Rethinking Accounting

Professor Atul K. Shah and Mzwanele Ntshwanti asks the question: are you are ready to rethink accountancy?

We are presently going through a ‘poly-crisis’. Many things are going wrong – and all at the same time. Inequality is growing fast, inflation is back in full swing, we are seeing a rise in global illicit financial flows, the environment is hitting back and we have no technology to stop flooding, hurricanes and forest fires.

And yet many accounting professionals are continuing their old habits, without any change in culture or knowledge that influence business practices and thereby our societies and the environment. How can this be sustainable?

In 2009, students at Manchester University discovered that the economics they were taught has nothing to do with the real world. We had just been through a global financial crash and this topic was not on any syllabus!

They set up a rebel movement, called Rethinking Economics, which has since gone global and achieved huge media coverage, including on the BBC and in the Financial Times. Through this movement, different schools of economics across different countries have begun to embrace the ideals of a pluralist and heterodox economics curriculum.

The same group has started a similar new movement called Rethinking Accountancy. The starting point is the same – they want a fairer, more responsible and sustainable society, and education at universities and in professional exams is still quite only traditional and technical. Ethics is discussed in a secular, hypothetical way, rather than engaging students with their own cultures and beliefs and challenging them on the kind of world they would like to shape. Often technical calculations of accounting, finance and taxation bury the ethical assumptions, removing them from the debate. Professional bodies have had huge ethical scandals among their members with