Accountants' Truth: Knowledge and Ethics in the Financial World (review)

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, issues of the difficult to understand asset-backed securities, failures including the Goldman Sachs-AIG debacle and older cases such as Enron, it is clear that understanding finance and accounting has become just as important as studying the economy. Fortunately, a new body of work in economic sociology and the emerging sociology of accounting and finance is taking this role. Accountants' Truth fits into this literature as a study of the stories, narratives and actual practices employed by accountants as they try to make sense of corporate activities, and then explain these activities through standard accounting techniques. Noting that the public usually takes notice of accounting when something goes wrong, Gill aims to explain the day-to-day financial work of accountants and the processes of knowledge construction.

This work is likely to be a contribution to our understanding of this important industry, which specializes in the creation of accounts, both in the double-bookkeeping and narrative sense. (To paraphrase Saskia Sassen, perhaps we should consider accounting to be among the creative industries.) As Gill rightly points out, we trust and rely upon the work of accountants for our own financial decision making, and the knowledge that is produced through the work of these professionals comes from an interpretive process. Much like in the early production of social statistics or ongoing creation of complicated quantitative models, these practices of narrative construction involve various choices, perspectives and expectations to make sense of the data. Facts are built up, rather than simply reflecting some impartial external reality.

Echoing earlier research on scientists and their work as a process of fact construction, Gill presents several key narratives and frameworks that accountants use to guide their decisions, while also upholding professional standards and goals of fair play. His discussion of specific technocratic and pragmatic strategies used by accountants to deal with complex and ambiguous situations also provides an excellent insight into the different methods that professional accountants use to navigate gray areas in their work. I found these explanations to be the most significant theoretical contributions.

Despite Gill's many interesting findings, there were a few intractable problems. As someone who does qualitative research in the United States, where quantitative sociologists always question the validity of our methods, I felt it was unfortunate to base a book on a mere 20 interviews and no ethnographic observation. Although I can appreciate the choice of interviewing given his use of discourse analysis, it seemed a shame that Gill did not also employ ethnography or other methods—given his four-year career as a chartered accountant in the United Kingdom (1998-2002), he would have had much greater access than an outsider via his existing contacts and networks within the industry. Perhaps due to the limited number of interviews, the data sometimes seemed thin, and at some points I wondered whether I would have come to the same conclusions. Compounding this problem, there were a number of instances where Gill was undoubtedly drawing upon his prior experience. While I am sure we can all recall examples of self-indulgent auto-ethnography, given that Gill's accounting career and university training gave him literally years of work in the accounting profession, I would have preferred much greater personal reflexivity about this past and his resulting personal biases throughout the book. (A few notes to this effect were included in an appendix.) For this reason, while I trust Gill's findings, it is equally due to his history as an accountant—the data alone were often not enough to substantiate his larger claims. This situation warranted the reflexivity and data presentation that lend transparency to qualitative research, and could have been a foil to the discussion of transparency in accounting.

It was also surprising to find a former accountant providing a wide-eyed gloss of the performance of accounting—not to be confused with the recent performativity work in economic sociology—and questioning of the...