Transforming into Practice a Concept: Accounting as an Instrument of Social Justice

Abstract

This article is a follow-up to an earlier article (Henry, Murtuza, & Weiss, 2015) [1] that discussed the potential of accounting to do much more than prepare financial statements for investment decisions. The three authors argued in the earlier paper that accounting besides producing financial statement can also be an instrument of social justice. This paper, written by one of the three authors shows how the conceptual potential of accounting to be an instrument of social justice can be transformed into accounting pedagogical practices. In other words, instead of being merely concerned with “counting,” accounting can also be seen as being connected with accountability and the ability to account for and explain, the organizational reality. An introduction is provided in Section 1. In Section 2, this paper starts by recapitulating the earlier paper and then describing how this paper will build on the foundation the original paper provided. In Section 3, the use of literary works to help teach accounting and information engineering concept is illustrated. The last section provides suggestions to bring about an enrichment of the accounting and business curriculum. The last section is adaptation of a proposal the author wrote for his department. While one does not yet know how the proposal will be perceived by the department, the business school and the dean, it seems a worthy idea to make it a part of public domain so it could help others get started on their approaches to improving their teaching and the material they use.