TITLE:
Transforming into Practice a Concept: Accounting as an Instrument of Social Justice
AUTHORS:
Athar Murtuza
KEYWORDS:
Accounting Education, Ethics, Accountability, Social Justice, Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.7 No.8,
August
29,
2019
ABSTRACT: This article is a follow-up to an earlier article (Henry, Murtuza, &
Weiss, 2015) [1] that discussed the potential of accounting to do
much more than prepare financial statements for investment decisions. The three
authors argued in the earlier paper that accounting besides producing financial
statement can also be an instrument of social justice. This paper, written by
one of the three authors shows how the conceptual potential of accounting to be
an instrument of social justice can be transformed into accounting pedagogical
practices. In other words, instead of being merely concerned with “counting,”
accounting can also be seen as being connected with accountability and the
ability to account for and explain, the organizational reality. An introduction
is provided in Section 1. In Section 2, this
paper starts by recapitulating the earlier paper and then describing how this
paper will build on the foundation the original paper provided. In Section 3,
the use of literary works to help teach accounting and information engineering
concept is illustrated. The last section provides suggestions to bring about an
enrichment of the accounting and business curriculum. The last section is
adaptation of a proposal the author wrote for his department. While one does
not yet know how the proposal will be perceived by the department, the business
school and the dean, it seems a
worthy idea to make it a part of public domain so it could help others get
started on their approaches to improving their teaching and the material they
use.