Reviewed by Edward Arrington University of Iowa
For most of us, certain texts stand not as documents from which one learns; but, rather, like friends and family, as sources from which self concepts are formed. Along with a few novels and works in philosophy, Carl Devine’s Essays in Accounting Theory, which span five decades of his work, occupy that status for me. This critique of his work is thus deliberately self-reflective. It can’t be otherwise. This both complicates and enriches this review.
As a twenty-two year old student of literature, I had the idea that accounting might best be viewed as a literary discourse, with all the trappings of constructing human experience in meaningful ways that we typically attribute to great narratives. Unbeknownst to me, Carl Devine was one of the few persons in accounting who might be enthusiastically open to such a view. I was fortunate to find him. Since then, countless hours of dialogue have ensued; and, without that experience, my romance with accounting would have been short lived. Like the man himself, the texts of Devine’s essays stand as a monument of reflection on the expansiveness of visions of accounting, and they are to be read as precisely that — an attempt to keep options open, to proliferate rather than to close discourse.
Devine’s work is massive in two ways. Name any issue in accounting or in twentieth century intellectual history; it’s in the text. Devine is a bookworm, a Renaissance scholar. But he is not ascetic. Knowledge, for him, must be cast into the experience of humans. His task and his joy is to take the most difficult intellectual issues and mix them with the soil of human experience called accounting; in his words, accounting provides a way for the scholar to get dirty fingernails. This awareness that knowledge is in the service of humans rather than humans being in the service of knowledge, gives Devine’s work an ever present grounding in classical American pragmatism. It is the pragmatist’s themes that knit his work together. Because of the expansiveness of his work and the limits imposed on this essay, I will focus upon these themes in this reveiw. As a caveat, however, this in no way implies that the texts are limited to these themes; a review of his work could take an infinity of approaches. The Essays are to be read, not reviewed.
TWENTIETH CENTURY THOUGHT AND REFLECTIONS ON ACCOUNTING: DEVINE AS HISTORY
The twentieth century intellectual scene has seen it all. From the earlier optimism of the “human sciences” and Com-tean sociocracy (a kind of faith in science to construct the City of God), to the post 1945 concerns with alienation, despair, and the dark side of human nature, a scholar whose work spans this century is a case study in Paradise Lost and Found. Moving to accounting, the twentieth century condition is even more exciting because it is more compressed.
Accounting only engaged the discourse of science after intellectual history had entered its dark side. Carl Devine can be found in the early years dragging accounting, kicking and screaming, into the mainstream of science with its emphasis on quantitative methods, experimentation, and design and out of the image ac-counting had of itself as a system of medieval book-keeping. Particularly in Volumes I and II, with their pedagogical focus on scientific thought and methodology, the historian of accounting can read a fascinating account of how novel and difficult the “education” of accounting must have been. The at-tempt early is to promote science as a way to expand the discourse of accounting.
Throughout the essays, the education continues. By the time one gets to Volume V, the dream is over. Like so many other disciplines, Devine begins to suspect that accounting has misunderstood science, turned its back on the difficulties that it has created for human life, and privileged itself as not one among many possible discourses in the conversation of mankind but as THE only credible discourse — the language of science as, in Richard Rorty’s terms — “Nature’s Own Vocabulary.” Ironically, Devine finds himself in a position of recognizing that his earlier assumption that science could be used to expand accounting discourse has instead been used to close off possibilities — science had converted itself from an object in the service of humans to the subject for which humans become objects. This is the single most dominant theme in intellectual thought today.
For Devine, the arrogant and imperialist discourse of “positive” accounting is the contemporary culprit. Only through complete inattention to the history and philosophy of science, could accountants reach a point at which they declare themselves “value free.” No serious scientist believes that anymore, and Devine finds the situation in accounting so obscene that he relies on parody:
How is it possible for a social scientist not to be involved personally in any social investigation. The investigator is handicapped by being a member of a particular gender, a particular ethnic group, steeped in an educational tradition, attached to a demog-raphical class, bound to a national or regional persuasion, conditioned by an urban or rural background — in short, by being a member of the human species (Volume 5, p. 6).
Accounting has gone full circle under Devine’s wing. While accounting was late in embracing the methods of science, it is equally late in coming to understand their limitations. Devine prodded accounting into the embrace; he is also prodding it into recognition of the fact that science is not what we think it is but is instead one among many ways to understand Socrates’ question — what does it mean to be a human being? Our early shunning of the discourse of science caused us to ignore it; our later shunning of the discourse of science causes us to worship it in decidely dogmatic, unscientific ways. Maybe we’ll learn.
THE PRE-EMINENCE OF VALUES: DECIDING WHO COUNTS
Whenever I think about Devine, I envision the many in-stances in which his discourse has turned to the question of values. In his terms, “The first thing an accountant has to do is decide who counts.” Like D. R. Scott, Devine always recognizes that every decision the accountant makes is fraught with possibilities for justice or injustice with respect to specific groups.
It can’t be avoided. Thus it makes no sense to speak of accounting in any sense as a “value-free” discipline, though the tendency to adopt a rhetoric of neutrality is rampant in academic accounting all the way from the income theorists to the empiricists. Again, Devine relies upon parody:
There is no question that everyone, including ac-countants, sometimes makes silly statements and gets carried away with the wrong sirens. Certainly the “just-give-me-the-facts-so-I-can-record-them attitude is among the silliest. Accountants, as representatives of a service function, must designate (implicitly or explicitly) their host groups whose objectives are to be accepted. Presumably, the objectives of accounting become a set of sub-objectives — means — that are consistent with those of the host system. (Volume 5, p. 12).
Devine is attacking the kind of imperialism, chauvinism, and arrogance that accountants have borrowed from Milton Friedman’s view that either it is possible to conduct inquiry independently of values or that we all agree on values. Univer-sities are exploding with inquiry and research into ways in which this denial of values has created a nightmare of existence for most of humanity. It is simply incredible, in the eyes of the contemporary university and in the eyes of Devine, that an intellectual discipline that is already in the service of elites could claim academic privilege because of its “value-freeness.” Devine has always recognized the strengths and weaknesses of a discipline that places it values in market commerce; he has also always recognized the evils of denying those values. The first thing an accountant does is decide who counts. He is also responsible for the consequences of that decision.
SOME VERY IMPORTANT MISCELLANY
First, Devine shares with the pragmatists a concern for “truth” (no capital) rather than “Truth.” Truth (capital T) is a proper noun, a stable, immutable condition of the universe that never changes, something that one can love with all one’s heart and soul — it is sort of like a Guardian Angel, never seen, but always there to provide metaphysical comfort. It is as old as the Gods and became scholastic with the Greek idea of theoretical discourse. In accounting, Devine wages war against theorists and metaphysicians of Truth. The early battle is against the income theorists notion of “True Income” and “The Laws of Accounting.” The early essays are fascinating trips through the aburdity of grounding accounting in this Platonic theory of “Ideal Forms.” The later essays are equally devas-tating critiques of the metaphyics of, in Popper’s terms, “Methodolatry” — a belief that by adherence to certain Methods the “Truth,” description of “The Way the World Is” will reveal itself — the decidely unscientific rhetoric of “positivists” in accounting. For Devine, the income theorists and the current generation of methodolatrists are mirror im-ages of each other.
On the other hand, truth (no capital) is a property that attaches to certain things we might say. It is for Devine and the pragmatists, something that a community finds useful to believe, and useful for definite assignable reasons that have to do with ways in which problems can be solved and life can be changed. In short, it is grounded in human values and choices. Nature (“the way the world is” or God if you prefer) is indifferent to accounting; the truth value of accounting depends solely upon its ability to help humans do more interesting things and become more interesting people. Surely, in a discipline like accounting, one whose subject matter is exclusively a construct of human values and agency, the quest for “Truth” is an intellectual absurdity.
There are two other important points that I would like to make salient. First, Devine is fascinated with the role of lan-guage in constructing knowledge and meaning, and draws upon the early work in semiotics and what it might have to say to accountants. What he could not have foreseen is the way in which semiotics has been expanded to the point that, currently, the history of ideas is firmly grounded in the overriding importance of language in the construction of meaning. Contemporary work in hermeneutics, structuralism, and poststruc-turalism that is sweeping the human sciences is beginning to surface in accounting. This work owes a debt to Devine for being the first scholar to position accounting firmly in the domain of language.
The second point I wish to highlight is Devine’s view of accounting as a behavioral science and how his view has been all too easily converted into a belief that certain “methods” associated with “behavioral research” are the limit of what he had in mind. For Devine, describing accounting as a behavioral science is a way to establish that the meaning of accounting is grounded in human agency. It is another way to let truth take precedence over Truth and human values take their rightful place at the origins of accounting. To say that accounting is a behavioural science is simply to say that it is a malleable, invented discourse that humans construct and change in ways that facilitate human agency. Accounting is one of those mechanisms through which humans talk their way into the meanings that they create for their lives. If Devine had written today, he would choose the term “hermeneutical” rather than “behavioral,” a term that is beginning to surface throughout the human sciences and which calls attention to the fact that disciplines like accounting are constructions of meaning, not “behavioral” responses to a meaning that is already present.
CONCLUSION
Devine’s essays demand reading, not review. Further, they demand an intellectually informed reading. The footnotes themselves are tremendous journeys through intellectual history, and the textual concentration on accounting requires an understanding of the broader issues addressed in the footnotes. But for those who want to move accounting and their own academic practice onto solid intellectual ground, Devine is invaluable. For my part, these texts are sacred.
