Assessing the validity of accounting for human rights: A pragmatic constructivist perspective
Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management
ISSN: 1176-6093
Article publication date: 1 August 2016
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on accounting for human rights. It explores the validity of conflicting theoretical perspectives on accounting and their ability to reduce the gap between accounting and accountability for human rights.
Design/methodology/approach
This study relies on the notion of topos to develop a pragmatic constructivist perspective on conventional accounting and social accounting with respect to human rights. Applying pragmatic constructivism permits a better understanding and assessment of the ethics underpinning the conventional and social accounting approaches.
Findings
The ethics underpinning the topos of conventional accounting offer a reductive explanation of the agency of organizational actors, so inhibiting moral and social responsibility. Furthermore, the calculative logic that dominates this topos promotes a monovocal form of communication (to shareholders) and translates values per se into instrumental values. By contrast, the social accounting topos sheds new light on the role that accounting may play in detecting human rights violations, by focusing more on communication and social values. However, for this topos to be valid, alternative management practices that go beyond voluntary social reporting need to be further developed.
Originality/value
Human rights accountability is an urgent challenge for companies in today’s society. However, scholars have largely disregarded the role of accounting in the process of holding companies accountable for human rights violations. By questioning the relationship between accounting and human rights, this paper takes a first step towards resolving this issue.
Keywords
Citation
Pianezzi, D. and Cinquini, L. (2016), "Assessing the validity of accounting for human rights: A pragmatic constructivist perspective", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 370-391. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRAM-09-2015-0084
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited