Poetry of Accounting

Abstract

The trouble with common sense arguments is that they implicitly privilege one common sense understanding over others, without taking the trouble to explicate which particular variant of common sense is being considered. If we articulated any particular common sense notion of accounting, we would find that it was merely one particular version of common sense, like that, say, according to the gospel of Harvard (Accounting is really about control) or Chicago (Accounting is really about monitoring) or some other definition of the subject. Indeed, there would probably be little agreement between the common sense of Chicago in 1994 with Chicago circa 1970, when The Journal of Accounting Research published a lengthy poem by David Green. Arguments that defer to common sense only rearrange the epistemic furniture: they still leave unresolved which version of common sense should we privilege - and does it include poetry?