How’s your ars professio?

Citation

Evans, S. (2011), "How’s your ars professio?", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 24 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj.2011.05924aab.001

How’s your ars professio?

Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1

Are you in a rut? Does your professional persona need a revamp? Maybe you could do with a refreshing dip into your ars professio.

I was recently invited to talk at a poetry festival about my ars poetica. That term refers to the way poets regard the nature and purpose of poetry, and how, personally, they engage with it as creative practitioners. It goes back at least to Aristotle and Horace, so we’re talking about over two thousand years during which writers have contemplated the what, how and why of their craft and set down their thoughts for an audience.

Move a bit closer to home, to 1926 AD actually, and we get Archibald MacLeish’s famous poem, Ars Poetica, which closes with the following well-known couplet, “A poem should not mean/but be” (MacLeish, 1985, p. 106). It is a poem, by the way, that literary students still agonise over. In fact, just days before the invitation, I was discussing it as part of a new topic I teach and I had asked my students to write their own ars poetica. I thought of following suit but baulked, not sure that I wanted to commit to that kind of manifesto. Suddenly, though, here was a very specific invitation, and I had to think it through and write it down.

By now you may be wondering what this has to do with accounting. If I reach back through the mists to my first encounter with those who taught me accounting and economics (and it is, admittedly, quite a while ago), I cannot recall anyone discussing the question of the accounting practitioner’s personal ethos or style. Sure, we talked about the history of accounting, a code of ethics (thank you, Pacioli), statutory requirements, accounting standards, issues of agency and fiduciary duty, and so on, but the accountant herself seemed to have little wriggle room; little space to express herself as an individual. And a good thing, too, you might say – clients need consistency, predictability, and safety.

Consider a conference in which accounting scholars and their commercial counterparts spoke only about their personal approach to the discipline. One by one, they would stand at the podium and say, “This is what I believe, and this is how it shapes the way I work.” Would we then have the broad spectrum that one finds in poetry, equivalents ranging from the staunch traditionalists to the contemporary lyricists to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets who defy the reader to find something intelligible – that is, essentially covering the span from “stick with what has worked in the past” to “let’s really shake this place”? Who would advocate an accounting equivalent at the radical end, and what would it look like. Who would subscribe to it?

Extensive research, these days known as Googling, reveals that some people do want a rethink of how accounting is practised. There is, for instance, a world of ontological and epistemological argument that questions conventional ways of accounting because of its root assumptions about cognition, and this philosophy has its partners in the arts. But…has any markedly different method of thinking about accounting gained purchase in people’s actual decisions about, say, investing in public corporations?

Noted poet Czeslaw Milosz writes:

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung outand stood in the light, lashing his tail(Czeslaw Milosz, 1968, Ars Poetica?)

Accounting doesn’t seem to contain much of that capacity for surprise. We’re not going to get any tigers leaping out of the undergrowth of accounting, are we? On the other hand, maybe you are now thinking about writing down your own ars professio, which is the accounting counterpart to the ars poetica, and saying what makes you tick as an accounting scholar. Will you discover an inclination to walk on the wild side?

Speaking of a sense of adventure and risk, in this issue Maggie Butt contemplates the value of risk assessment techniques, comparing the contemporary and sophisticated world of practice with some ancient ones. Sriya Kumarasinghe, too, finds his focus in a mix of old and new when he ponders what might be found in a study of very old accounting systems. These two poems provide a fine comment on how accounting sees itself.

I look forward to your contribution to this section of the journal, which can be sent to me at: steve.evans@flinders.edu.au

Acknowledgements

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights Section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.

Steve EvansLiterary Editor