The boundary of the ‘economic’: Financial accounting, corporate ‘imaginaries’ and human sentience

This paper pursues the thought that the divide between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ that Gendron and Rodrigue observe in the field of accounting research, is no more than a reflection or symptom of the more consequential divide that financial accounting enacts between the corporate entity and its social and natural environment. Through a distinction the paper develops between what are termed the corporate imaginary and human sentience, it contrasts two very different notions of the nature of boundaries. As ‘imaginary’ financial accounting plays a key role in the constitution of the corporation as an entity, indifferent to what lies beyond the corporate boundary save for that which accounting makes play upon its own economic interests. Accounting is also key in making a reality of the economic imaginary of the self; the atomistic conception of the individual as a self-interested and opportunistic ‘individual’. In an attempt to illustrate the ‘meconnaisance’ or misrecognition involved in such imaginaries the paper draws on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Irigaray as these inform Butler’s recent explorations of human sentience. Each recalls us to the different dimensions of our material embodiment in the world as humans, and with this the nature of boundaries only as space of forgotten relation, exchange and dependence in which we are always acted upon as we act. The paper concludes by suggesting that both ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ accounting researchers now share the urgent task of finding ways to refashion the limited and purely economic ‘sensibility’ that financial accounting affords the corporate entity, in order to make it responsive to the needs of sentient humans.