Learning to dialogue: towards a critical pedagogy for public finance and accounting management practice

Critical accounting sees the world as socially constructed and intrinsically linked to organisational, social and political contexts. Whereas mainstream accounting historians study accounting history in terms of the progressive development of modern techniques and practices, a Foucauldian analysis challenges the very notion of its historical progress. Hopwood, in his comments concerning the archaeology of accounting systems has questioned the traditional notion of its historical progress showing how research into its practices has become ‘what it is not’. Miller and O’Leary have also discussed the ‘governable person’, showing how standard costing and budgeting are part of the complex social and organisational management practices that have developed to regulate individual action in the name of economic efficiency. Further, the public finance and accountancy management professions have not adopted what might be termed a “critical stance” towards its practices, being trapped within a modernist target setting culture. As such, I will discuss the context in which financial management and accountancy operates and the response found within a critical pedagogy that espouses emancipatory and authentic educational practices underpinned by the dialogical process.