Accounting for Accountability

Accounting for Accountability

Accounting for Accountability

Accounting for the effects of accountability.

This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability a...

Accounting , Accountability , Closeness and Transparency

[The] understanding which is relevant to the sciences of man is something more than this implicit grasp on things. It is related rather to the kind of understanding we invoke in personal relations when we say, for instance: ‘I find him hard to understand’; or at last I understand her’. To switch for a minute to another language, it is the kind of understanding one invokes in French when one say...

Perspectives on Language, Accountability and Critical Accounting: An Interpretative Perspective1

This paper explores the utility of Habermas’s A Theory of Communicative Action (volumes 1 and 2) and his Between Facts and Norms. Habermas’s work has influenced middle-range accounting as advanced by some critical accounting researchers writing about critical and public sector accountability models. This paper considers accounting’s role in the public sphere and examines the Habermasian strain ...