Creating and reinforcing discrimination: The controversial role of accounting in bank lending

Abstract

This paper examines the controversial role played by accounting within the discriminatory bank-lending practices of a privately owned bank in Sri Lanka. It reports on an analytical auto-ethnography (during the period 1994–2004) coupled with follow-up interviews and reiterated analyses. Data were analysed using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, habitus and symbolic violence. The empirical findings of the paper illustrate how key capitals at macro levels (social, cultural and symbolic) are mobilised in the dominance structures within the banking lending field and how individuals with given habitus behave and follow given strategies to deploy rational accounting systems at a micro level to translate discriminatory bank lending policies into practice and, as a result, create and reinforce discrimination.