Perspectives on Language, Accountability and Critical Accounting: An Interpretative Perspective1

This paper explores the utility of Habermas’s A Theory of Communicative Action (volumes 1 and 2) and his Between Facts and Norms. Habermas’s work has influenced middle-range accounting as advanced by some critical accounting researchers writing about critical and public sector accountability models. This paper considers accounting’s role in the public sphere and examines the Habermasian strain running through critical accounting. A different linguistic model is introduced which adapts H. G. Gadamer’s and Charles Taylor’s work on language and how it creates different ways to think about the world. The aim of the paper is to examine whether it is possible to escape the instrumental limitations of accounting.