Accounting is the language of business, increasingly standardized across the world through powerful global corporations: a technical skill used to reach the correct, unquestionable answer. Yet, as recent corporate scandals have shown, a whole range of financial professionals (auditors, bankers, analysts, company directors) can collectively fail to question dubious actions. How can this be possible? To understand such failures, this book explores how accountants construct the technical knowledge they deem relevant to decision-making. In doing so, it not only offers a new way to understand deviance and scandals, but also suggests a reappraisal of accounting knowledge which has important implications for everyday commercial life. The book's findings are based on interviews with chartered accountants working in the largest accountancy practices in London. The interviews reveal that although accounting decisions seem clear after they have been made, the process of making them is contested and opaque. Yet accountants nonetheless tend to describe their work as if it were straightforward and technical. Accountants' Truth digs beneath the surface to explore how accountants actually construct knowledge, and draws out the implications of that process with respect to issues such as professionalism, performance, transparency, and ethics. This important book concludes that accountants' technical discourse undermines their ethical reasoning by obscuring the ways in which accounting decisions must be thought through in practice. Accountants with particular ethical perspectives more readily understand and construct particular types of knowledge, so the two issues of knowledge and of ethics are inseparable. Increasingly technical accounting rules can therefore counterproductive. Instead, our best approach to avoiding future scandals is to redefine and reinvigorate professional ethics in the financial world.

"Accounting is the language of business, increasingly standardized across the world through powerful global firms. This ethnographic study shows how decisions and judgements are actually reached, exploring the links between technical knowledge, professional judgement, and ethics."--[Source inconnue]

In the business world, recent years have seen a growing acknowledgement of the value of intangible assets rather than physical assets. This has precipitated a crisis in the accounting industry: the accounting representations relied upon for years can no longer be taken for granted. Here, Norman Macintosh argues that we now need to understand accounting in a different manner. Offering several different ways of looking at accounting and accountants, he draws upon the work of eminent thinkers such as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Bahktin. In doing this, he develops revolutionary insights into the nature of accounting, pioneering the introduction of contemporary poststructuralist ideas into accounting theory and practice. With a wide range of examples and case studies and now available in paperback for the first time, this revolutionary new work will be essential reading for academic and professional accountants along with all those with an interest in the future of accounting.

The Philosophy of Money and Finance presents sixteen original essays providing a comprehensive introduction to questions concerning the nature of money and monetary value, the epistemology of markets, and the ethics of financial systems.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Following a spate of high-profile financial scandals (including Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat), the quality of financial information has come under increasing scrutiny. Many of the accounting standards being imposed on the profession by regulators and standard-setting bodies are now attracting criticism from the business community and the accountancy profession itself. In this book, Anthony Rayman traces a fundamental flaw in the conventional academic wisdom back to the nineteenth century, and proposes an alternative conceptual framework. He argues that effective corporate governance can be achieved, not by expensive and counterproductive regulations (like the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act and some International Accounting Standards), but by an enhanced accounting information system that exposes corporate management to the full rigour of market forces.

The images will not go away - multinational corporations failing, executives being led away in handcuffs, and public accounting firms being charged for complicity. How do we make sense of the reality behind these images? Neu and Green show that public accountancy is simultaneously a business and a public service.