Accounting and the Public Interest: The Danger of a Single Story: Algorithms as Imperfect1

Abstract

This paper is intended as an overview and think piece, contributing to literature identifying accounting’s impact in making things knowable. Critical accounting research has always sought alternative ways of understanding the discipline and the legacy is extended here by considering pathways forward. Accounting continually impacts public policy in what it privileges for selecting and in what it silences and neglects. Given that humans are meaning-making we have choices, and this essay interrogates accounting techniques operating as facades while disguising social impacts. Promoting qualitative accounting research that reimagines these complexities and considers moral contexts is the substance of this essay, for advancing the public interest in accounting.