The work tries tangentially, but not for that reason reflexively, to put in controversy certain reflections on the scientific status of the accounting discipline. On the occasion of the different conceptual distances on the subject, points sensitive to the academic debate are touched on, where questions such as the construction of the accounting research object, methodological variables, epistemological positions and criticism of some accounting approaches are questioned, that from the epistemic they try to find a certain conceptual rigor to interpret the accounting regulations, without revealing that standardization is ultimately a process of rationalization of capital, which evidences a work aimed at elucidating the mechanisms that guarantee and legitimize the power of large corporations transnational companies.
Key words: Statute of scientificity, epistemology, object, method, accounting, disciplinary.
It is necessary to recognize that all reflection on accounting discipline emerges and is determined by the set of economic-social factors that condition it. In this way, the emergence of the problematic nucleus of this discipline responds to the set of interests that underlie the evolution of capitalism as a planetary system.
The history of accounting, therefore, as a field of knowledge, is embedded in the history of capitalism, while it serves as a substrate that provides capital with a certain "scientific rationality" to solve the new demands arising from the world. of modernity, expressed among others, by the formation of "an ever-expanding world market that encompasses everything, capable of the most spectacular growth, capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except offering solidity and stability" (Berman, 1991: 5)
It is in the fracturing or rupture of the feudal order, where new economic and social information needs are created that simultaneously demand the emergence of innovative ways of knowing, as well as technical tools for manipulating the transnational scenarios of the new economic and business map. On the other hand, it is necessary to gather how accounting knowledge from its gestation period was biannually committed to a purely utilitarian and pragmatic thinking, where the assumed perspective was limited to the technical-instrumental dimension of the doings, where a one-dimensional form was installed to judge and evaluate the results of a knowledge whose vectors had to do with the action of an efficient and practical world, without taking into consideration the fundamental value of the knowledge of,to create in Kantian fashion a "world for itself", where, as the material world is transformed, the subjective and autonomous world of knowing is also transformed.
Accounting from its gestation process as a discipline, retracted and subsequently developed its practice through experience. For this reason, accounting reflection placed its concern on the construction of accounting applications, rather than on the centrality of epistemological reflection, so that from the rigorous theoretical construction problematize the field of its action. He considers his work, then, as the passage from the "facts" of reality to knowledge, and it is well known that the inductive empiricist does not recognize a fact in science as dependent on theories and systems of metaphorical rules.
The Object and Method of Knowledge: Two Problematic Constructs
The Object and its Antinomies
A science is essentially an object of knowledge and a method for its apprehension, approach, interpretation and analysis; method that will be defined by the nature of the research object. That is, every method depends on the object of investigation which is mediated by processes of meaning, intentions, symbolizations and interests of the epistemic subjects that build them. The method, then, translates into a set of postulates, rules, norms, institutionalized - by what Thomas Khun has given to call - socially recognized scientific community.
Now, cognitive activity is not controlled by the apparent, by the obvious, by the visible and immediate, nor by direct individual observation. Man, in his cognitive eagerness, has the ability to symbolize and build universes of representation and ways of representing, abstracting himself from direct impression and, when he performs this critical exercise, he molds and organizes both extra-subjective reality and his own subjectivity. Only at this stage, it can be said, that the challenge of problematizing reality has been assumed, which is nothing other than to construct objects of knowledge.
Scientific research, then, is organized around constructed objects that have nothing in common with those apparent phenomena, delimited by naive and spontaneous perception; therefore it can be inferred that science has a dialectical logic, when it constructs its object against common sense; This premise correlatively implies overcoming common notions, that is, for example, the incipient or rudimentary knowledge of linguistic objectifications; to conclusively determine that an object of investigation, no matter how partial or partial it may seem, cannot be defined, delimited and constructed, but, in light of and based on a theoretical problem, that allows it to be subjected rigorously to a systematic examination all aspects of reality staged for auscultation.Only a mutilated and inexperienced vision of scientific construction can make subordination to facts the imperative par excellence for the definition of the scientific status.
Whatever the status assigned to the world of factual reality, on cultural, social, material or temporal levels, the construction of objects as abstractions does not come from an amalgam and collection of self-evident facts that possess universality per se for all observers. Therefore, as Professor Gallego Badillo argues, “an object of knowledge is a field constructed and delimited by the mind of the knowing subject, in the plan of making a world for itself, for which reason these objects exist to the extent that possess an ambition and an intellectual interest (to contrast the hypotheses or predictions that are made from the knowledge that is known) that seek to elaborate a space for intervention, control, transformation, and mastery,as a guarantee without which that making a world for itself is nothing but rhetoric. In this way, words more words less, knowledge as a human activity is eminently intentional, which goes beyond the old Aristotelian conception of knowing that obeys mere curiosity ”, (Gallego, 1996: 301); that is, as many objects of knowledge will be available as many cognitive intentions the researcher or the epistemic group has.
Science, therefore, does not begin with the fact, but with the problems and with the effort to solve them from the plane of the abstractions that constitute self-referring floors for their confirmations or new distinctions, that is to say that the scientific reality is an uninterrupted construction, where the real never has the initiative, meanwhile, it can only give answers to the extent that it proceeds to question itself. Said in Bachelardian words, the epistemological vector goes from the rational to the general and not the other way around.
In conclusion, the facts do not differentiate the concepts, even though an empirical reference is always necessary, as a subsidiary element. The concepts are differentiated and characterized by virtue of the mutual relationships established between the various abstractions belonging to a conceptual network; Then, then, the concepts are in a certain sense "objective" and effective, not exclusively because of their external characterization, but thanks to their relative position within a conceptual framework or theoretical system.
The Method: Beyond False Technicality and Epistemological Dichotomy
Among the theorists who focus on the analysis of the problematic relationship between science and method, there are two marked trends: first, those who from an exclusive position disqualify the discussion about a certain methodological pluralism and, defend the existence of a unique method (the scientific method), which clings to the conception of the unity of science supported by the criteria of methodological monism and doctrinal unity, which enables the validation of a single way of doing science and; secondly, those who accept the existence of two scientific methods, one in charge of operationalizing the functioning of the natural and exact sciences and the other that claims the autonomy of the social, human or spirit sciences.
The former require that the methods be rigorous and, this rigor comes from the permanent experimentation and mathematization of reality, which is what ultimately gives the status of scientific "objectivity" to both the natural and social sciences. Those who adhere to these postulates do not accept other variables of scientific construction, as these compromise scientific rigor and a supposed axiological or evaluative neutrality.
Silvio Sánchez Gamboa, when referring to this controversial issue, states:
"The method, considered as the only criterion of objectivity, transforms the object into its codes, reduces it, dissects it, divides it into sectors, adds it, interrelates it and sacrifices it to logical rigor. The primacy of the method, be it as the logic of reason, the method of experience, or the mathematical logical method, is questioned today, in view of the de-conceptualization of the object, when it is thought that it should have primacy over the method and the objectivity should focus on the object and not, as stated in our study, the validity of the instruments, on the accuracy of the operational definition of the terms or on the rigidity of the rational logical process ”. (Gamboa, 1998: 37).
The latter depart from that mechanical, linear and automatic movement, which from the natural sciences is intended to be methodologically extrapolated to the social sciences and defend the autonomy of the latter, seeking a methodological orientation from nuclei of comprehension and symbolic interactionism, in in other words, the structuring of a different method that allows giving specific treatment to subjectivity.
This methodological dualism is expressed in the polarity that emerges from the dichotomy: objectivity-subjectivity and explanation-understanding. The former are rooted in the positions that come from positivist approaches and the latter that have phenomenology and hermeneutics as their analytical matrix. The difference between one position or another is found in epistemological and epistemological assumptions, which each one handles with reference to the subject-object dialectical relationship. Ranking one of them determines serious implications for any research process: If the process of knowing is centered on the object, one would be talking about a controlled, quantitative and univocal observation; if, on the contrary, hierarchization is transferred to the subject, the cognitive process would be mediated by sensory comprehension,qualitative analysis, to the detriment of controlled observation. Given the above, it can be said that, “The method threatens to fetishize and fetishize its object, for this reason it becomes necessary to reflect on it, questioning its own foundations. Interrogating the methods used in scientific research is a historical task of philosophy that helps us become aware of its importance, its limitations, its implications and contradictions. " (Gamboa, 1997: 27).
Brief Considerations on the Object and Method in Accounting
The Object of Accounting Knowledge: An Unfinished Concept
Inevitably, Accounting - like any other disciplinary field - by focusing on reality, delimits it and shapes it to constitute its object of knowledge, thereby obtaining an image, a form of representation and, why not, a specific form of conception of the world. In this interpretative plot and in this adherence to a theoretical body, an attitude is established, which serves accountants to develop their scientific practice or approach, from the springboards and criteria that have supplied and fed a tradition, which obviously has had to be transferred various landmarks and obstacles for its gradual perfectibility.
Fortunately, in this slow but growing process, there has been no uniformity and homogeneity and, conversely, theorists with very diverse interests, inclinations and even ideological positions co-exist dispersively. Even though, the revision of these multiple conceptions on accounting is costly, the truth is that, the reconstruction of the history of accounting as a discipline, allows and will allow to unravel a tight tissue of confusion and uncertainties to finally base on these considerations a reflection that makes it possible to trace a specific line of work, which implies less instrumental developments and more from the reflection of the epistemological.
The original origin of accounting problematization was congenitally linked to structures proper to logical-mathematical knowledge, referring to this character of accounting - Tua argues - how these links emerge from the substantiation of the business world with the need to find symbologies of representation, which would account for the information needs of that social state of limited exchanges.
“The first manifestations of our discipline were assigned to areas close to mathematics and, especially, to commercial arithmetic. It could not be otherwise, if we consider the usefulness of both disciplines in the field of business; both served the merchant who, in his still primitive activity, was obliged to make numerous, complex and frequent calculations, with abundant use of the four rules, logically proceeding to the orderly and adequate recording of the result of such operations ”. (Tua, 1995: 124).
Due to the source of birth and its inherent internal structure, it can be affirmed that accounting knowledge uses symbolic tools, typical of logical-mathematical knowledge, to construct meanings and ways of signifying the reality that it is bound to interpret. This does not imply recognizing that accounting is a purely logical-mathematical knowledge, on the contrary the interpretative source is found in the social reality or extra-subjective world. If it is recognized that this social reality is an integrated whole, that it carries a dual character, in terms of objective facticity and subjective meaning, that makes it "sui generis"; The construction of the accounting problem (object of investigation) could hardly be undertaken, from the reduced space of the mathematization of objective facticity,leaving aside the qualitative abstractions of the subjective dimension of social reality.
From this reflection it follows the consideration that accounting, as social knowledge, must construct its objects recognizing that dual character of the social, while the factual reality, with some relevance can be addressed with methods similar to the natural sciences, in so much this is not easily recognizable and validable for subjective meanings. In this direction Professor Rafael Franco Ruiz, reveals his impression, saying:
"The apprehension of material objects as objects of knowledge have kept accounting in a state of empiricism and pragmatism, an essential cause of its scientific underdevelopment, determining a conjunction with its nature to establish that knowledge is description and this is determined by legal economic conditions established by existing power relations at a given moment, environmental conditions, thereby establishing a truth for each historical moment and for each social reality; the impossibility of establishing transcendental truths in time and space, of course, within its relativity ”(Franco, 1998: 234).
The possibility of building, then, a scientific status for accounting, as a social science, involves recognizing that the transformation of that reality depends on the possibility of being captured in its "sui generis" dimension and not biased in a partial and unilateral way., in which the methodological assumptions of the physical-natural sciences are accepted, or those derived uncritically from their procedures.
The Accounting Method, the Original Conception and its Antinomies
The first attempt at accounting-scientific rationality was characterized by privileging the methodological, that is, the achievement of an effective method (double entry), through which to find or discover meaning structures that would account for the descriptions of transactional phenomena and of the information needs inherent in the development of an economy that refined and complexed its exchange system. This is confirmed by the appearance of the double-entry method, which is nothing more than a mathematical algorithm constituted as a symbolic element of representation of the transactional reality of a mercantile society of limited exchanges, immediately before the advent of big capital. José María Fernández Pirla, argues that, “The Double Entry method responds to a system of economic representation, because it undoubtedly establishes a means of registration for each economic cycle which provides the basis for it. This method registers all economic movements, and it must be taken into account in this order that in each of these there is an origin or source of financing and an end or concretion in capital values ”(Fernández, 1977: 109).
The double-entry method is just a structured direction, in the manner of an algorithm, to capture the facts, inventory them and induce in them generalizations, in which imagination and creativity are prohibited. Ultimately, accounting since its creation as a discipline was prone to the repetitive and mechanical action of doings, where there was no cognitive activity that structured and directed the almost continuous construction of conceptual, methodological, axiological and attitudinal structures, as forms to Through which the accounting group, organize the informational representations, in order to express them in the corresponding language and direct, now, their actions to implement the desired systems, applications and practical results.
Referring to the methodological criteria of the double entry, Professor Efrén Danilo Ariza, claims the merit of Paciolo, arguing that it is a system that, “It included the main accounting practices related in turn to the main activities and commercial rationing carried out in Venice, making it clear that although the book was printed in 1492 the Venetian method comes from a long time ago.
In general terms, this method is characterized by the following aspects:
- That the first record brings to the debit the cash account or the debit of the merchandise the amount of the merchant's contribution to the business, simultaneously and for the same amount to the credit of the capital account.
- The placement of the two accounts and amounts face to face. The expression of each transaction (recorded in both the chronological journal and the specific records ledger) ”. (Ariza, 2000: 118).
This quick tour of the original conception of the accounting method, reveals that in terms of accounting knowledge there is still a long gap to go and, this is explainable, in as much as Moisés García García proposes:
"If accounting as a practice is so old, accounting as a theoretical discipline is, on the contrary, relatively recent, apart from the work of Pacciolo, who will soon be five hundred years old, we can affirm that the first generalizations and abstractions that deserve the qualification of Scientific data only date from the last century (it refers to the nineteenth century - our underline). This can give us an idea of the very slow process of gestation of accounting science ”. (Garcia1982, cited in Lara, 1990: 236-237).
Explainable circumstance, among others, for a compelling reason in the construction of scientificity, and that is, the "congenital methodological weakness together with a pragmatic spirit that frequently acquires characters of true opportunism in the scientific creation of accounting theories" (Garcia1982, quoted in Lara, 1990: 237).
The Renunciation of Theoretical Construction: an Obstacle to Overcome in the Accounting Discipline
Accounting as a discipline still has an unfinished debate: the construction of its true scientific status, while in its historical journey a kind of radical empiricism has been present, which has forever neglected the theoretical construction, making it in fact vulnerable to new conceptual appropriations. Every time accountants believe they are avoiding the theoretical problem based on inconsistent pragmatism, they are dominated by a certain primacy that does not know the epistemological vectors of scientific construction. Possibly, the investigatory lag of accounting knowledge originates in this hypothesis still to be proven.
The symbolic structure of accounting (accounting, what is derived from the action of counting), must be studied dynamically, within the circumstances of time, mode and space, which condition its gestation, and within a perspective of becoming unfinished, fallible, always open to permanent changes and transformations.
A good interpretive exercise to approach the reflection of accounting historicity, would be referred to the use of conceptual categories such as those suggested by Fernad Braudel, which refers to placing the analysis of social life from different observation points, involving variables such as spatiality, the temporality, the social orders and the hierarchies, for from a wide interpretative spectrum to specify the shortcomings, the weaknesses, but also the scientific strengths and foundations of accounting. Only in this way, accountants can assume a position more from the consolidation of an academic community, that privileges the theoretical competence from which to order the extra-subjective reality and less from a pragmatic and unionist position and in eclectic opportunities of the discipline.
The Positivist Epistemic Posture: A Hegemonic and Insufficient Methodological Version
Historically, positivist references could be located in Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, on the occasion of the emergence of the Copernican and Galilean conceptions, which destroyed the prevailing Aristotelian physics for more than two thousand years. As the positive sciences emerged with their experimental mathematical method, the entire Aristotelian philosophical edifice collapsed, including metaphysics, leaving the way cleared for the so-called natural sciences to gain hegemonic criteria in subsequent centuries. The century of arrogance, as the journey of the 19th century has been cataloged, will embrace Comte's all-encompassing thesis that everything that has to do with logic, metaphysics or ideology is vain phantasmagoria and a dream, if not absurd.
Positivism, then, gathers the legacy of these centuries and will fatally extend the death certificate to philosophy, elaborating the pious fables that delineate the irreversible passage from religious to philosophical knowledge and from this to scientific knowledge, the stage where modern thought is knotted and where the idea of unlimited progress, of an optimistic vision of the world, of the ascending itinerary of man that passes from archaic primitiveness to the mature age of the supremacy of reason, arises.
This optimistic interpretation of history as an overcoming of the precariousness of the past, places reason, as a guiding beacon for the emancipation of shadows and the chains of the past, both darker and more distant. With this, a Manichean conception of history is inaugurated, which links progress with civilized and enlightened peoples and backwardness with servitude and barbarism, a distance that defines and delimits the field between enlightened "freedom" and the ignorance of the savages, for whom no more promising future awaits than that of disappearing or being absorbed by the civilizing fatality that does not forgive yesterday's relics. Theorists like Condorcet even went so far as to prophesy that the "tenth era of humanity" was coming,where all nations will have to reach the state of civilization that the most enlightened, freest peoples have reached: the French and the Anglo-Saxons.
There are different ways of characterizing positivism, one of them is the so-called modern positivism, linked to the verificationist theory of science, to scientific experimentation and to the uniqueness of methodological structures, whose characteristic vector principles are:
- Methodological Monism, that is, above the diversity of problematic constructions or thematic objects of scientific research, there is the idea of method unity . As far as doctrinaire is concerned, it need not be univocal but it must be homogeneous. The second principle refers to the consideration that the exact natural sciences, especially physics and mathematics, constitute the methodological barometer that measures the degree of development and perfectibility of the other disciplines, including the so-called human, social or spirit sciences. The third principle refers to the causal explanation, which is supported by the invariable nature of natural laws, which consists more explicitly, in the subsumption of individual cases to be explained under the imprint of the general hypothetical laws of nature. This causalist position is crossed by the predictive desire, which consists above all in seeing to foresee,in looking from the vantage point of what happens to the horizon of what will happen. Scientific work is restricted to laboratory experiences, in order to discover the causal laws that govern the world, followed by the dogmatic conviction of the universality and necessity of physical laws, as categories capable of guaranteeing the infallibility of scientific knowledge. A last principle has to do with the dominating interest that positivism claims and that is inherent to the interests that it represents, if it is understood that this epistemic variant is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.Scientific work is restricted to laboratory experiences, in order to discover the causal laws that govern the world, followed by the dogmatic conviction of the universality and necessity of physical laws, as categories capable of guaranteeing the infallibility of scientific knowledge. A last principle has to do with the dominating interest that positivism claims and that is inherent to the interests that it represents, if it is understood that this epistemic variant is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.Scientific work is restricted to laboratory experiences, in order to discover the causal laws that govern the world, followed by the dogmatic conviction of the universality and necessity of physical laws, as categories capable of guaranteeing the infallibility of scientific knowledge. A last principle has to do with the dominating interest that positivism claims and that is inherent to the interests that it represents, if it is understood that this epistemic variant is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.followed by the dogmatic conviction of the universality and necessity of physical laws, as categories capable of guaranteeing the infallibility of scientific knowledge. A final principle has to do with the dominating interest that positivism claims and that is consubstantial to the interests that It represents, if it is understood that this epistemic variant, is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man, into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.followed by the dogmatic conviction of the universality and necessity of physical laws, as categories capable of guaranteeing the infallibility of scientific knowledge. A final principle has to do with the dominating interest that positivism claims and that is consubstantial to the interests that It represents, if it is understood that this epistemic variant, is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man, into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.if it is understood that this epistemic variant is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man, into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.if it is understood that this epistemic variant is the legitimate daughter of modern society characterized by the perverse hallucination of the utility of money and the conversion of man, into a tool of accuracy, production and exchange.
Positivism denies philosophical reflection, considers it typical of backward, primitive mentalities, overcome by a self-sufficient and progressive spirit. It is not otherwise explained, that it is in the European countries with a clear imperialist vocation, where the positivist doctrine emerges and develops with more intensity, as a doctrine entirely similar to the situation of the believer regarding the immaculate dogmas of revealed faith. The "men of science" are allergic to philosophy, used only to surprise with an experimental and mathematical knowledge.
Thus posed the epistemological problem, in positivism the social dimension does not appear, nor its capacity to give scientific practice a human directionality. But the truth be told, every act of knowledge, however subtle it may seem, hides a position that imports an implicit answer to the problem of the relationship between scientific knowledge and philosophical knowledge. From the solution that is given to this relationship emerges a conception of man, of the world, of organization of society and, why not, of a liberatory political practice.
The Accounting Discipline as Gregariousness of Positivism
Positivism, in its broad Comtian significance, has been intended as the exponent of the hegemony of science. Accounting as a discipline has not been exempt from positivist motivations since its genesis. Cerboni's personalistic legal theory, or Besta's economic theory, make no sense except within that monolithic conception of positivism.
The Tuscany School and the Legal-Accounting Dogmatics
Giuseppe Cerboni, main representative of the Tuscany or legal-personalist school, in his Primi Saggi de Logismografía (1873), defines accounting as: “The doctrine of legal responsibilities that are established among the people who participate in the administration of heritage of companies ”(Tua, 1995: 128). This position considers the legal responsibilities as an object of knowledge, where the representation universes and the forms to symbolize the transactional reality, are reserved exclusively to the logical-mathematical structure objectified in the double game.
The Cerboni legal or personalistic school structures its legalistic character on the basis of accounting as a means of proof. This reductionist spirit of the discipline, towards a kind of legal-accounting dogmatics, makes it impossible to introduce variations or corrections in the sphere of practical applications and accounting research. The disciplinary development is thus subsumed in the descriptive “purity” of the merchant's patrimonial information, according to which, a certain fact is imputable to the norm, by virtue of which it acquires the strict accounting significance.
The Economic and Control School of Fabio Besta
Seen the scenario from the Braudelian temporal perspective of the long term or "longee durée", it can be said that the political-economic conditions derived from the first industrial revolution, had created the climate for the operationalization of the modern revolutionary forces of capitalism; that is, the export economy, the great metropolitan city, the development of the manufacturing industry and the organic expansion of the State; Circumstances that made it possible to exert a decisive influence on the organizational structure of the company, which began to implement more defined profiles, since the right of ownership - object of intervention of the legalistic school - ceded part of its powers to the administrative and control bodies. of economic information,circumstance that inevitably defines a new role of intervention in accounting practice, as only through the primacy of control is it possible to reduce the levels of uncertainty derived from the speed with which the scenarios change.
As stated, the purpose of accounting is the construction of technically usable knowledge and, moreover, that it constitutes an instrument of rationality for big capital, that is, technical support that enables compliance with the inexorable law of maximizing profits at minimum cost. This dominant attitude of the control paradigm (as some have called it), to which accounting knowledge is drawn, excludes the contradictory dimensions of the social, forgetting the interference of contexts in the modulation of accounting systems.
For a discipline such as accounting, with an immediate orientation towards practice, the above is of great importance, above all, as regards the use of knowledge, because the value of theories cannot be evaluated at the expense of their referents social. Professor Tua, in trying to interpret Besta's postulates and the link between accounting and business economics, distinguishes three facets of estate administration: management, direction and control, where the accounting function must be focused on control of farm wealth, placing special emphasis on the economic nature of accounting discipline.
As a concluding synthesis, Tua, quoting Goxens Duch, tries in a tight synthesis to condense Fabio Besta's Contista thought:
"Accounting from the theoretical point of view, studies and states the laws of economic control in farms of any kind, and deduces the appropriate rules to follow so that such control is truly effective, convincing and complete; from a practical point of view, it is the orderly application of these rules to the different haciendas ”. (Tua, 1995: 134).
In this way, an accounting style of work was consolidated, whose manipulation, dominance and control will be strategically centralized in the hands of those who hold economic structures on a planetary level. It is not explained otherwise, why the construction of the accounting discipline tragically led to the aberrant consolidation of the exegetical norm of general acceptance, fundamentally derived from the crises of the capitalist system, especially the North American one, that appear recurrently as inevitable.
Undoubtedly, in the context of the discussion on the framing of accounting knowledge, from the positivist stage, academics from the University of Patagonia argue:
¨ The historical root of the development of accounting from the positivist and pragmatic school founded on Anglo-Saxon doctrine, had a notable impact on accounting thinking, which was fundamentally assumed - as a "know-how", that is, as a technique. First "registration technique", then "value measurement technique" and finally "information technique".
This circumstance made the investigation process difficult, since, in general, it is accepted that the efficiency of the techniques - in the accounting case - is verified in use (a technique is lawful, it is valid depending on its use) and the accounting is perfectly disclosed and justified ”. (Aguilar, others, 1987: 9).
In the analytical background, it can be seen that both the position that links accounting to legal-accounting dogmatics, and the one that ascribes it to the study of economic control laws - to name just two examples - are congenitally linked to conceiving accounting “objectivity” as the result of reading its object of study derived from an evaluative interpretation, standardizing the precept of the physical-natural sciences where objectivity and axiological neutrality are taken as epistemological assumptions. The problem of values arises for accountants, at the level of the irrational, as a "war between different gods", and as Max Weber said, "over those gods and struggles, fate governs, but certainly not science "
This instrumental, eminently positivist vision, uncritically accepts the manifest destiny of the society in which one lives, from which the conservative and legitimizing character of the social order that accounting has had since its origins as a discipline follows.
The Necessary Conceptual Review of the Accounting Framework
In the absence of an epistemological matrix for the development of an initial plan - following the Lakatosian conception of research programs - that would give continuity to the members of a disciplinary collective, accounting as a conceptual body fatally took refuge in the instrumentalization of its practice, the which was subsumed in the institutionalization of a regulation summarized in a series of conventional guidelines called generally accepted accounting principles, whose form of "legitimation" is executed with the almost coercive authorization of a regulatory body, which by "magic" acquires the all-encompassing power to dictate pragmatic, predatory standards of any evaluative concern of theoretical construction. In this sense, then, ¨ The accounting standardization system is a feature of the western economic system, which acquires professional operational status at the international level through the IASC (International Accounting Standards Commission), and at the Latin American continent level through the AIC (Inter-American Accounting Commission ”. (Aguilar, others, 1987: 10).
The transformations that have taken place and that are taking place with greater speed in the contemporary world reveal the notable limitations of the positivist perspective. The profound mutations of world power related to the information technology revolution, economic globalization, a vast theoretical revolution, the automation of capital, etc., are sufficient indications to renew the theoretical accounting arsenal that allows facing the type of problems posed and the ways of organizing the responses, in correspondence with the tendencies of change of the society of the future, for which it is an imperative to reconstruct the epistemological and organizational assumptions of the accounting discipline.
Accounting Normalization: Another Gregarious and Subaltern Vision of Positivism
This regulation, whose claim lies in the uniformity of accounting standards, on bases not precisely agreed, through a scientific-accounting community, which constitutes a filter of epistemic guarantee, has been classified by some authors, in three supposed “subprograms of research ”, which coincide precisely with the conjunctural periods of crisis of the capitalist economy, today subtly called the market economy:
- General Acceptance "Subprogram" (1917-1959). Logical "Subprogram" (1959 –1973). Teleological "Subprogram" (1973 - hereinafter).
In all this normative construction there is a common denominator and it is the unavoidable mechanistic reductionism to empiropositivism, which denies that cognitive activity is structurally methodical, and that this structuring will only be understood to the extent that it gives way to innovation, to the emergence of paths unsuspected, precisely because she does not follow a straight path or an inertial direction.
The first purported “subprogram” of general acceptance, which worked on the leaven of accounting regulations, commits the sin that originates from considering almost exclusively, as empirical references, common facts of the economic-financial reality, defining itself as the only, safe and worthy of the normative interpretation, whose guide cannot be other than the questioned empirical inductive methodology. In this way, from the beginning of the postulation of the principles, a naive evaluation is produced that has as a culmination the superficiality of the results.
"The ideological conception of this first stage can be summed up in a phrase GO May, president of the Special Committee on Cooperation with the Stock Exchange:" The rules of accounting are the product of experience, rather than logic. " With this, the search subprogram is characterized in that the endorsement of a certain standard lies in the fact that it is commonly practiced. In other words, general acceptance is based on the belief that what is practiced must continue to be practiced, with which the accounting principle is based on the fact of being shared, a circumstance that ensures that it will be understood and even demanded by the user, making its use desirable ”. (Tua, 1995: 24).
A criterion that is generalized, from the plane of appearances, without being able to discern the essences of facts, phenomena and contexts, will remain on the plane of speculation and apparent knowledge. As in its primitive stage of general acceptance, contexts are excluded and have no significance, the referential framework that guides the structuring of accounting principles is built on the status quo of practice, in this sense, disciplinary construction, it is handicapped and exposed to not apprehending historicity and not giving meaning and direction to the scientific qualification of accounting.
The second “subprogram” called logical, arises as a subsidiary of the first one that had collapsed, while it had not fulfilled the purposes, among which deserves to be mentioned, uniformity in the consolidation of financial information; the lack of answers to the intricate needs and problems of the speculative world of finance; in addition to the late claim to find a conceptual rational nucleus, from which to carry out the construction of accounting standards, trying to impose from the background the unusual belief that only technically usable knowledge is valid.
Even though this last claim is laudable, it does not stop being an illusion born from the very depths of organisms whose primacy is precisely to dedicate ourselves to the analytical and exploratory work of the connections between the most abstract categories (concepts) and their rigorous contrast with the empirical material built - in the Popperian way - for its falsification.
Within the aim of finding a rational conceptual nucleus, in order to project the reconfiguration of accounting regulations from that budget, another methodological precariousness is incurred: believing that the scientific bases of the disciplines are built through political consensus, due to accessions union or professional. No, science does not play to obtain majorities. The conceptual frameworks for tackling new fields of research can only be generated within a tradition of scientific practice, whose legitimation scenario is the scientific communities, where problems are formulated and solutions are attempted; that from their predictive nature, they can lead to new reworkings, new meanings and ways of meaning.
In this sense, around 1959, the AICPA, the North American regulatory body, created the accounting principles board (APB)., Which “was made up of a group of eighteen experts from different sectors, in a clear attempt that the issuance of the standards be sustained in the widest possible representation ”, (Tua, 1995: 27). In other words, conceptual rigor, which suggests scientific competence and decantation, is replaced by levels of union representation.
It is unknown, therefore, that the reliable domain of information systems such as accounting, need to be understood in relation to methods and procedures, which are also a derivation of theoretical, methodological and epistemological assumptions.
The work that supports this logical proposal of theoretical-formal appearance, is consigned in the elaborations of Moonitz and Sprouse and Moonitz, whose methodological itinerary pretends to be supported, in a misunderstood positive heuristic, which does not lead to the elaboration of a strong theoretical framework that supports the principles, but on the contrary in a hierarchy of concepts arranged in fourteen postulates, which in turn are grouped into three categories: the economic environment of accounting, the field of discipline and imperatives; watchtower from which the construction of the principles and finally the body of norms that will govern the system of financial accounting is glimpsed. The teacher Rafael Franco has warned in his analysis, referring to this methodological itinerary, “It is an illusion of transparency in Bachelard's words. The appearance of the deductive hypothetical model has given many authors to interpret and generate in researchers the illusion of having managed in the history of accounting thought to develop research programs with the application of deductive methods, constituents of prestige in the history of knowledge. However, when these apparently hypothetical deductive models are taken and subjected to hermeneutical criticism, the true method of construction is found, the model was not built from the top down, it was made from the bottom up, that is, observation, creation of classifications and finally the justification of the practices,there does not appear there a formulation from the concepts of logic or psychology that can be considered as hypothetical deductive. It is a pragmatic model to which a justifying corpus was built, which is far from being a corpus of scientific knowledge ”. (Franco, 1998: 211).
Certainly it was an attempt, which discards all analysis from scientific rationality and, rather, it aims to build a normative tool justifying the forms of organization of capitalist society, where it is about making accounting a bland discipline prone to the dizzying dynamics of change in the global scenario.
In this same direction, the third “subprogram” appears, called teleological, which emerges as a new alternative to the failed uniformity, which should arise on the occasion of the “theoretical” substratum of the logical “subprogram”. The central purpose of this new problem lies in deriving accounting standards from observing the objectives of financial information, that is, the objectives of financial information must have a teleological criterion, that is, provide usefulness to the information for the decision-making, especially related to the protection of stock investment. This teleologizing vision of accounting determines a progressive weakening of theoretical and methodological approaches, which installs a certain pessimism about the future of the discipline.
On the other hand, it is necessary to reveal that this “subprogram” is born, in the scenario of a new economic environment, which is supported by the hegemony of the dogmatic fundamentalism of neoliberal single thought, where a new pattern of accumulation is created, which when saying de Gorostiaga, “this concentration is more intense and monopolistic than the other forms of capital, increasing the gap between north and south. The repercussion of this phenomenon has led to an increasing dematerialization of production where fewer and fewer raw materials are required per unit of product. ” (Gorostiaga, 1992: 23).
The market appears as the supreme source of all authority, as an effective tool for the regulation of the economic, political and social functions of the States, independent of their conditions of structural asymmetry and their identity heterogeneity. In this sense, the accounting normalization process does not escape this wave that travels the world like a new apocalyptic plague, as much as Tricker argues, "accounting depends on ideology and social customs, being ultimately the result of the dominant cultural environment ». (Tricker, cited in Tascón, 1995: 68).
This is one of the precepts that neoliberals find, to justify the necessary metamorphosis that capitalism is facing to respond to the new crisis situations that this society of the end and beginning of millennia is facing. Crisis that has its most significant correlate towards 1973, a journey characterized by a great economic recession, with high inflation rates and low growth rates and, where accounting must be tempered, to new forms of productivity and competitiveness, which, among other basic aspects They have to do with the ability to process information in a market of financial turmoil and capital automation.
Another controversy that seems to mark the disciplinary development of accounting is related to the opposition between the consolidation of a general theory for accounting and the praxis of accounting applications. This dichotomy has as a background a conception of theory as a separate domain, the end of which is exhausted in itself, and of accounting applications and systems as technical manipulation of data. Between the fetishism of the conceptual and the fetishism of practical applications, there is a common characteristic: the arbitrary exclusive separation between theory and praxis.
As a corollary, it can be said, then, that any investigation that is claimed to be coherent and seeks to overcome the superficiality of mere speculation or an impressionist copy of reality, where as Bachelard puts it, goes from the “concrete state, in which the spirit he recreates with the first images of the phenomenon and leans on a philosophical literature that glorifies nature and, strangely, at the same time sings to the unity of the world and the diversity of things ", to an" abstract state, in which the spirit undertakes information voluntarily subtracted from the intuition of real space, voluntarily detached from immediate experience and even openly arguing with basic reality, always impure, always formless ”(Bachelard, 1976: 11),you must necessarily use theoretical categories and empirical references. In this sense, all research process is at the same time a theoretical and empirical process, while the theory without supporting data is empty, innocuous, speculative and, the data without a theory that illuminates its path, would be completely sterile, opaque and lacking interest.
Only by assuming with responsibility, the disciplinary development from the horizon of the construction and consolidation of the academic community, will it be possible to overcome that menestral vision that has been assigned to accountants as gregarious of practical and technical knowledge, marked with stereotypes such as the description made by a North American accountant, who said:
“The public accountant is a man who has passed middle age, lean, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, without commitment to anyone, with cod eyes, courteous in his relationships, but at the same time insensitive, calm, abominably composed to the way of a concrete pole or a cast iron mortar. A human petrification with a feldspar heart and without even clinging to the germ of friendship; without guts and without passion or sense of humor. Fortunately, they never reproduce and they all end up in hell. " (Hubbard, 1988: 437).
Basic Bibliography
- Aguilar, Marcela. Gil, Jorge, Manuel and others. The Qualitative Research Method applied to Accounting. In: Teuken Magazine No. 0 - National University of Patagonia, San Juan Bosco-Argentina. IV quarter 1987.Ariza, B., Efrén, Danilo. The Production Relations and the Double Game. In: Magazine Legis del Contador - Studies on accounting discipline No. 2, April-June 2000. Page 118.Bachelard, Gaston. The Formation of the Scientific Spirit. Siglo XXI Editores SA- Fifth edition. Buenos Aires - Argentina, 1976.Berman, Marshall. All Solid Fades in the Air - The experience of modernity. XXI century Editors, 5th. Edition. Santafé de Bogotá, 1991.Fernandez, Pirla, José, María. Economic Theory of Accounting - Accounting introduction to the study of economics. ICE Editions - Ninth edition. Madrid - Spain 1977.Franco,Ruiz, Rafael. Integral Accounting - Theory and normalization. Investigate Editors, third edition. Armenia, 1998.Gallego Badillo, Rómulo. Constructivist Discourse on Experimental Sciences - A current conception of scientific knowledge. Editorial Round Table-Teaching. Santafé de Bogotá, 1996. Gorostiaga, Xabier. "Latin America Facing Global Challenges". In: Chistus Magazine. May-June 1992. Mexico, DFHubbard, Elbert. Quoted by Abreu, Paez, Victor. In: Teuken Magazine No.4 National University of Patagonia, San Juan Bosco-Argentina. IV quarter 1988. Lara, Juan, Abel, in the article: "Accounting Theory and Paradigm Structures". In: Accounting Magazine-University of Antioquia, No.17-18, September 1990 - March 1991.Mardones, José, María:The Philosophy of Human and Social Sciences - Materials for a scientific foundation. Anthropos Editorial. Santa fe de Bogotá, 1994.Teuken Magazine No. 0 - National University of Patagonia, San Juan Bosco-Argentina. IV quarter 1987. Accounting Magazine-University of Antioquia, No. 17-18, September 1990 - March 1991. Accounting Magazine - University of Antioquia No. 26-27. March-September 1995 Sanchez, Gamboa, Silvio. Foundations for Educational Research - Epistemological assumptions that guide the researcher. Editorial Round Table-Teaching. Santa Fe de Bogotá, 1998.Tua, Pereda, Jorge. Accounting Theory and Research Readings. Inter-American Legal-Financial Center. Ediciones Gráficas Lda., Medellín. 1995.
An erroneous conception of the "scientific method" is to consider it as an infallible tool of whose indiscriminate application all kinds of knowledge appear as spontaneous generation. It is only necessary to apply the algorithm or recipe, so that the representations of the new concepts appear in a corresponding way.
Further development of these conceptual approaches can be found in the Article "Braudelian Reflections on Economic Globalization: The Historian as a Pioneer", written by Eric Helleiner. In: Political Analysis Magazine No. 39 January-April 2000 - Institute of Political Studies and International Relations - National University.
The name of “positivism” was coined by Auguste Comte, but with due foresight, it is also imputable to characterize the positions of Johon Stuart Mill and the entire intellectual tradition that since Comte, not only reaches our days but, that is interwoven towards back until reaching Hume and certain philosophers of the Enlightenment.
This same taxonomy of positivist postulates can be consulted in the text by José María
Mardones: "The Philosophy of Human and Social Sciences - Materials for a scientific foundation", Editorial Antropos, in the section referring to "The first explicit controversy of the philosophy of the social sciences: nineteenth-century positivism against hermeneutics". P. 27-30.
Among the authors who have made interpretative approaches to the accounting policy configuration periods, Leandro Cañibano, Tua Pereda and Rafael Franco Ruiz are nationally the most representative.
This taxonomy is taken from the work carried out by Professor Jorge Tua Pereda, to analyze the itinerary that the construction of the principles of general acceptance have followed (Book of Accounting Theory, referred to in this same writing).
Download the original file
