Teaching & learning management accounting as a social science

Internal Seminar for Researchers

Research Area: Accounting

Abstract: With discourses such as decolonising accounting curriculum, incorporating sustainability issues, and the ever-neo-liberalising global political-economic order, there is a necessity to see possibilities of teaching/learning accounting as a social science capable of engaging with social and ecological justice issues. This is a challenging desire due to pragmatic constraints that we, as accounting academics, face in balancing between practicist and liberal epistemologies of accounting education. We have competing demands of teaching techno-managerial elements of our courses, on the one hand, and going beyond that techno-manageriality to uplift our courses into the status of social science that many other university disciplines embrace and enjoy, on the other. Taking strategic management accounting (SMA) as a specific case and drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical notions of assemblages, lines, rhizomes, and arborescent structures, this paper aims at providing an epistemological basis for a critical social-justice-oriented system of learning and teaching management accounting. It provides a theoretically informed conceptual schema to locate techno-managerial and calculative elements of strategising in their broader political-economic and historical context so that our students can de- and re-territorialise management accounting thought from its conventional arborescent model. Students need to understand and appreciate broader political-economic logics of the calculations and rationalisations they carry out in the name of SMA.