Accounting as Reality Construction: Towards a New Epistemology for Accounting Practice by Morgan - Article Example

The paper 'Accounting as Reality Construction: Towards a New Epistemology for Accounting Practice by Morgan" is a good example of a finance and accounting article. Morgan (1988) puts forward the argument that accountants tend to perceive their engagements related to accounting as being objective and representing the underlying set of reality in its true state as opposed to being subjective considering the fact they are only allowed to represent underlying situations in a rather restricted and one-sided way. Just like an artist, accountants are only restricted to providing a one-sided and rather a partial generation of perspectives of the underlying reality. Taking this to consideration, then accountants can thus evaluate the situation at hand and ensure that they can adopt new sets of epistemology that will focus on emphasizing the need for conducting an interpretive ability to represent reality as opposed to only focusing on the objectivity side. In fact, with the ability to discern reality through the extensive interpretation of facts; accountants will certainly cover a distinctive set of views that incorporates a good number of notions.

Indeed, accountants tend to perceive their engagements related to accounting as being objective, and representing the underlying set of reality in its true state as opposed to preferably being subjective considering the fact they are only allowed to represent underlying situations in a rather restricted and one-sided way. It is noted that just like there have numerous theories that have been formulated to ascertain the true state of an organisation, accounting theory should also focus on incorporating different sets of views whenever coming up with a true representation of reality. The author notes that human agency and the restrictions that are a result of different views is primarily a significant portion of producing knowledge, which always is not sufficient enough to represent reality (480).

Hooper and Low (2000, p.4) ascertain that people and especially accountants while making distinctive decisions about an organisation’s immediate operations, are barred with the multi-complexity of the surrounding environment and thus, are bounded to come up with artificial restrictions while moving around their decision models. This means that accountants will certainly make decisions and justify them within their agreed level of boundaries of the immediate decision model in question. The metaphor has been fairly echoed by Morgan (1988) who notes that accountants are only in the business of justifying their numbers to the different users of information. Each and every one of them are only focused on coming up with a representation of numbers that fairly match their individual criterion and perspective of an underlying organisation’s operations. I tend to agree with this argument that no single set of accountants will likely come up with an almost similar interpretation of accounting information because they rely on their individual capacity to discern and interpret the rather multi-complex environments, which might differ from one to another.

I believe that this article will be useful in my topic because it sets to explain the divergent set of representations accounting profession can come up with in portraying reality. It serves to explain that different views from different professions can be incorporated in order to accommodate a well-represented set of facts.