FASB and Social Reality—An Alternate Realist View

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper follows up on the discussion on “advising” the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) about social and economic reality. It began with Lee (2006a), was commented upon in Macintosh (2006) and Williams (2006), and closed with a reply to both papers in Lee (2006b). All three authors criticized, in one way or another, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the fashion in which it attempts to incorporate principle‐based accounting standards into its conceptual framework (CF). The main thrust of these four papers is a critique directed toward the FASB, which has been more concerned with “comparability and consistency” than with “identifying improved ways of recognizing and representing social‐constructed reality and truthful correspondence in the light of principle‐based accounting standards” (Lee 2006a, 1). Thereby, Lee promotes Searle's (1995) theory of constructing social reality. The primary purpose of the current paper is to show that the methodology of the “onion model of r...