Title: Three '-isations': thinking with but beyond the sociological in comprehending accounting in a global context

Authors: Edward Arrington; David R. Upton

Addresses: School of Accounting and Finance, Faculty of Commerce, The University of Wollongong, Building 40, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2500, Australia ' Bryan School of Business and Economics, Department of Accounting and Finance, B383, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, P.O. Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA

Abstract: This essay seeks to render accounting's relation to globalisation understandable in a hermeneutic rather than sociological way. We address accounting's relation to globalisation first through Bartelson's three approaches to understanding globalisation in general, approaches that he terms transference, transformation, and transcendence. We offer brief allusions to how existing critical accounting work may or may not speak to these different approaches. We then suggest that accounting's place within globalisation embeds practices and rationalities which others have referred to as 'accountingisations'. We conclude the essay with some remarks on the emancipatory potential and transcendental horizon of orienting accounting toward what we rather nervously term 'worldisations', an idea which grants the construction of meaning absolute priority in understanding global processes and account giving in ways that have little to do with the narrowly circumscribed senses of accounting that dominate the existing literature.

Keywords: globalisation; accounting; critical theory; hermeneutics; cultural studies; Marxist ethics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCA.2013.056652

International Journal of Critical Accounting, 2013 Vol.5 No.4, pp.327 - 345

Published online: 28 Nov 2013 *

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