When asked to think about accounting, most people imagine numbers, calculators, spreadsheets and offices populated by smart-suited bean counters hunched over reports. You most certainly think about money.
Author
- Jack Campbell
PhD Candidate, Accounting and Accountability, Dublin City University
But by breaking away from this image and reclaiming the term "accountant" to speak to a wider number of everyday activities, we can understand the vital, often positive role accounting plays in our lives.
Accounting is one of the oldest forms of communication in human history, perhaps even pre-dating other forms of written language . From these origins, it has been intrinsically linked with numerical, often financial, information.
The word account comes from the Latin verb computare , meaning to count, sum up, reckon together, which established its numerical base. Later, the French term acont tied it specifically with the counting of money - the reckoning of money received and paid. Over time, this definition has developed into our narrow association of accounting today, not only with counting, nor with the counting of money, but in particular the counting of money by a qualified professional: the accountant.
Justify behaviour
However, this need not be the only way to thinking of accounting - or accountants. Alongside the dominant definition that refers to managing finances, another one has developed, by which accounting is understood more broadly as "the language by which people justify their behaviour" to others. Accounting in this sense isn't just counting (although it is still that), but also measuring, recording, explaining, justifying, evaluating. Accounting becomes the giving of accounts - and something we already do in our everyday lives.
On a simple level, and close to conventional accounting, household budgeting can be considered a form of everyday accounting. This is how the Greek philosopher Aristotle's conception of economics, as household management, has been widely interpreted. This is a form of everyday accounting we do when we pay bills and balance household budgets, or when a child puts their pocket money in a piggy bank.
Instagram accounts like moneymum are good examples of this form of everyday accounting, closely tied to financial forms of accounting, yet very much rooted in the realities of everyday life: back-of-the-envelope maths, kitchen-table economics.
Yet we can take an everyday accounting even further, beyond the sums. Aristotle also conceived of his economics as the general managing of relationships, as a for of "social accounting". In fact, if we think about why we account in any circumstance, it's for this reason. Even when we account in a financial sense - when a company publishes its financial statements - it does so primarily to ensure the shareholders that their money is being well spent by those who run the business. From this perspective, accounting is not about money, but about communication between people and in the interests of transparency.
With this understanding of accounting as a form of communication, we can begin to think about the wider forms of accounting that we all do in our everyday lives. When we review a product we bought online, or when we are asked to justify our actions in the workplace during a performance review, aren't we practising this form of accounting?
In my research, I have studied two other examples of this everyday accounting: social media posts and social protest songs . By this definition of everyday accounting, these are accounting activities. When online users write social media posts, or protestors sing songs, they are everyday accountants. In each case, people are communicating information to others and managing social relationships by doing so.
Aristotle's economics
In thinking about accounting in this way, we can begin to understand the purpose with which we undertake many of activities in our everyday lives. This takes us back to Aristotle's economics: we account to foster, nurture or reckon with the relationships we have with each other.
This may also clarify the link between accounting and accountability. When we give accounts - especially when someone expects us to give an account - then it is often because that person wants to hold us to account. Justifying our actions is not done for nothing. And in being asked to justify our actions - or asking someone else to do so - we're at least in part implying that they have something to reckon for.
Yet, realising what we do as a form of everyday accounting can also reveal our positive interdependencies. When we listen to songs together at a concert, or save up for a holiday with our friends, we're accounting in ways which connect us with each other. These are accounts which are about hope, love, friendship. Accounting isn't just about being held to account, then, but bringing us into closer relation with those around us.
So, accounting is not only the domain of accountants. Yes, there are professionals whose job it is to prepare company accounts. But by only considering accounting in this narrow sense, we miss how much of our everyday activities are based on it. Accounting is, at heart, a form of communication, and we are all everyday accountants. We just need to remember it.
Jack Campbell receives funding from Research Ireland.
