The role of accounting in creating, perpetuating, and overcoming inequalities: Going beyond discipline, borders, and stasis towards accounting as activism

Abstract

This reflective article addresses the role and power of accounting in creating, perpetuating and, potentially overcoming, inequalities. Such inequalities may be based on personal characteristics, including gender, or relate to the global effects of neo-liberalism and broader structural inequalities resulting in colonialism, slavery, and repression. The article illustrates how accounting operates in society, its power and effects, particularly the role of accounting as a calculative practice and as a profession in creating and perpetuating inequalities. However, accounting can also subvert or overcome inequalities, when positioned with critical and emancipatory intent. Three areas of going beyond accounting's current confines are discussed where it is proposed that accounting research and practice can contribute to an enhanced understanding of intersectional perspectives and systemic inequalities, and, importantly, ways of overcoming them. These are: going beyond disciplinary orientation to embrace feminist interdisciplinarity; going beyond borders to embrace reflexive intersubjectivity and contextualized knowledge; and going beyond stasis towards academic activism.