BOOK REVIEW OF: ACCOUNTING AND EMANCIPATION: SOME CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS

The liberal wing of accounting research has taken some peculiar turns into postmodernism in recent years; gyrations that are echoed elsewhere in social science (Petras, 1991). Such circumlocutions are also prevalent in Gallhofer and Haslam’s book. The fingerprints of Laclau (1992, 1996), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Lyotard (1984), Nederveen (1992), etc. are all over these sections, and this is where the book alerts us to the first troubles that beset postmodernist accounting research.We begin with the uncritical embrace of the ‘philosophical critique of modernity…[specifically Laclau’s desire to go beyond]…totalizing perspectives’ (p. 19).“Totalizing,” in Laclau’s sense, is the key that gives away the punch-line. Laclau’s thesis springs directly from French disenchantment with Soviet Communism and its satellite: the French Communist Party. The red-baiters lump these “communisms” (and their progenitor, Marx) into the same dock as Totalitarianism and modern capitalism. The conclusion is that both are equally despotic.