Rejoice! We are haunted. Towards a Deleuzian understanding of accounting standard setting process
Frederic Bill, Växjö University
Lena Olaison, Växjö University
Accounting is a haunted discipline. The accountant, through the accounting standard setting process, is visited again and again by an apparition inherent in the very notion of semiotics, a ghost haunting accountants and standard setters alike. This is the, perhaps somewhat surprising, implication of perceiving these entities from the perspective of traditional structuralism. Being haunted constitutes however a cause for rejoicing rather than a cause for anxiety, this is at least the call emanating from the renowned French philosopher Deleuze.
Put in a more traditional way, the purpose of this paper is to offer a new mode of understanding regarding accounting standards and especially the repetitiveness of the accounting standard setting process. We argue that from the horizon of traditional structuralism, the reoccurring attempts to address the representative deficiencies of any accounting standard are actually no enigma. This is since there must always in principle be an unaccounted for residue in any representation. This at least is what the classic authors of structuralism argues, be that they baptise it in different ways as lack, castration, lacuna and so on.
Snapping the strong (but veiled) ontology of structuralism and a weak ontology of movement and becoming together, we use the works of Freud (1905; 1920) (claiming the existence of an insatiable lacuna giving rise to an eternal search for a substitute) and the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1972; 1980) (claiming that this need of constantly searching is actually a cause for happiness and celebration).
Thus, when it comes to accounting standards, something is made to represent something else, but since this representation will never, in principle, be capable of representing the entirety of that to be represented we are haunted by the ghost of lack. That is, regardless of starting point, whereas accounting standards and the accounting standard setting process are seen as the strive for representing a company as argued by Schmalenbach (Graves, 1992); about marketing excuses and/or negotiating/preserving various interests (i.e. Watts and Zimmerman 1986), the process tends to end up in a means/end substitution.
Deleuze and Guattari urge us, however, to stop searching and start questing. Not questing for the standard (c.f. Page 2005), but questing for the cause of the quest itself – since it addresses, it could be inferred from Deleuze and Guattari (1972), anxiety by displacing our attention from the world in flux to the defined aim for our efforts. This is how this paper offers an alternative by considering the standard setting process as its own rationale, implying that it has no real aim beside itself - it is an end in itself - and further proposes that the haunt thrives on our anxiety. Therefore we should stop being afraid.
References
Deleuze Gilles & Guattari Félix, 1980 (2004) A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia Continuum, London & New York.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari F. 1972 (1983) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Graves, F. O. 1992 “Dynamic Theory and Replacement Cost Accounting: The Schmalenbach-Schmid Polemic of the 1920s” in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal vol. 5, No. 1, pp: 80-91.
Freud, Sigmund, 1920 (1991) On metapsychology: the theory of psychoanalysis: Beyond the pleasure principle, The ego and the id and other works, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth
Freud, S., 1905 (1977) Three essays on the theory of sexuality, Clay Ltd: London.
Page M. 2005 “The search for a conceptual framework: Quest for a holy grail, or hunting a snark?” in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal vol. 18, No. 4, pp: 565-576.
Watts, R. and Zimmerman, J. 1986 Positive Accounting Theory, Prentice-Hall London.