Letting the chat out of the bag: Deconstruction, privilege and accounting research

There are signs on the intellectual scene that we are moving out of an era in the social sciences termed modernism — a belief that separating fact from value, truth from falsity, is just a matter of applying the right version of method. The purpose of this paper is to introduce accounting researchers to a movement termed “deconstruction” which reflects the postmodern view that modernism is an untenable philosophical position. Postmodern thought in general and deconstruction in particular demand self-reflection and abandon any desire to somehow “ground” knowledge in an external and transcendental metaphysic like the positivist's faith in observation or the Marxist's faith in historical determinism. Deconstruction differs from the academic tradition in which competing metaphysics attack each other with their different dogmas. Instead, it works from within a research paper (text), taking an author's own criteria for privileging his or her work, and then de-constructs the text by pointing out how the author violates his or her own system of privilege. In this study, we both introduce deconstruction and apply it to Michael Jensen's “Organization Theory and Methodology” [The Accounting Review(April 1983) pp. 319–339], a text which would suggest that positive theory in accounting should be privileged over other ways of knowing and writing accounting discourses. We show through deconstruction that positive theory and the empirical tradition are not entitled to the kind of epistemic privilege and authority that they have enjoyed in silencing other kinds of writings about accounting. Deconstruction, then, is a moment of resistance to the reductionism of modernism and its desire for knowledge closure. It resists metaphysical author[ity] and restores life to its original difficulty before our obeissance to metaphysics.