This
digital document is a
journal article from
Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
published by
Elsevier in 2005. The
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Description: All social practices reproduce certain taken-for-granteds about what exists. Constructions of existence (ontology) go together with notions of what can be known of these things (epistemology), and how such knowledge might be produced (methodology)-along with questions of value or ethics. Increasingly, reflective practitioners-whatever their practice-are exploring the assumptions they 'put to work' and the conventions they reproduce. Questions are being asked about how to 'cope' with change in a postmodern world, and ethical issues are gaining more widespread attention. If we look at these constructions then we often find social practices: (a) give central significance to the presumption of a single real world; (b) centre a knowing subject who should strive to be separate from knowable objects, i.e. people and things that make up the world; (c) a knowing subject who can produce knowledge (about the real world) that is probably true and a matter of fact rather than value (including ethics). Social practices of this sort often produce a right-wrong debate in which one individual or group imposes their 'facts' (and values) on others. Further they often do so using claims to greater or better knowledge (e.g. science, facts ...) as their justifications. We use the term ''relational constructionism'' as a summary reference to certain assumptions and arguments that define our ''thought style''. They are as follows: fact and value are joined (rather than separate); the knower and the known-self and other-are co-constructed; knowledge is always a social affair-a local-historical-cultural (social) co-construction made in conversation, in other kinds of action, and in the artefacts of human activities ('frozen' actions so to speak), and so; multiple inter-actions simultaneously (re)produce multiple local cultures and relations, this said; relations may impose one local reality (be mono-logical) or give space to multiplicity (be multi-logical). In this view, the received view of science is but one (socially constructed) way of world making, as is social constructionism, and different ways have different-and very real-consequences. In this paper, we take our relational constructionist style of thinking to examine differing constructions of foot and mouth disease (FMD) in the UK. We do so in order to highlight the dominant relationship construction. We argue that this could be metaphorised as 'accounting in Babel'-as multiple competing monologues-many of which remained very local and subordinated by a dominant logic. However, from a relational constructionist point of view, it is also possible to argue that social accounting can be done in a more multi-logical way that gives space to dialogue and multiplicity. In the present (relational constructionist) view, accounting is no longer 'just' a question of knowledge and methodology but also a question of value and power. To render accounting practices more ethical they must be more multi-voiced and enable 'power to' rather than 'power over'. .
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