I have been discussing accounting education at a conference at the University of Leeds for the last couple of days, and will be today as well.
This LinkedIn post from yesterday by my Accounting Streams colleague, Prof Susan Smith, features a photo taken by me when she was presenting our ideas yesterday:
The Accounting Streams project aims to publish a new foundation year accounting textbook by the end of this year. The book will encourage critical thinking rather than rote learning. Most especially, it will be interactive and even playful. The aim is to inspire students. The fact that it will be free and online should help. The aim is to change the way that accounting is taught - and the need for that is very clear.
There is more on the project here.
Streams stands for stakeholders, transparency, reporting and ethics: accounting for management and society, although I admit we have, since the project began, begun to have doubts about the use of the word 'stakeholder', however commonplace is its usage.
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As I understand it, “stakeholder” is intended to capture anyone with any kind of interest in the operations of a business enterprise – not just owners or shareholders but also employees, suppliers and customers, the government, the local community and wider society.
What is your concern with the term? Do you have a better alternative?
I offer this as explanation https://getinvolved.london.ca/40548/widgets/168806/documents/119393#:~:text='Stakeholder'%20was%20historically%20used%20to,concept%20of%20ownership%20and%20dominance.
This is about decolonising the vocabulary?
Yes
Not to detract from your work on reframing accounting away from bean-counting based on abstract standards and towards something that can add real ethical value (which is essential, as is framing economics away from the current pseudo-mathematical certainties based on abstractions and unrealistic assumptions, and towards a social science based more on – and with greater application to – the real world) but I have to say I am not convinced that “stakeholder” is as problematic a term as some have recently been making it out to be.
As I understand it the term was introduced in the 1930s to carry the meaning I referred to above – a wider interest group than owners. I’ve not seen any contemporaneous or earlier suggestion that it was derived from any sense of colonial settlers staking a claim, or physically driving stakes into the ground to demarcate ownership. Rather, earlier uses of the term are in the main about wagers (and who holds the stake money) and about contextual deposits (held by a stakeholder).
I completely understand that some indigenous groups consider the term to carry colonial overtones – and if there are good alternatives I have no problem using them – but I just don’t see evidence for “stakeholder” being used historically in that way. Perhaps there is some evidence available to convince me otherwise but at the moment it feels to me like a modern “just so” story.
(As I understand it some groups also object to being described as “stakeholders” for a slightly different reason – they say with some justification that the term understates the level of their rights and interests.)
When I am working on multinational projects I chose not to use language that can cause offence
So, as alternatives are available we plan to use them
I understand why you might prefer to use a different term to avoid causing offence. I just gently question the basis on which offence is taken.
It reminds me of the offence taken to uses of the term “niggardly”. (It is complex because I suspect some use such terms to cause offence in a plausibly deniable manner.)
• Collaborator
• Community Partner
• Affected groups
• Community Groups
• Ally
• Interested parties
We are using the term relevant interestered parties and variations thereon
Not wishing to be picky, but I have an issue with “collaborator”.
CollaboratING is good but being a collaboratOR sounds traitorous.
I think that might suggest the context in which you became familiar with the word
The good old days?
As you and peers contemplate prospective future accounting cohorts, Richard, here is one part of the past that might be worthy of resuscitation:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/michael-hudson-modern-misinterpretations-of-ancient-debt-cancellation.html
I suspect it will not be accomplished by the will of governments nor their populations but, if at all, by the few left to stir in the embers that remain in the aftermath of unbridled global warming.
I talked about Michael at this conference