Critical Perspectives on Accounting 15 (2004) 565586

Critical accounting education: teaching

and learning outside the circle
Gordon Boyce
Division of Economic and Financial Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
Received 15 December 2002; accepted 30 January 2003

Abstract
The development of the corporate university is an element in the suite of economically rational
public policy changes promulgated in recent decades. Working from a position that the practice of
accounting is centrally implicated in these changes, it is contended in this paper that accounting, and
accounting education, can in fact play a part in challenging these positions. Extant accounting research
is sufficiently well-developed such that we are aware of the conflicts and contradictions both within
accounting and flowing from the practice of the discipline, yet the effect of this body of knowledge
on the content of teaching and learning within the accounting classroom remains limited. By and
large, accounting education continues to be constrained within narrowly defined, but mis-conceived,
disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the techniques and skills of accounting practice.
In outlining a case for broadening the accounting education curriculum, this paper adopts the heuristic of tangential thinking as a means of transcending narrowly constructed disciplinary boundaries.
In doing so, it is suggested that accounting education reform needs to go well beyond the putative
reform agenda of the organised professional accounting bodies.
The exploration of tangents lead to areas of knowledge that initially seem to be outside of accounting,
but which nevertheless have an integral connection to the realities of the practice of the discipline.
The paper outlines a case for tangential thinking in teaching and learning activities in the accounting
classroom, within extant accreditation and curricular arrangements. Teaching and learning outside the
circle in this manner is suggested as a way to make accounting education relevant in its socio-historical
context and, particularly, relevant to the lived experience of students.
2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Critical accounting; Corporate university; Accounting research; Accounting education; Intellectuals

Tel.: +61-2-9850-8530; fax: +61-9850-8497.

E-mail address: gboyce@efs.mq.edu.au (G. Boyce).

1045-2354/$ see front matter 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1045-2354(03)00047-9

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G. Boyce / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 15 (2004) 565586

1. Introductionthe academic condition

Contemporary university activity is increasingly centred on the narrow goals of preparing
students for work and meeting the needs of business for trained workers. The resultant socialisation of students into disciplined compliance with the values of the present social order
(see Aronowitz, 2000, 2001), is in sharp contrast to the ideal university as a community of
scholars with a role in reflecting on and problematising the pervasive ideas of the times (see
Craig et al., 1999; Newman, 1996) and providing an active space for difference, debate, and
even dissent (Aronowitz, 2000). The influence of business has become so significant that
corporate acceptability has become a yardstick for university operations (Rappert, 1995,
p. 388) and corporate branding of university activity seems to be the order of the day
(Klein, 2001). Parker (2002) considers that the impacts on university financial/funding, education, and research subsystems have been so deep that they are changing the interpretive
schemes of the university lifeworld:
Core values of universities now include financial viability, vocational relevance, industry relationships, market share, public profile, and customer/client responsiveness.
These values are transparently reflective of business enterprise values as private sector business concepts and practices have been increasingly imported into the university
sector . . . Scholarship, knowledge development and transmission, and critical inquiry
have been transformed from fundamental core values of the university lifeworld into
exploitable intellectual capital for the pursuit of the new enterprise university core
values . . . Knowledge based values formerly comprising the lifeworld have been supplanted by commercial values that now exploit subservient knowledge values for their
commercial contribution (Parker, 2002, pp. 612613, 616).
Not only have universities taken on meeting the needs of business as their core mission,
universities have increasingly come to resemble businesses themselves (Alexander, 1996;
Klein, 2001; Marginson, 2000; Saravanamuthu and Tinker, 2002). Within universities, executive leaders have been key change agents, but their actions are largely disconnected from
the academic and administrative community they supposedly lead (Parker, 2002, p. 609).
All aspects of university activity and academic work, and conditions under which teaching
and learning activities occur, have been affected. For example:
Course design: increasing influence of professional and commercial interests;
Course content: increasing commodification of curricula and influence of multinational
textbook publishers;
Student context and support: significantly larger class sizes and decreases in student
support;
Student numbers: massive growth, transforming many institutions into mass education
providers;
Vocationalisation: a shift towards vocationally based training with a decline in socially
critical functions;
Service provision: outsourcing and cost shifting to students and academic departments;
Academic work: reduced academic autonomy and restrictions on academic freedom;
Job security: casualisation of university labour and contract teaching;

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Infrastructure: postponement or elimination of building construction and maintenance;

and Internationalisation: pervasive influence of Western cultural patterns of thinking
without reference to appropriateness for students from a range of country settings (see
Boyce, 2002; Lewis, 1998; Parker, 2002, for example).
Change in universities is often explained or justified as being a result of globalisation
and a claimed need to comply with market and other external forces. Parker (2002), for
instance, variously attributes university change to external environmental pressures, external disturbances and the [government] funding crunch and Latham (2001) sees the
need for change as flowing from the fiscal crisis of the state. A particular problem with
these conceptions is that, in effect, economic rationalism becomes both the referent and
the ideal for change (see Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993, p. 214). By contrast, analysis of the
active role of public policy settings shows the strategic role of the state in reorienting academic activity towards serving the needs of global capital. This demonstrates that university
change is driven as much by deliberate government action in support of a particularly narrow
set of economic and political interests as anything else (see Boyce, 2002). Indeed, many
of the changes in academia are a result of the states direct interventionist role vis vis
the intellectuals . . . to control their activities by using financial and economic incentives
(Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996, p. 201), having the (desired) effect of marginalising oppositional spaces and voices.1
Despite the extent and pace of change to date, the future for universities remains undetermined, and academic action-in-the-present will continue to be significant in shaping that
future. The ongoing dialectical tension between education as domination and education as
emancipation (see Dillard and Tinker, 1996; McPhail, 1999; McPhail, 2001a) means that
possibilities for transcendence are inherent in the present situation, and that educational
endeavour has a significant role to play. Individual and collective actions, including those
of academics, students and university administrators, can have significant effects within
universities and the wider society.
In this paper I consider how accounting educationand accounting academicsmight
respond to the state of affairs outlined above. The practice of accounting is a key element
in operationalising the economically rational public policy changes referred to above,
and it thus follows that accounting may have some part to play in challenging these positions. Indeed, accounting research is sufficiently well-developed such that the conflicts and
contradictions both within accounting and flowing from the practice of the discipline are
well-known. Yet the effect of this body of knowledge on the content of teaching and learning
within the accounting classroom remains limited. Accounting education has traditionally
been narrowly defined within disciplinary boundaries that exclude consideration of anything
1 The fiscal crisis of the state referred to by Latham (2001) is itself more a symbol of a wider crisis of capitalism
that is structurally determined by social and economic conflicts between classes and groups (OConnor, 1973,
p. 3) and an outcome of the unequal distribution of social, economic and political power. Specifically, the crisis
has arisen as a result of government policy settings promulgated in the interests of an elite, rather than something
imposed on the state by uncontrollable external forces. Rhetoric about smaller government and cutting personal
taxes is coterminous with policies that minimise taxation on particular groups such as large corporations, which
play one country off against another in establishing operations, and wealthy private individuals who are able to
arrange their financial affairs in order to minimise their own personal taxation burden.

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outside the policies and practices of the discipline as such. In contradistinction, I outline
a case for consciously adopting tangential thinking as a heuristic for the transcendence of
mis-conceived, narrowly constructed disciplinary boundaries.
The remainder of the paper is divided into four sections. The next section briefly contextualises accounting education by considering the role of universities in changing times and
the interplay between universities and social change, showing that the dialectical interplay
between the university as a social institution and society itself remains a source of possibility
for the creation of alternative futures. This is followed by a short outline of the present state
of accounting education, incorporating the now-established reform agenda emanating from
the organised accounting profession. The third section, on practising critical accounting
education, outlines how academics themselves might respond to this state of affairs in a
critical way, making a case for broadening the ambit of accounting education. The notion
of tangents, as areas of knowledge that seem outside of accounting, but which have an
integral connection to accounting, is used to make a case for the practice of critical accounting education within extant broad accreditation and curricular frameworks. It is noted that
accounting academics who tread the critical accounting path with their students are likely
to encounter resistance in this endeavour, but the implications for academics of not doing
so, are discussed in the concluding section.

2. Universities and accounting in changing times

In dealing with the turbulence of university change, an informed response from academics
requires more than a yearning for a lost past or a passive submission to the present. Universities have always been subject to various social forces, but have always been closely tied
at a functional level with the needs of the prevailing hegemonic order, tending to be a tool
of social control and social reproduction. Historically, universities have also been a site of
social struggle and university change has been integrally related to wider social change (see
Boyce, 2002; Tilling, 2002). This means that effective educational reform must be linked to
reform in other social spheres, and our present consideration of the corporatised university,
and any project for change within universities, must be contextualised within the existing
socio-political situation, in all its complexity.
Marxs famous observation that The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the
ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force . . . (Marx and Engels, 1970, p. 64, original emphasis) is apposite
here. In a sense, universities always have to be in tune with the times but in new times
(Hall and Jacques, 1989) the possibilities for change remain undetermined. Hall and Jacques
(1989) argue that the extant hegemonic position (dominated by economic rationalism) is
unsettled and characterised by enormous unevenness and ambiguity. This position, although
buttressed ideologically, materially and culturally, and, indeed, backed up with the power
of the state and multilateral institutions, remains contingent.
While it speaks the language of choice, freedom and autonomy, . . . society is increasingly characterised by inequality, division and authoritarianism (Hall and Jacques, 1989,
pp. 16l7). Social change flows from crises that crystallise out of such contradictions, and
social and political alternatives have not been obliterated by the supposed end of history

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(Fukuyama, 1992). Whilst change-inducing crises can last for long periods, and can be
effectively rebutted or suppressed in the short term, they cannot be eliminated in the longer
term (Amin, 1998; Habermas, 1973; OConnor, 1973). Indeed, an open question remains as
to whether university change is a tool of capitalism in adapting to new social and economic
circumstances or whether a wider project for the creation of a different social order emerges
(with universities being a part of this project).
The role of intellectuals is important in articulating any movement for change. The quest
for a new society requires intellectuals to articulate the social and cultural contradictions
of the prevailing order and to harness the creative impulses of a range of alternatives:
The principal agents are intellectuals who have a specialized responsibility for the circulation and development of culture and ideology and who either align themselves with the
existing dispositions of social and intellectual forces (traditional intellectuals) or align
themselves with the emerging popular forces and seek to elaborate new currents of ideas
(organic intellectuals) (Hall, 1996, pp. 432433).
It follows from the above that change in universities is not likely to occur without concomitant change in society. The interplay between the two remains a source of creative
possibility. Change in accounting and accounting education represents one small part of
this larger picture; consequently accounting academics need to consciously position themselves in the larger social context within which change might occur.

3. The present trajectory of accounting education

Accounting education is in the midst of a reform effort designed to address perceived
deficiencies associated with the dominance of a narrow, functionalist view of the discipline
(Johns, 1996; Needles and Powers, 1990; Nelson, 1995; Patten and Williams, 1990). The
traditional view is manifested in a teaching and learning approach that centres on passive
teaching techniques and focuses on the transfer of a discrete body of procedural knowledge,
including an ever-growing technical-regulatory content.
Accounting education reform efforts are substantially driven by the professional accounting bodies, with their clarion-call for change in accounting education in order to make it
more relevant to the (changing) needs of the accounting profession (e.g. Accounting
Education Change Commission, 1990; Bedford et al., 1986). University accounting departments have invariably responded by seeking to sing the professions tune ever louder (cf.
Bellamy, 1996; Cooper, 2002; Patten and Williams, 1990), although there is little evidence
that the substantive content of accounting education has materially altered. Despite significant resources expended thus far, the reform effort has come to little and, on present
indications, this situation seems unlikely to change (see Davis and Sherman, 1996; Dillard
and Tinker, 1996; Puxty et al., 1994). The great bulk of accounting education continues to
exhibit technical reductionism and develops severely limited perceptions of what constitute
problems in accounting, excluding any sense of the political agenda of accounting (Booth
and Cocks, 1990).
Both traditional curricula and the putative reform agenda remain largely rooted in an assumption that university education has no obligations beyond preparation for working life.

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This is at odds with the acknowledged limits of education dominated by vocational considerations (see, for example, Aronowitz, 2000; Preston, 1992; Tinker and Koutsoumadi,
1997).2 The narrowness of the vocational approach to accounting education is doubly flawed
because it is based on the mistaken assumption that the future vocation of accounting students will be professional careers in accounting per se. This stands in stark contrast to
the reality of downsizing and deskilling in accounting work, which means that most accounting graduates will face a markedly different future (see Cooper and Tinker, 1998).
Many will never work in professional accounting practice, or, indeed, in any form of
accounting (see Tinker and Koutsoumadi, 1997, 1998). All will have to face the emergent
jobless (diFazio, 1998; Esposito et al., 1998), joyless (Tinker and Koutsoumadi, 1998),
and commodified (Tinker and Koutsoumadi, 1997) future. The accounting education reform agenda is ignorant of these aspects of the reality to be faced by current students of
accounting.
Whilst accounting education is not unique in its vocational emphasis,3 it does present a
particular case in point. Whether they recognise or accept it, academic accountants have
a particular responsibility that flows from the central role of their discipline in creating
and sustaining social reality, including the present dominance of economic rationalism (see
for example, Berry et al., 1985; Boden et al., 1998; Davids and Hancock, 1998; Guthrie,
1999; Reiter, 1997). In the present specific context, accounting has been a significant tool
in contemporary attacks on universities and on the role of academics (see Dominelli and
Hoogvelt, 1996). Flowing from this, it is reasonable to assign a degree of responsibility to
accounting academics for the present state of affairs, not only in accounting education, but
in universities themselves, and in society more generally. It is also reasonable to assign to
them some responsibility for developing positions that challenge this state of affairs.

4. Practising critical accounting education

An effective response to the increasing hold of economic rationalism must draw on the
potential, inherent within the historical function of universities in social reproduction, for
universities and academics to play a role in building a counterhegemonic position (see
Boyce, 2002, pp. 593597). Academics may perform a range of functions in this regard,
but it is their daily attention to teaching and learning that will form the focus of critical
accounting educational practice. Intellectual involvement with students is perhaps the most
important activity to be undertaken by educators with a commitment to social change (see
Freire, 1996, 1998, for example).
2

The vocationalism of accounting education is not a recent problem. Parker (2001, p. 441, drawing on Previts
and Merino, 1979) notes that in the United States, when accounting was first taught in universities early in the
20th century, academics were criticised (by practitioners!) for taking a narrow, technical, practice oriented focus
at the expense of a more conceptually based analytical education. The technicist, vocational approach prevailed
at the time, and has dominated university accounting education ever since.
3 University teaching across the board at the present time seems to be increasingly focussed on training students
in occupational skills, socialising them into the extant social arrangements, and preparing a ready supply of future
labour (Aronowitz, 2000). Gray and Collison (2002) suggest that the malady in accounting education affects a
number of comparable professional domains.

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Foundationally, accounting educators must address whether their allegiance is to the

accounting profession (whatever that may be) or to accounting education (see Tinker and
Feknous, 2001). If all that university accounting academics do is teach the practices and
procedures of the discipline, they are doing something that logically seems unnecessary. In
a situation where so much accounting work can be and is performed by accounting workers
who do not have any formal training in accounting (see Baker, 2001), formal university level
education is not a prerequisite to the technical practice of accounting. We should therefore
seek something more from university accounting education than mere skill development
for the practice of accounting. This would necessitate a dramatic redrawing of the horizons
of accounting and accounting education.
4.1. A broader definition of accounting
The problems in accounting education may well start with the conventional portrayal of
accounting as a process of truthfully or fairly (or even legally) representing financial
and economic reality. Critics identify problems fundamental to the craft itself and the way
it is practised and regulated. Clarke et al. (1997), for example, make an argument that
conventional accounting representations result in nothing like the portrayal of anything
even approaching commercial reality. Their argument is a reformist one, ironically
sharing with the official rhetoric surrounding the promulgation of accounting frameworks,
standards, regulation, and law, the goal of making changes to the system of accounting
in order to produce better representations. But beyond representation per se, it is now
well-recognised that the power of accounting and its techniques of notation, computation,
calculation, and evaluation are indispensable in the operation of power and rule in society
(Miller and Rose, 1990). There is ample research evidence that ties both present social
and economic injustices and the sustaining of the system that produces these injustices
to the practice of accounting (e.g. Adams and Harte, 2000; Arnold and Hammond, 1994;
Chwastiak, 1998; Hoogvelt and Tinker, 1977; Neimark and Tinker, 1986; Tinker, 1985,
1991).
The ideological role of accounting in legitimating the extant social and political order
is particularly significant (see Richardson, 1987). Expertise associated with the practice of
accounting is important in its use as a translation device between authorities and individuals,
shaping conduct not through compulsion but through the power of ostensible truth and
rationality, and its promised effectiveness (Miller and Rose, 1990; Robson, 1991). Eagleton
(1991) identifies six different strategies through which an ideology can serve to legitimate
dominant social interests:
A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to
it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and
apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms
of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in
ways convenient to itself. Such mystification, as it is commonly known, frequently takes
the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception
of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. In any actual ideological
formation, all six of these strategies are likely to interact in complex ways . . . (Eagleton,
1991, pp. 56, original emphases)

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A growing stream of accounting research literature explores these areas, demonstrating

how accounting is implicated in all of the ideological strategies identified by Eagleton (e.g.
Cooper, 1995; Lehman, 1995; Lehman and Tinker, 1987; Murray, 1990; Neimark, 1995,
1996; Reiter, 1998). Dominant forms of accounting promote, naturalise and universalise
economically rational, profit-centred, corporatist values. These values are not problematised
and are unquestioningly presented as the primary concerns of accounting and accountability. Alternatives are systematically denigrated, marginalised, and obscured (Chua, 1996;
Clarke et al., 1999; Mitchell et al., 2001; Reiter, 1997; Reiter and Williams, 2002) and
social conflict and contradictions are masked (Lehman, 1995). By contrast, the theatre
and intolerance (Clarke et al., 1999) that characterises the mainstream research agenda
is reflected in the classroom, where accounting education presents a decidedly illiberal,
uncritical, economically rational and market-centred perspective on the discipline (see, for
example Craig et al., 1999). Students are rarely given the opportunity to discover that accounting is less the neutral language of business serving the economic good than it is the
partial language of social power serving particular interests.
Given the constructed, partial and partisan nature of accounting (see Tinker, 1991; Tinker
et al., 1982), and the one-sided and one-dimensional reality-production in which accountants
are actively engaged (see Hines, 1988), a pretence of neutrality in accounting cannot hold.
It seems unarguable that the areas of knowledge of accounting outlined above are indeed
central to the practice of the discipline, and should be central to education in relation to that
same discipline. Whilst enhanced skills and knowledge deemed suitable for participation in
the workforce are not to be ignored, the inclusion of these areas of accounting knowledge
requires classroom activity to go beyond the conventional bounds of accounting education.
4.2. Using tangents to redraw the boundaries of accounting (education)
To be sure, effective accounting critique must be grounded in a solid understanding of
the techniques and practices of the discipline, but when this is not infused with a thorough
appreciation of the social and political context and consequences of accounting, students
are effectively blinkered, or worse blindfolded, to the realities of the actual practice of
the discipline. For accounting education to be socially relevant, it must be infused with an
exploration of areas that may prima facie seem tangential to the main game of accounting.
A tangent is defined as touching (Macquarie Dictionary, 1991). Geometrically, a tangent is a line or surface that is touching, as a straight line in relation to a curve or surface.
To fly off at a tangent involves a sudden divergence from one course, thought, etc., to
another. Something tangential is pertaining to or of the nature of a tangent . . . divergent
or digressive. Figs. 1 and 2 illustrate how what is referred to here as conscious tangential
thinking can be used in accounting education to broaden the definition of accounting to
include its socio-historical elements, and to incorporate critique. Fig. 1 portrays a typical
conventional depiction of a business (or other) organisation, and the limited role of accounting within it, consistent with the portrayals of conventional accounting which see it as
serving strictly limited economic and decision-making functions. Notable features of this
characterisation are: definite and solid entity and disciplinary boundaries; a large perceived
area of interest within each system and subsystem boundary; and a description of everything
outside the perceived organisational boundary under the simple general notion of external

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573

Fig. 1. A typical portrayal of a business entity and its environment.

environment. This external element is broadly outside the purview of the disciplines inside
the organisation, including accounting conventionally conceived, except insofar as there is
a direct impact inside the (perceived, constructed) boundary.
By contrast, Fig. 2 develops the depiction in Fig. 1 to include within the purview of
accounting its socio-historical setting. Notable features of this characterisation are: indefinite and permeable entity and disciplinary boundaries (broken lines); only a small area of
interest contained within the boundaries (however, drawn) of each system and subsystem
this smallness being relative to what might be referred to as the universe of interest; and a
specific recognition of what is outside the organisational boundary (wherever it might be)
under various specific topics of interest. This latter aspect is perhaps the most significant:
the environment is no longer a nefarious or amorphous thing outside the organisation to
be dealt with, but something that takes on a distinct and explorable form, with definite and
identifiable conditions and effects. The range of (environmental) topics of interest outside
the (perceived boundaries of the) organisation are tangentially connected (the emphasis
being on the connections) to what happens inside the organisation, and, specifically, inside
accounting. In this sense, what may have initially seemed outside of accounting turns out,
on exploration, to be integral to it. As Dillard comments, such considerations are, indeed,
an important part of the subject matter of accounting:
. . . a faculty member must critically, logically, analytically and continually explore all
aspects of the subject matter including the theoretical base, historical and social context,

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Fig. 2. Many tangents to travel: a broader, tangential view of a business entitys system and its environment.

technical content and societal implications. As a consequence, inequalities, power structures and systemic weaknesses become more difficult to rationalise. (Dillard and Tinker,
1996, p. 222)
Going off on what may seem to be tangents is therefore an essential element of a meaningful and comprehensive consideration of accounting itself. In establishing and interrogating
these connections and the divergent aspects of accounting, flying off at a tangent represents socio-historically informed critique in a very real sense. In this model, going off on
tangents become an essential aspect of accounting, just as accounting practice has a range
of immediate and not-so-immediate effects. This divergence from the established norm of
what is deemed to be within accounting simply recognises integral connections between
accounting and elsewhere.
In sum, by comparison with Fig. 1, Fig. 2 more closely reflects the reality of the influence
and power of accounting in society and in the lives of participants in accounting classes
(teachers and students). This approach brings a range of relevant issues into the accounting

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575

classroom, and provides the opportunity for the critical discussion of a range of issues
that are often no-go areas within any subject area normally included within commerce
or business degrees (not just accounting). Perhaps most importantly, tangential thinking
facilitates exploration of a range of areas impacting on the daily lives of academics, students,
their families and colleaguesimpacts that flow from the uses of accounting.
Tangential thinking presents the ideal opportunity for the kind of dialogical education
advocated by Freire (1996), where teachers and students jointly explore, discover, and
grow in consciousness. The range of possible tangents for consideration facilitates much
more exploratory and interactive forms of knowledge acquisition, validating the voice of the
learner in interaction with that of the teacher (see Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, pp. 100103;
Freire, 1996).4 All of this provides the possibility that learners will:
. . . appropriate critically the best dimensions of their own histories, experiences, and
culture . . . in an institution that breaks down the wall between vocational and academic
education, bringing students to the threshold of the world of work with a broadly based
education in both aspects of . . . knowledge. (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993, p. 23)
Tangential approaches to teaching and learning can utilise a range of classroom strategies
and tactics in a number of different teaching modes. Perhaps most significant in this context
is not specific strategies and tactics per se, but the teaching and learning philosophy which
sees classroom activity as much more than training for work and skill development.
Classroom activity in this approach connects the domain of specific studyaccountingto
the wider real world as experienced, but perhaps not well understood, by all involved in
the activity. Drawing tangentially, with a diverse array of areas for considered exploration,
it is possible to connect with the ordinary feelings and experiences which students have in
their lives outside the classroom and thereby to get in touch with lived reality and bring the
historical and contemporary social underpinnings of accounting practice into the classroom.
Students can articulate their own common sense knowledge with a more encompassing and
enlightened social consciousness (see Hall, 1988, p. 171), whilst seeking to transcend the
limitations of their pre-existing understandings. As McLaren points out, these connections
to common sense and lived experience are important because:
Knowledge is relevant only when it begins with the experiences students bring with
them from the surrounding culture; it is critical only when these experiences are shown
sometimes to be problematic . . . and it is transformative only when students begin to
use the knowledge to help empower others, including individuals in the surrounding
community. (McLaren, 1998, p. 192)
Fig. 3 provides some examples of specific tangential connections that might be explored
in accounting classes. All of these connections, which might initially seem tangential, are
now well-established in the accounting research literature as being a part of the practice of accounting. Thus, this research literature represents an established and developing
4 Although the value of instruction and even propaganda (in the non-pejorative sense) as a part of education
as consciousness-raising should not be entirely ignored in a rush to dialogic pedagogy (Freire, 1996; cf Gramsci,
1971, pp. 3536; Gramsci in Forgacs, 1999, pp. 6768).

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Fig. 3. Examples of tangential connections.

knowledge base that can form the basis for exploration and further building in the accounting classroom.
4.3. Acting within present curricular arrangements
Many accounting educators have made a start, with the presentation or exploration of
alternative and critical perspectives in some specialist or elective courses in subject areas
such as environmental and social accounting (see Bebbington, 1995, 1997; Gibson, 1997).
However, such courses are invariably taken by a relatively small number of students who
are already motivated and at least to some degree aware of pertinent issues (Collison et al.,
2000). This limits the potential of such courses to bring critical accounting to a mass
accounting audience. Whilst the potential value of such courses in presenting alternative
views and in sowing small seeds for change cannot be denied, it should also be recognised
that even education under the rubric of social and environmental accounting might have
the effect of sustaining the status quo (see Tinker et al., 1991).
In any case, opportunities for individual academics to offer specialist elective courses
are constrained by specific departmental situations within which individuals work. Many

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577

academics spend much of their teaching time in core or compulsory courses in introductory,
financial, or managerial accounting, and it is here that the challenge of developing a critical
accounting education remains. Fig. 3 indicates how this can be done within the broad
parameters of standard or core courses such as management accounting, accounting systems,
or auditing. Care is required, however. The adding-on of professional ethics or similar
modules (see, for example, Clikeman and Henning, 2000; Fulmer and Cargile, 1987) may
help, but may also reinforce a vocational orientation if ethics are themselves uncritically
presented in an instrumental or vocationally oriented fashion.5
In short, where critical accounting education is an elective or add-on to otherwise unchanged mainstream content, it might also be deemed to be peripheral to the main game
of an accounting qualification (Humphrey et al., 1996) and therefore of marginal import.
However, there is considerable scope for accounting academics, within the rubric of the current accounting curriculum and curricular and accreditation arrangements to directly draw
on and explore socio-historical knowledge of the functioning of accounting in an integral
and integrated manner.
While educators at all levels have been subject to systematic and sustained attempts to
disempower them in relation to their control over teaching and learning,6 much control remains in the hands of academics, particularly at university level. Continued academic control
over teaching and learning is crucial to the long-term health of universities (Aronowitz,
2000, p. 34). The role of lecturers in syllabus design, text selection, setting assessable work,
assessment of student work, and, importantly, fronting classes, remains significant, and the
challenge is to make space in all of these activities for critical work. In accounting, it is
perhaps contradictory that the capacity of accounting academics to act may be enhanced by
the accounting professions official accreditation of university accounting courses. Parker
(2001, p. 443) makes the important point that, even under relatively tight accreditation arrangements, the quantum of technicist material that we currently deliver in undergraduate
courses is not sacrosanct . . . ; this means that there is considerable room for innovative
practice within existing constraints.7
The profession has emphasised the development of generic skills in its accreditation
requirements. These skills include analytical and critical thinking skills, judgement and
synthesis skills, personal and interpersonal skills, management and organisational skills,
and the ability to apply these skills in a range of unique situations (e.g. see Accounting
Education Change Commission, 1990; Bedford et al., 1986; Deppe et al., 1991). Taken
in any meaningful sense, the wide ambit of this list of skills precludes the adoption of a
narrow objective-based, vocationally oriented training model, and the specific inclusion
of critical thinking skills, which involve skillful judgement as to truth, merit, etc. . . . a
5

But cf. McPhail (2001b), Puxty et al. (1994) and Neimark (1995), for example.
These attempts have been characterised by the imposition of standardised curricula and testing in primary
and secondary schools, and have had the effect of deskilling teaching work and reducing teacher autonomy to a
particular degree, to the substantial detriment of education itself (see Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993).
7 It will be noted that this discussion relates the significant control academics retain in relation to many of
those elements of university life that have changed in recent times, as outlined in the introduction to the paper. This signals the possibility that a degree of academic passivity and resignation in the face of seemingly
powerful forces may be partly to blame for the current state of affairs (but c.f. Tinker and Feknous, 2001, for
example).
6

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critical analysis (Macquarie Dictionary, 1991), provides not only the opportunity, but the
necessity for developing a capacity for critique.
Any critique in and of accounting must involve upsetting received notions. This has been
described as making the familiar strange (see Chua, 1998; Merino, 1998), and may include
locating the development and use of accounting systems, technologies, and associated policies, procedures, and practices in their organisational, social, and ethical contexts. It may
involve identifying and questioning underlying assumptions and examining and interrogating the justifications and explanations offered by others. This should involve subjecting
accounting systems, technologies, policies, procedures, and practices to scrutiny insofar as
they have real direct and indirect consequences for social actors and groups. The interests
of various (different) parties (including students, in varying aspects of their lives) should
be considered and challenged.
The distinction drawn by Aronowitz and Giroux (1993) between intelligence and
intellect is useful in considering the development of higher order critical skills. The
development of critical skills in the classroom must reach beyond the narrowness of the
intelligence of routinised, instrumental knowledge. Intelligence is employed within a narrow, immediate range to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust while intellect is critical and
creative insofar as it examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. In this
sense, intellectthe stuff of intellectualsand not expertise or credentials, is central to
critical accounting.
4.4. Encountering resistance2
Accounting academics who seek to broaden the perceived disciplinary boundaries within
which they work will face undoubted resistance in this endeavourfrom both students and
academic colleagues.
4.4.1. Student resistance
The great bulk of accounting students may not initially seek or appreciate the consciousness-raising, engaging, enlightening, and emancipatory critique that might be offered in
critical accounting classes. They may even resent being confronted with it. Indeed, it
is likely that this will be the case, given the non-creative, rote-learning, practice-oriented,
bean counting stereotype, which many students seem to associate with accounting (see
Cory, 1992; Inman et al., 1989). Prior education and self-selection into accounting programs
means that accounting students are likely to be well-versed and oriented to the links between
accounting and their possible roles as investors and managers of various sorts, but less so
to the links with their roles as citizens, family-members, and workers.8 This means that
the ideological function of accounting, which attaches itself to the former, can be at least
partially overcome by making the explicit links to the latter.
8 Students choosing an accounting major are predisposed to view the learning of accounting as consisting of
rote memorisation and are least likely to believe that an important or essential goal of education is to increase
self-directed learning, to develop clear thinking capability, or to develop creative capacities (Gow et al., 1994;
Inman et al., 1989, p. 44). Students who choose social and environmental accounting electives tend to be more
concerned about ethical issues, than the greater number of students who choose not to undertake such electives.
Research suggests this latter group are much more career oriented and they feel social and environmental accounting
will be of less relevance to them in this arena (Collison et al., 2000).

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The seeming natural, but narrow, connection of the accounting discipline to the world of
commerce and management amplifies the problem, and students may well be motivated by
career-focused, economically centred aspirations. Nevertheless, this is in itself a product
of ideology, given that the major way in which ideologies (in the pejorative sense) have
traditionally maintained themselves is by harnessing what are in themselves perfectly legitimate human aspirations . . . (Geuss, 1981, p. 25), in this case, the aspiration for individual,
social and economic well-being.
Further, the very nature of the broader system of education includes the fundamental
socialisation of students to the values of the extant social system, including notions of
individualism and individual responsibility and an acceptance of inequality as natural
(Byrne, 1999, especially Chap. 1; Gramsci in Forgacs, 1999, pp. 6467). Students are denied
the opportunity (which can also be a life burden) for self-formation and self-actualisation
(Freire, 1996; McPhail, 2001a). The prior submersion of students in the reality of an
oppressive system and their internalisation of the values of that system means that they are
initially unable to see that reality, and they fear the freedom that a challenge to it entails
(Freire, 1996, Chap. 1). Anything that seems to challenge the present social arrangements is,
at least initially, upsetting, and is likely to be resisted. The resentment is an understandable
response, given the internal self-contradiction many students are asked to face between the
varying roles they play in life:
Class conflict is not a conflict between individuals but between social role aggregates in which individuals participate in several, often conflicting, roles as investors,
workers, community members, consumers, managers etc. By engaging the same dispute through conflicting roles, an individual may ultimately contribute to his/her own
exploitation . . . (Tinker et al., 1991, p. 30)
Accounting is conventionally portrayed as being unproblematically connected only to a
narrow spectrum of these conflicting roles, but the interconnections, conflicts, and immanent
contradictions of accounting itself mean that this is not a sustainable position.
Whilst the stereotypical view of the accountant as bean counter does little to attract
creatively oriented students to accounting studies in the first instance (Cory, 1992; Saemann
and Crooker, 1999), the perceived quality of students themselves is not the key issue.
Ruminating about this lack of quality (e.g. Cory, 1992; Graves et al., 1992; Inman et al.,
1989; Sharma, 1998) fails to address the here-and-now: how can we best serve the students
we have, and society, in the time we have with them?9
4.4.2. Academic resistance
Accounting academics, too, play conflicting roles. Most, of course, are themselves the
product of conventional accounting education programs, into which they self-selected, with
pre-existing stereotypes about accounting, and they have been socialised into the existing
system through their own education. While accounting educators (and practitioners) are
9 I should note that my own experience suggests that a cross-section of students from a wide variety of professional, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds are highly receptive to critical content in accounting curricula and
capable of engaging with it. This is particularly the case where the material is incorporated in a way that resonates
with the daily experiences of students, including their interaction with the world around them, and elaborates the
contradictory aspects of those experiences and that world.

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implicated in the reproduction of the social system, it does not necessarily follow that they
are themselves committed to that system: . . . they also experience ideology in its various
material forms (Roslender, 1992, p. 202). As Marx commented: . . . it is essential to
educate the educator himself . . . self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood
only as revolutionary practice (Marx, 1970, p. 121, original emphasis).
This means that there are considerable personal barriers to be overcome before the
consciousness-raising potential of accounting education is likely to be able to be meaningfully tackled by any accounting teacher. Principal amongst the barriers is the very orientation
of many academics themselves, who consciously or unconsciously align themselves with
the social reality that conventional accounting reproduces10 (see Dominelli and Hoogvelt,
1996). Committed disturbers of the peace (Craig et al., 1999) or confronters of orthodoxy
and dogma (Sikka et al., 1995) are few and far between:
This is a rapidly dwindling residue of academics who remain wedded to their conception
of themselves as change agents and critical thinkers working with social groups or communities for a better world. Their task is to mobilise those in favour of changing the status
quo. This group is relatively impotent at the moment because they have limited grassroots
support and critical intellectual activity has become a devalued activity, carried out in
their spare time, at night and on weekends. (Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996, pp. 208209)
Transformational education cannot take place unless academics themselves are transformed (see Dillard and Tinker, 1996, p. 221). Facing students who are uncomfortable
with the challenge of critical accounting is only part of the problem; our greater challenge
lies with ourselves and our colleagues. The challenges and choices are open: accounting
academics, as intellectuals, can make their expertise principally available to and for professional bodies, the accountancy industry, big business, and government; or they may seek to
engage more directly with the values of fairness, justice, democratic participation, openness
and accountability (see Sikka et al., 1995).
Resistance to critical accounting from within the accounting academy itself is unlikely to
be overcome in the short term, but there remains considerable scope for critical accounting
educators. Whatever the state of the accounting academy generally, and the prior expectations of accounting students, there is much that can be done by the individual lecturer or
tutor within their own classes. In addition to the priors students bring, perceptions about
accounting are formed in the accounting classroom (Friedlan, 1995). Consequently, teaching and learning activity can do much to bring students to a conscious awareness of the
socio-historical aspects of accounting, its contingency and partisanship, and of their own
place within that system.
5. Implications: accepting intellectual responsibility
Wherever, and however, accounting students work in their post-graduation lives, the practice of accounting will be used in ways that have direct effects on them, their local communities, and communities of interest across the globe. Accounting students/graduates are as
10 In Gramscian terms, these are those who seek the role of traditional intellectuals or hegemonic organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971).

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581

likely to have accounting done to them as by them. The narrowness of conventional accounting education, which prepares students only for an assumed future career in the practice of
the discipline, focusing on a managerial, corporate perspective, and privileging the preparers and immediate users of accounting reports hardly seems relevant in these circumstances.
The perspective of accounting from a broad user perspective, or, even, that of accountings
victims, including those not involved in ownership or management, is more directly relevant.
Rather than an excessive focus on the minutiae of this and that aspect of technical
accounting procedures, relevant accounting education must prepare students for informed
action in and on the world. This must include a developing understanding of the relation
of accounting to the mundane activities, language, and interactions of daily life engaged
in by both academics and students, and how these relate to the larger social system within
which they are embedded. It is in this realm that ideas, conceptions, and consciousness itself
are produced, effected, and reproduced (Marx and Engels, 1970, p. 47). However, critical
accounting thought extends well beyond the life of individuals: social life and the lives of
others, including their ideas, hopes and sufferings, are equally important considerations,
because every person is a citizen of a wider world (Gramsci in Forgacs, 1999, p. 68).
The social implications of accounting education have assumed greater significance in
recent times, as a growing proportion of accounting practitioners carry formal university
qualifications. This has meant that an accounting mentality consistent with the dominant
world view throughout society is growing in importance (Booth and Cocks, 1990, p. 400;
see Gray and Collison, 2002). Indeed, in the present context, it is evident that the monolingual mentality and worldview represented by mainstream accounting (see Chua, 1996) is
writ large in the corporatised university.
Individual accounting academics might deny responsibility by asserting that it is someone elses job to consider the social, environmental, ideological, and political dimensions
of accounting, but the obvious response to such a position is who could be regarded as more
responsible for this than accounting educators themselves? The professional accreditation
arrangements, which facilitate the inclusion of critical content within a broader purview of
what accounting actually is, do represent something of a contradiction:
. . . there is the question of how creative to those who employ accountants really want
them to be? Few if any prospective employers would deny that they are seeking adaptable,
dynamic, inventive, open-minded, lateral thinking, etc., staff. But . . . these qualities, if
widely distributed, might prove problematic given the existence of the social and technical
divisions of labour, the general application of accounting formulae, the intrusion of
politics and so on. One of the dangers of encouraging students to think about accountancy
is that they might be tempted to think about other things as well. (Roslender, 1992, p. 208)
In this regard, the ostensible and official commitment to the development of accountants
as broadly educated and creative critical thinkers could be motivated by rhetoric, ideology,
or a genuine commitment to criticism and critique. Whatever the motivation, formal accreditation arrangements, along with the academic freedom that remains with academics, allow
for the traditional socialisation roles of accounting education to be transcended. Extant social structures will be nurtured, on the one hand, in an absence of consciousness of their
causes, effects, and contingency, and, on the other hand, action based on that consciousness.
For accounting educators, the acknowledged role of accounting in social production and

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reproduction means that accounting itself is a part of this domain. An educational project
for change in accounting can interact with broader social change which, in turn, brings
systematic change to education (see Freire, 1996; Gramsci, 1971).
Those academics who fail to consciously make choices between reproducing the system
(and its inherent problems and injustices) or taking an active role in the creation of alternatives, or who endeavour to take pragmatic middle of the road or pluralistic positions,
championing moderation, consensus and compliance, will tend to act in ways that have
the effect of sustaining, protecting, and preserving the status quo (Tinker, 1986; Tinker et al.,
1991, p. 29). It is not possible to assume away the political content of education:
Educators at all levels . . . have to be seen as intellectuals, who as mediators, legitimators, and producers of ideas and social practices, perform a pedagogical function that is
eminently political in nature. (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993, p. 31)
None of this should be taken to suggest that enlightened accounting educators can save
the world. But they can play a part, and accounting educators must constantly address
the question of how their own time, effort, and dedication as intellectuals might make a
contribution to a larger process:
The fact is that only by degrees, one stage at a time, has humanity acquired consciousness
of its own value and won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization
imposed on it by minorities at a previous period in history. And this consciousness was
formed not under the brutal goad of psychological necessity, but as a result of intelligent
reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whole class, on why certain conditions
exist and how best to convert the facts of vassalage into the signals of rebellion and social
reconstruction . . . (Gramsci in Forgacs, 1999, p. 58)
In the accounting classroom, teaching and learning outside the circlegoing off on
tangentsis a way that accounting educators can bring a broader, socio-historically informed definition of accounting to students and teachers alike, creating possibilities for the
development of a socially relevant accounting education. Exploring and explaining what
might seem prima facie tangential to accounting itself actually creates space for considering the links between accounting and the lived reality faced by students. Such educational
content and process has the potential to be transformational for students and teachers, and,
through them, for the larger social system. It can thereby be genuinely critical.

Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Cindy Davids, Bill Blair, and Kala Saravanamuthu for their
helpful comments.

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