Descentising the (in)sensitivity of accounting towards shaping a better world

This chapter adopts an instrumentalist constructionist perspective to reflect on different strands of literature, especially social, critical and public sector accounting, to provide “reflective interpretations” (Bebbington et al., 2021) of the conceptions, flaws and developments of accounting in contemporary society. The chapter argues that what is perceived as ‘objective knowledge and truth’ produced by means of accounting, as it is conventionally used in the social, economic and public sector reality, is the result of specific perspectives and a creation of the mind: there is no unique ‘real world’ that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and symbolic discourse and language. As a result, the current conception of accounting is simply one of the potential systems of representation/construction of social and material practices, influenced by current dominant discourses, logics and ideologies. By acknowledging the pluralistic and constructed character of reality, this chapter digs into how accounting supports specific sets of meanings that have material effects, to the detriment of alternative values and conceptions of the world, and discusses alternative views. To do so, the term descentise is coined to capture a dual process: decentring accounting from its privileged status as a neutral or universal way of knowing, while re-sensitising it to the social, ethical, political and ecological concerns, which dominant calculative logics marginalise.