian intellectual leadership? What is it about these authors’ historical and contextual location that so motivates them to assert their preeminence in the field?
To answer these questions I turned to Derrida’s (1994) ‘logic of spectrality’ and Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) ‘will to power’ (1977), concepts that draw attention to these authors’ ‘fears and desires’ and their tendency to discount an important tool that we as academics need to help affect change, namely critical thought. These concepts also help draw attention to a more general ‘lack’ that I think inheres in the wider social and environmental accounting literature (SEAR), a lack which is a function of “the [current] conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate” (Foucault, 1984, p. 38). This lack concerns the field’s continued inattention to the issues of power and reflexivity, and its general Stoicism (Macintosh, 2004). In what follows, I move from a more specific concern with the authors’ fears and desires to a more general concern with lack, or “what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped” (Foucault, 1984, p. 38).
1. Fears
One of Jacque Derrida’s more political works concerns itself with a ‘specter’ that Derrida argues forced Marx to ‘mistake the spirit for the real’ and presuppose an ontology that was in fact a ‘hauntology’ (Derrida, 1994). This haunting or ‘spectrality’ is not negative for Derrida (as it was for Marx) and nor is the specter something that can be exorcised (as Marx believed). Rather the specter can be a positive, vital force in that it has us both imagine and move toward a fundamentally different – and more just – future. In reading the authors’ paper I couldn’t help but think they too are haunted by a specter, one which both frightens them and has them imagine a rather different future.
Again, the question I asked myself while reading this paper was why did the authors go to such lengths to demonstrate leadership in the field of social accounting research? The answer perhaps lies in the dualism implied by the idea of leading. Leading implies that another is following, yet it also implies that the leader and follower are going somewhere. For Derrida that somewhere is not a place but a teleological or eschatological direction in time. Where then are the authors wanting to go? Away from the past towards some future? Or away from some future towards some past? Indeed it might be both.
One past that the authors seem to be wanting to move away from is one wherein the ‘social’ and the ‘environmental’ were not afforded their due, a past wherein accounting was seen as concerned only with matters economic, and wherein numbers were representative of strictly economic values. The leadership the authors are speaking of might actually entail a move toward a different, more comprehensive (though it must be added not particularly radical) form of accountability. Yet it must be kept in mind that the authors are not speaking of a global move away from this past, but rather a pan-national move. It is a collective ‘Australasian’ identity that they position themselves at the head of, not a global identity. So what specific past is it that these Australasians want to move away from? Perhaps it is one wherein Australasian scholarship was not sufficiently valued, or one wherein Australasians more generally were not sufficiently valued. But what is this past? What is this phantom that looms about the region? Unfortunately one can only speculate.
Yet besides this past there might also be a future that the authors fear, a future that makes them yearn for a certain past. That feared future might be the one envisioned by the members of that other collective identity the authors invoke, the ‘American’. Living so close to this imperial giant, here I think I can offer some insights. American accounting academics, by and large, do seem to embrace a particular future, one wherein accounting is seen not as a morally-infused, cultural practice, but as yet another commodity, a ‘product’ to be bought and sold, demanded and supplied (cf. Demski & McGee, 1992, p. 734). They have also embraced – or at least tenuously subscribe to – a future wherein a particular (neo-conservative) vision of democracy, law and order, and family values holds sway. Theirs is a future where it is apparently acceptable for leaders to lie to their followers (as per the prescriptions of Leo Strauss) and kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of innocent people, all as a means of furthering freedom and other such fantasies. Certainly such a fear is not unwarranted, as these liberal American values have slowly crept across the political landscape in Australasia, to the point now where many in the region embrace the far-right visions of political candidates like Pauline Hanson and the only moderately-less conservative John Howard.
2. Desires
Yet along with these possible (and quite justified) fears of the past and the future – these specters – it might be that the authors also have a number of desires. One is indeed explicitly mentioned: the authors need to extend a previously solicited work (a book chapter in honor of Reg Matthews). But again the authors’ paper has a certain structure and message which is in some need of explanation. Agency theorists, those true practitioners of performative magic, would certainly be willing to offer a desires-based explanation: what really motivates these authors, they would suggest, is narrow self-interest. While the paper should be telling the reader in part how Australasian research is in some sense unique or different (again, this is one of the objectives) instead it laments the fact that the most prestigious academic accounting publication outlets are simply closed to any consideration of accounting’s role in furthering or preventing social and environmental ills—indeed these outlets seem closed to even the idea that such ills exist. Certainly the authors observe that one of the implications of this problem of exclusion is that “promotion-focused individuals” are being discouraged from pursuing SEAR. While the authors seem to be talking about junior faculty here, one can’t help but wonder if this problem in fact doesn’t also apply to themselves; as SEAR scholars, mightn’t their own mobility through the institutional hierarchy be impeded by the existing system of journalistic discrimination? Might not their own opportunities be constrained on account of their chosen research interests?
Yet while this is most likely what agency theorists would have us think, I for one am not convinced the desire for advancement is what really motives the authors. Having had the fortune to work in one of Australia’s more prestigious academic institutions, I was left with the impression that the region’s research luminaries have yet to become enslaved to a JAE/JAR/TAR definition of quality, and that an individual as prolific and academically productive as one of this paper’s authors would still be highly valued in that system. But this would be an agency theory narrative, and there is a big difference between the agency theorist’s narrow (materially-oriented) idea of self-interest and the more-encompassing idea of desire, which seems to me to offer a better means of solving the puzzle provided by the authors.
Tags: Australasian perspective