Accounting for tacit coordination: The passing of accounts and the broader case for accounting theory

Abstract

Tacit coordination is a pervasive aspect of accounting practice. This paper teases out insights on tacit coordination from existing scholarship, starting with studies of everyday life accounting, then turning to professional practice. It develops an understanding that, in the application of rules and accounting standards, in producing, framing, auditing and using statements, records, apologies or excuses, accounting practitioners tacitly coordinate towards the passing of accounts. This passing can be articulated in terms of structures, agencies and processes of tacit coordination involved in making accounting happen. The implications of this understanding of accounting practice and the importance of the wider domain of enquiry it is indicating are discussed with respect to the stewardship position of accounting professionals and the further development of accounting theory. The passing of accounts charges accounting practitioners with the stewardship of silence and indicates a broader case for accounting theory to address the full continuum of accounting practices. One vital role of such theory is to offer antidotes against the idea that any account, any slice of information, or any amount of 'big data', could speak for itself -or that it should.

The performativity of accounting: advancing a Posthumanist understanding

“…Accountants and managers therefore have to be accountable for the ontological existence of the accounting apparatus, for its commitments and its performative effects (Mauthner, 2019, for a similar argument concerning scientific practices). The accountability for its ontological existence and its performative consequences includes an accountability for the exclusions or the "silences" (Vollmer, 2019) that the accounting apparatus produces. Posthumanist studies may particularly give voice to such silences and point to exclusions, thus insisting that accounting indeed is an ethical-political practice.…”

“…While from a humanist and representationalist perspective humans call other humans to account on the basis of accounting information, from a posthumanist perspective the more-thanhuman practices of accounting (in the broadest sense of the word, so including valuation, performance measurement, ranking) are called to account. Posthumanism does not simply reject the representationalist aim of the practice of accounting, but it does not simply accept the silence (Vollmer, 2019) that comes with it. A posthumanist account is not simply a philosophical critique or deconstruction of a representationalist stance of accounting.…”

Biblioscene

“…'Mammon and Man' being one (p. 194), the clerk, as an agent of capitalism, carried accounting from the office, to the home, and even to the gymnasium. Although in accounting research such locations are often treated as separate sites for investigation, Zakim reveals them as locales on a continuum of accounting practices connecting the workplace to the embodied self and to the state (Vollmer, 2019). One wonders whether clerks in other capitalist economies beyond the US, such as those in 'the first industrial nation' (Mathias, 1993), made similar worlds.…”

The Sacred and the Profane: The Exclusionary Legacy of American Labor 'Exceptionalism'

“…It is easier to explain why a phenomenon exists, than to explain why it does not. Still, Vollmer (2019) argues that it is not only the explicit discourse appearing in authoritative standards and textbooks that is important to professional life. The 'passing of accounts' is enhanced by the tacit 'silences of the social' (Hirschauer, 2006).…”