Abstract:

Accounting is not purely and solely a technical practice or science, but rather it is regarded as a social, economic and institutional practice. It has been directly affected by the surrounding economic and political dynamics and therefore alternatives and varieties of economic and political systems. Since the rise of the charge and discharge accounting and afterwards the revolution of the double entry bookkeeping as well, accounting has been a tool or system for controlling human and material resources. On one hand, it may be used by the management to justify and introduce its truth regime as scientific and necessary, it may be used by the labor to support and reinforce their truth regime, on the other. In addition, because it is a specific language accounting can bear different meanings in different contexts. For this reason, a discussion of how accounting reports disclose information about the financial truths, whether they have a common and exclusive meaning to the users, the role of the financial table preparers and users on constructing the truth and meaning, the positioning of accounting within the context of different ideologies and truth regimes and whether a separate accounting truth regime is possible could help rightly place accounting into modern economies, societies and the corporate world. The historical process through which accounting has evolved from a simple bookkeeping job into a regime constructing the financial truths reveals that accounting is not a theory and practice that can be confined only to the boundaries of the firm, on the contrary it is a tool interacting with, even largely formed by the external dynamics in which it operates and the society, and in turn having an impact upon its environment and the society and that in producing accounting information essential features of accounting are substantially affected by social, economic and political power relations. In diagnosing and disclosing such interrelationships cited above, social accounting seems to have more capability than technical accounting

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