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FEMINISM AND ETHICS IN ACCOUNTING

Emancipatory perspectives

What greater challenge can there be than to consider, if we are free to shape our world, “how do we want that world to be?” (Bakewell 2016, 9). Freedom in creating our world, so fundamental to feminism, resonates with morality, ethics, and philosophy as well. Humans create their world, and it matters for us to design “choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity” (Bakewell 2016, 10). Here, too, accounting is implicated, given that accounting makes things governable and thinkable, configuring “persons, domains and actions as objective and comparable” (Mennicken and Miller 2014, 25). As stated by Bay (2017), accounting’s ability to affect “people’s minds and behaviour, has been widely acknowledged in accounting literature” (Bay 2017, 44). Accounting often legitimates knowledge, and given accounting’s role in social creation, this chapter recognizes the significance of creating our world and considers accounting’s emancipatory possibilities.

Critical accounting acknowledges alternative ways of knowing the world, and this chapter explores this knowledge production. One would hope a “feminist ethics” would be rendered as a relic and that feminist ideals of social justice and well-being were ubiquitous. Acknowledging many differences in terms, here feminism and ethical behavior encompass human will and social justice as essential, equalitarian, and fundamental to being human. We also recognize that given cultural, religious and economic differences, the issues are vexing. Instabilities of classism, sexism, and racism are explored¹ in the chapter while briefly introducing familiar debates and feminisms’ overlaps with ethics and philosophies. Given the voluminous nature of the topic the focus here is on a particular immorality: violence against women. Such violence communicates fundamental injustices, connecting to accounting, since “taking account” is central to the discipline where visibilities or silences endure. An essential element of human existence on which ethics and morality rest is safety. Without elimination of violence against women² – in other words, without security as an essential element of well-being – ethics and morality are nonexistent. This emphasis speaks to central debates regarding female bodies: who controls and speaks for women’s bodies? What are women’s bodies “about” – reproduction? Sexuality? Commodification? Are women excluded in [numerous] arenas under the façade that their bodies are detractors? This chapter recognizes the prevalence of these controversies and addresses the creation of knowledge by silencing and distorting issues of violence regarding women. As we shall see, these issues parallel feminist ethics both in redefining the terrain of struggle (that which is silenced) and in emancipatory aims (redefining how to take account).

The chapter’s two main aims are (1) engaging with a specific area of a moral dilemma: women and violence, illustrating with critical accounting literature, and (2) examining on a global scale how measuring is selective and distorting regarding women and violence. The chapter proceeds in the second section with a brief overview of feminist ethics literature and corroborating research in accounting. The third section examines accounting research on symbolic violence and other arenas of violence in accounting, including engaging in issues of women and violence. The fourth explores controversies of measuring social phenomena: potentially distorting and potentially enhancing. The case of measuring violence against women on a global scale is considered using Gender Gap Reports compiled by the World Economic Forum, linking taking account and accounting’s role. The fifth section concludes.

Exploring oppressive social structures, psychological marginalization, material impairment, and societal configurations all comprise feminist ethics issues. Social relationships of power, privilege, inequality, and critiquing concepts of gender as binary (given it maintains oppressive social structures) are among reflections in feminist ethics, and philosophy and researchers have redefined an array of ideas (e.g., Ehrenreich and English 1976; Fraser 2010; Haraway 1989; Hartmann 1979; Held 1993; Kessler-Harris 1981; Snitow 2010; Waring 1988). Their work critiques conventional philosophical theories for failing to examine gender as a variable in social orders where men’s privileges are naturalized and unchallenged.

Significant among these writers, de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) provided formative insights that individuals are shaped by forces of oppression and experiences so crucial that philosophy is inadequate if these dynamics are disregarded. Beauvoir notably observed “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman … the figure that the human female takes on in society … [results from] the mediation of another [that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir 1949, 329). The social creation of women – their expectations and rights – are founded on discriminatory and powerful structures. Beauvoir advocated an ethical theory tackling women’s oppression, influencing feminist ethics as a field of philosophy (and was particularly significant during a period when women’s rational and moral abilities were being questioned).

Ideas and idealization regarding “female characteristics” continues to be a controversy, regarding innate and social constructions of moralities or separate realities. This problematic centers upon whether biology is destiny or whether social norms (nurturing) are crucial in differences? What does it mean to be female or male – is it encoded in us? Burkett proposes, “That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries” (Burkett 2015) or, as de Beauvoir (1949) wrote, was among the socialized thinking of women as “other.” New measurement techniques renew this conversation that brains are shaped by experience (e.g., culture) and thus expectations and society impact differences, inequities, and hierarchies. Of course biological differences exist. The idea is that both nature and nurture are relevant and that biology is not destiny in creating hierarchical inequalities. Feminists suggest in early life status and roles regarding work and life were equally shared and there was no particular status between male labor and female labor upon which to establish differences of morality (Coontz and Henderson 1986; Cott 1987; French 1986; Held 1993; Irigaray 1985; Lerner 1986; Pollitt 2005).

As such, philosophers such as Jaggar dispute separatism as producing a morally better world. A society valuing personal relationships, efficiency, emotions, and rationality “cannot be achieved through sexual separation” ( Jaggar 1974, 288). Approaches to ethics continued emerging and overlapping including androgyny, gender bending and gender-blending in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Held 1993) and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy in the 21st century (Dill 2010; Lorde 1984; Pateman 1988; Snitow 2010). A critique of gender binarism emerged, recognizing its impact on marginalizing nonconforming individuals with intersectionality, providing some resolve to the controversies.

Intersectionality attends to those unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Collins 1990; Giddings 2007; Holvino 2010; hooks 1984).

Spivak also critiques myopias and the tendency to collapse struggles in north and south capitalism and postcolonialism in urban and rural flows, integrating the notion of “subaltern” in the dialogue (a complex term of persons completely outside access to social structures) (Spivak 1995, 1996). By virtue of what Randeria (2002) calls “entangled histories,” it is impossible to reduce postcolonial analysis to national boundaries, boundaries themselves an invention of colonial discourses.

Those among the subaltern spaces are increasingly the targets of new globalization, forming the basis of exploitation in the arenas of bio piracy, pharmaceutical dumping in the name of population control, and micro loans to women.

Rather than comprising theories beholden to abstract and universal principles, feminists supporting virtue ethics acknowledge “moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon … what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams 1991, 209–10). Resistance itself may be a “burdened virtue,” a term allowing for moral agents, including those who are oppressed, to operate not as victims but to resist extending virtues to applications in nonideal circumstances (Nussbaum 2000; Tessman 2005).

Barad (2007) integrates philosophy, feminism, and other social theories, redefining concepts of space, matter, and objectivity in what is referred to as new materialism. Matter is subject and subjected to analysis, pointing at processes of meaning-making (“to matter”). The innovativeness of new materialist approaches lies in that they provide ways for signification to be simultaneously material and semiotic (Haraway 1989; Barad 2007), asking not only how discourses come to matter but also how matter comes to matter (Barad 2007; Orlikowski 2010). Corresponding to feminist reflections, meaning-making is an affair of the mind that happens after the fact of an event in the ecological, sociocultural or politico-economic sphere, dramatizing “the fragility of things today and helps to explain why many constituencies refuse to acknowledge and address it” (Connolly 2013). Resonating with feminist ethics, new materialism rejects artifices between the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts but rather explores “how each affects the other, and the agency of things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building)” (Fox 2017).

As is evident from the preceding, feminist ethics is not monolithic with divergence among feminists regarding purpose, activism, essentialism, and strategy. Recent manifestations of gender mainstreaming illustrate the tensions that while “there may be synergy and greater power; on the other there may be loss of visibility and vitality … these dilemmas need to be faced rather than avoided” (McRobie 2012). Nussbaum concurs, suggesting we need to “think through our own intuitive ideas … [particularly] when we consider the interests of the powerless, who rarely get the chance to bring their own ideas about such matters to the table” (Nussbaum 2000, 300). Humans need to reflect on their world views and assumptions whether studying ethics, philosophy, or accounting (Lehman 1992, 2012), as we shall examine next.

In her work on environmental accounting, Andrew (2000) describes an ethical perspective encouraging “a re-imagination of nature as a site of multiplicity and multi-vocality … perspectives that have been excluded or erased from the main texts” (Andrew 2000, 199). Traditionally, ethics was considered a guide between right and wrong, good and bad, praise and blame, virtue and vice. Resonating with Andrew, we view ethics not as a statement of fact but “fluid, contextual, dynamic, and often times contradictory” (Andrew 2000, 201). Ethics informs and guides action, forming assumptions we use for aspirations and goals (Andrew 2000). Cooper (1992) similarly describes feminist aims³ in a “philosophy of praxis … as a way of seeing the world and a guide to action … it empowers women … [and] also liberates men … it allows for difference; it opens new possibilities” (Cooper 1992, 16).

In adopting reflective perspectives in accounting and recognizing quantifications are “physically violent removal of things and people from their embeddedness in social relations” ( Joseph 2014, xviii), there is also potential for human emancipation in them. “No doubt, quantification and abstraction are powerful … [we] explore the extent to which their very potencies – the productivity of accounting, accountability, and abstraction … are subject to engagement, transformation and appropriation” ( Joseph 2014, xix–xx). Research in this expanded realm examines accounting’s role in rationalizing war (Chwastiak 2013), in labor deliberations (Cooper and Coulson 2014), and in setting immigration policy (Agyemang 2016; Agyemang and Lehman 2013), to name a few. We further this inquiry by examining an issue not always visible in accounting literature in the next section.

Research on accounting’s symbolic violence exposes the discipline’s role in power asymmetries. Its policies appear as objective in a subtle maneuver “through language and the construction and use of knowledge” (Farjaudon and Morales 2013, 157). Reproduction of relations of domination seem legitimate (Malsch, Gendron, and Grazzini 2011), while the silencing of alternative voices appear natural (Cooper and Coulson 2014). By privileging powerful and dominant interests, making them yet more powerful in contemporary struggles, those not in power are further marginalized. Accounting’s symbolic violence is hidden and “not recognised as such when … enclosed and institutionalised within symbolic systems” (Bourdieu 1977).⁴ Practices appear rational but remain mysterious, “a kind of hidden dark art which is too difficult for ‘ordinary people’ to understand” (Cooper and Coulson 2014, 240). Although appearing fair and natural, the task is a contested terrain, since the “giving of accounts is a complex social, hermeneutical, and moral task” (Perkiss 2014, v).

Denouncing how accounting neutralizes physical violence and symbolic violence is diverse in the literature.⁵ Chwastiak (2013) illustrates war financing and social upheavals in Iraq implicating accounting as information is “rendered invisible” (Chwastiak 2013, 38). Accounting’s hold on power in Dillard (2003) links IBM and the Holocaust, as does Funnell’s (1998) research on Nazism: accounting disguises violence by making human consequences bureaucratic. Participating in eugenics (Graham et al. 2018) and normalizing violence regarding Indigenous populations (Neu, 2000; Neu and Graham 2006) reveal symbolic and physical integration with violence as well. Studying incarceration, researchers describe the dynamics of power, profits, and violence (Andrew 2007, 2011; Lehman, Hammond, and Agyemang 2018; Mennicken 2013; Scott 2015; Taylor and Cooper 2008). As such, “Accounting becomes an eminently suitable technology to manage and enact violence on racialized populations because of its capacity to de-humanize them or render them invisible as people” (Annisette and Prasad 2017, 9).

The manifestations of violence and women is less extensive in accounting literature, but the issues parallel those in feminist ethics. Tremblay, Gendron, and Malsch (2016) consider unconsciousness and discriminatory consequences related to gender in promoting applicants for corporate boards. While seeming to support women’s role in the boardroom, “from a deeper perspective these discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic power to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people” (168). Symbolic violence is a “subtle, gentle and quite imperceptible domination” (Tremblay, Gendron, and Malsch 2016, 170), and in this sense, it is “invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling” (Bourdieu 2001, 2). Resonating with feminist ethics theories described earlier, Tremblay et al reveal how domination occurs daily, consciously and unconsciously, alongside structures sustaining these forms.

Isolation and exploitation is revealed in Killian’s (2015) work of young women in what were known as the Magdalen Laundries. Accounting is implicated in its silencing, enabling women’s labor to be exploited invisibly “where the women were ‘accounted for’ in ways that rendered ‘accounting to’ them unthinkable” (17). Killian observes how ideological mechanisms prevented women from seeing their own oppression where “the occluded nature of the Magdalen system facilitated … a separate, Catholic identity, untainted by ideas of prostitution, single motherhood or sexual violence” (18). Haynes also notes “Sexual violence can be understood as a social and cultural phenomenon … [and as] accounting is both a tool and political construct … [o]ne might rightly ask therefore: what is the role of accounting in perpetuating sexual violence?” (Haynes 2017, 121).

Silva, Nova, and Carter (2016) reveal accounting and the confluence of race, gender, and segregation in Brazil forming destructive violence and repression while communities are excluded from “education, political and economic structures associated with competence, independence, power and social autonomy” (49). Describing an Afrodescendent accounting professor holding elected office, merging with views of minorities and women as inferior and sexually threatening, is “illustrative of the enormous potential to be paralytic, that is a ‘violence’ to their identity and is effective in establishing barriers to access” (2016, 51).

Violence in prison materializes in shackling during childbirth and forced sterilizations. These forms of violence control women’s bodies, given that incarceration already “takes away your ability to voluntarily consent” (Barolone 2013). Control and efficiency is described in accounting literature as a major 20th-century momentum by Puxty (1993) as a totalizing apparatus. “The answer was eugenics: to sterilize those who were unfit… . This control over the body, far from being the concern of a few, was not just widely advocated but was also practised” (Puxty 1993, 120). The normalized dehumanization in the criminal justice system becomes so ingrained that questions of oppression are made invisible (Lehman 2016). For incarcerated women, physical violence and symbolic violence overlap replicating power and abuse experienced in the outside world. The loss of empowerment makes the person, “that is the body, more amenable to being managed and controlled” (Puxty 1993, 120).⁶

Violence takes on ubiquity and impact as it

We take up this call by examining how accounting privileges what is accounted for in contemporary life, maintaining immoralities for women when accountability regarding violence is invisible (Lehman 2012). The next section examines how reporting captures differing views of representing, measuring, and exploring violence and women.

What are the ethics of measuring? Quantifying social phenomenon is problematic, because they are “always invested with meaning, potentially disguising as much” as is revealed (Hansen and Muhlen-Schulte 2012, 1). The current preoccupation with “big data” exemplifies this, given “data is used to leverage and exercise authority … reaffirm[ing] the immediate power … to a machine” (Di Russo 2016). O’Neil, in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016), describes discriminatory models. Because of strong correlations (not cause and effect) between poverty and reported crime, big data, “even with the best of intentions … [adds] precision and ‘science’ to the process… . The result is that we criminalize poverty” (O’Neil 2016, 91). Measuring restricts what is viewed and erases that which is not “identified” (Spivak 1996, 2010). Gessen asks, how do you tell a story that is hidden, “How do you bring up a topic that has never before been discussed … for which there is no language?” (2017, 62).

Chwastiak and Young (2003) question the ethics of annual reports that

They suggest that “Only by breaking silence and counter-posing corporate values with alternatives can we hope to free humankind from the limitations of profit maximization” (535). Such research adds to critical accounting’s work on counter-accounts, intending to shed light on those aspects rendered invisible by traditional accounting (Gallhofer, et al. 2006; Lehman, Annisette, and Agyemang 2016; Paisey and Paisey 2006; Sikka 2006). They are alternative societal responses, expressing the “standpoints of the oppressed and underrepresented voices” (Apostol 2015, 213).

Why and how we choose to privilege ideas and data is problematic in a society dominated by an ideology of the bottom line. Global policies could not be enacted without support of economic theories, accounting numbers, and a claim that pure markets go hand in hand with democracy. Generally acknowledged is that neoliberalism has benefited a minority of the world’s people, further bifurcating rich and poor and burdening women further (Cooper 2015; Jaggar 2002; Lehman, Annisette, and Agyemang 2016, 2018), and how this representation appears in quantifying the issue of violence and women is presented next.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) compiles data, impacts policies, and is particularly known for its Davos meetings of CEOs, politicians, economists, and celebrities. As such it is significant on the world stage and has been the subject of criticism for elitism and negative impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations.⁷ The WEF has published the Global Gender Gap Report (GGGR) since 2006, with its most recent publication in 2018. Computing indices they are aimed at measuring the “relative gap between women and men” (GGGR 2018, v) with four key areas (four thematic dimensions): Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment. As an overview, the initial 2006 report covered 115 countries (152 pages), the 2010 report covered 134 countries (334) pages, and the 2018 report was expanded to 149 countries (355 pages).⁸ As we are told in the Preface of the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, “Measuring the size of the problem is a prerequisite for identifying the best solutions” (GGGR 2010, v). And thus the question arise: How is measurement constructed? What are the assumptions? What is measured specifically in relation to violence against women? We address this next.

It is stated the aim is for “consistent and comprehensive measures. The forum does not seek to determine priorities for countries, acknowledging different economic, political and cultural contexts” (GGGR 2017, 36). Implying advocacy is not an aim, an accounting-language orientation of comparability is proposed, and the following statement provides this view in the introduction to the GGGR of 2010.

The quote at the beginning of the paragraph uses italics to differentiate the statement “does not seek to determine priorities” to suggest the GGGR advocacy of multinational company profit orientation. The language includes investment in girls and women as consumers and impacts on competitiveness. Claiming an objective measure in using ratios while claiming the WEF drives change for betterment is an example of symbolic violence under which impacts on women are naturalized into the language of business objectives that claim dominant and normalized conviction. Through a particular business language, a mindset is molded and developed toward privileging competitiveness, consumerism, and profits. A movement is lauded not for social justice aims per se but for “deliverables” to the business community and economy. Measures are needed to prevent loss articulated with gentle advocacy, as if natural.⁹

In the most recent 2018 report an update to the preface harbingers big data and technology:

What emerges in the 2018 preface is a naturalization of technology skills for raising society toward prosperity and a better world. It is an interesting assertion and juxtaposition that “what makes us human” is first “the capacity to learn new skills” and secondly “our creativity, empathy and ingenuity.” This directs society toward more technology, big data, skill sets with the hope that these will be the areas in which women direct their energies, where “talent is already scarce.” Embedded in objective terms of metrics and technological processes is a privileging of technique into spheres that are unambiguously social and in line with neoliberal ideals.¹⁰ It is notable that the measures regarding violence are neither highlighted or noted compared to the emphasis on “gender gaps in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a critical in-demand skillset of the future” (GGGR 2018, viii).

Assessing the GGGR for its treatment of violence toward women presents a number of challenges. First, as noted earlier, the mindset of neoliberal ideals are inherent in the perspective and resulting categories. Second, violence was most often associated with and included in a particular category of “Health and Survival.” There were 11 sub-categories¹¹ in this GGGR thematic, including mortality from birth, disease, accidents, and intentional injuries. These categories are rich for an analysis of differences between women and men regarding workplace treatment, medical hazards, and differentials in suicides. The category of sex ratio at birth states the report “aims specifically to capture the phenomenon of ‘missing women’, prevalent in many countries with a strong son preference” (GGGR 2018, 4). We note this category is also a category for exploring in the future and it is sometimes called a “genocide of females,” although the GGGR description is a language sanitized, offering a cultural origin. We chose to describe (and challenge) one category representing violence toward women well understood in contemporary research, literature, and debates: Prevalence of gender violence in lifetime, described as the “Percentage of women who have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner at some time in their lives.”¹²

In order to not overwhelm the reader, a random sample of the 149 countries from 2016 and 2018 is provided as a summary of the measure: Albania 31%; Bangladesh 53%; Brazil: 31%; Canada 6%; China 15%; New Zealand 33%; Poland 13%; Pakistan 13%; Turkey 42%; Ukraine 13; US 36%.¹³ With this data, a pervasive violence is evidenced in the category “prevalence of gender violence in lifetime.” Most frequently, one-third to one-half of women attest to this form of violence.

Along with questions regarding how the data is compiled and researched, we note an incongruous statement summarizing the results in the GGGR. Despite the previous statistics, the GGGR (2018) concludes an achievement. It states:

In the summary results and analysis there is no mention – a silencing – of the high prevalence of gender violence. It is a conspicuous creation of an invisibility, given approximately 33% of all women “experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner at some time in their lives,” which does not include violence from non-intimate partners which would surely increase the percentage substantively. How might we provide a different account and accountability?

Spivak (2010) remarks one might not disavow reports such as the GGGR as unimportant, because they may lead to the passing of important laws protecting women from violence, yet she likens these as gestures with “missionary impulses” and imperfect interventions. They may be considered a form of symbolic violence: “tremendously well-organized and broad repressive ideological apparatuses” (Spivak 1996, 22). While challenging measures, we also consider that quantification holds potential for furthering emancipation by infusing them with reflections of social values and making visible that which is otherwise silenced. We recognize the concern among feminists that quantification reduces or erases particularity and context “in the processes of categorization [that] often depends on categories that reconstitute … social hierarchies; and produces an illusion of objectivity” ( Joseph 2014, xviii). Yet agreeing with Joseph, we can also stake out how we might want to form knowledge production with our values ( Joseph 2014). Thus, data from outside the Global Gap Reports is considered here,¹⁴ suggesting that violent practices are voluminous.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports:

The World Health Organization estimates that globally, one woman in five will be the subject of rape or attempted rape: 700 million women have been raped during their lifetime (Kristoff and WuDunn 2009). More broadly, the number of women who die due to gender-related violence, deprivation, and discrimination “is larger than the casualty toll in all the wars of the 20th century combined” (Winkler in Lederer 2005).

Challenging the inevitability of violence, refuting natural causations and advocating for accountability all provide opportunities for transformation. As Gayatri Spivak affirms, these can only be partial transformations until the economic and social systems and structures perpetuating the violence are revealed and no longer under the radar (Spivak 2010). What can be seen from the alternative numbers provided is the power to see differently, reflecting and expanding upon ways of knowing. Feminism is based upon notions of change and continually questioning our beliefs and their impacts. Dambrin and Lambert (2012) point out that any scholar, activist, or person runs the risk of limited reflexivity. Yet exposure to visionary ideas creates new theories, activism, and emancipatory potential to ensure there is no single story.

This chapter asks what connects ethics, violence, women, and accounting? How does one “account” for such violence and unpack accounting’s role while acknowledging that taking account is contextual and there are always shifts in ways of knowing? Exploring accounting’s role regarding women and symbolic violence, physical violence, quantification, and qualification have inevitable overlaps, and this chapter recognizes these complexities while beginning an exploration. The desire to illustrate accounting’s ethical and discourse-creating position on the subject is based on an activist curiosity¹⁵ and to enhance thinking, not as merely filling in a box. Encouraged by Gendron, “Box-breaking research should not be viewed as imbued with irrationality and foolishness; instead, this intellectual journey needs to be considered a political act against the threat of relentless gap spotting and intellectual stagnation” (Gendron 2018, 9).

What makes accounting powerful is the discipline’s promotion of privileged positions, and in this chapter we take account of a complex moral issue. We make visible how, under contemporary processes of globalization, progressive feminist dialogues have taken place while the immorality of violence continues. It is impossible to provide a complete narrative of multiplicities of feminism and ethics, and as stated in our introduction, morality entails freedom to choose how to create our world. We have highlighted and made visible the circumstance around the globe rendering women without freedom: violence toward them.

While recognizing the complexity of the issues, morality includes, for women and men, the right to work, choose, and celebrate and to be free of violence: “To not only have a piece of the pie, but to choose the flavor and know how to make it” (Nussbaum 2000, x). We have precedent in accounting literature to consider the art of the possible and to research dialogue into nuances and explorations of impacts and perceptions. Accounting is a part of the social construction of society making things thinkable, and given accounting’s role in social creation, this chapter recognizes the significance of creating our world and revealing a story that is hidden. Critical accounting research acknowledges accounting’s capacity to erase, restrain, and reduce social phenomenon to abstractions of rules, procedures, and reports, and here we uncover injustices and accounting’s participation. Accounting neither delivers the truth or is neutral in public arenas. Instability surrounds the nature of accounting such that Khalifa and Kirkham (2009) advocate scrutinizing what “is understood and accepted as an accounting task and why such understandings emerge” (439), as we have sought to do here. This chapter asks us to examine, given accounting is meaning-making, how we might reinvent it for a discourse fulfilling a crucial area of social justice.

Appendix

EXAMPLES OF SELECTED COUNTRIES FOR GGGR 2018, AS PER FOOTNOTE 8

Brazil GGGR 2018

Norway GGGR 2018

USA GGGR 2018

The author is grateful to the two editors for their invitation, scholarship, and camaraderie and to Hofstra University.