“Democracy is like air: we notice it when it’s missing” – Piero Calamandrei
Companies are increasingly stopping to report on diversity. Fairer performance systems that account for discrimination are being progressively dismantled. Countless data have been removed simply due to associations with words such as women, queer, or diversity. Diversity is being erased in and through,accounting. Accounting is at the heart of these attacks on diversity.
What can we, as an epistemic community of accounting scholars within the European Accounting Association, do in response?
Accounting’s Double Role in Diversity: Both Oppressive and Emancipatory
We know that, within traditional neoliberal approaches, accounting has long played a role in reproducing inequalities and reinforcing power imbalances. At the same time, accounting also holds emancipatory potential: through commensuration and what has been termed statactivism, quantification can bring visibility to marginalized voices. The growing development of counter-accounts support stakeholders to challenge dominant narratives and advance alternative perspectives.
What we are now witnessing is clear: accounting is increasingly being used as an infrastructure to dismantle diversity. Omitting or removing any form of quantification is a first act of erasure—a refusal to acknowledge certain groups, and therefore, a refusal to care for them. Rehashing the outdated debate around performance evaluations only based on “merit,” while ignoring equity and individual circumstances, suggests a narrow and reductive understanding of performance measurement. Erasing diversity dimensions reinforces existing power imbalances and ultimately hinders our collective pursuit of social justice.
European Values
By having European in the name of our association, we carry with us the values of diversity, inclusivity, democracy and of course, scientific knowledge. These values were developed over centuries and became central after two world wars that took millions of lives and sought to exterminate Jews, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Roma, political opponents, and many others.
We are the generations of Erasmus, who had the opportunity to experience different education systems and meet peers from across Europe. We are the generations who vote for the European Parliament. We are the generations who benefit from social rights thanks to pioneers like Simone Veil, Nilde Iotti, and Ursula Hirschmann. Remaining silent or passive falls short of upholding our European values. It would be a betrayal of those who fought for our freedom of research, freedom of thought, and the freedom to be ourselves.
Activism in Accounting: Acting Up, Acting Now
This is an open call to all accounting scholars to actively support and defend diversity. Our role as social scientists cannot remain passive in the face of the ongoing anti-diversity and, more broadly, anti-science, attacks we are witnessing.
In a time when important initiatives like the PhD Project, which has supported many of our great colleagues in the U.S., are under attack, and when the Diversity Section of the American Accounting Association is being pressured to reconsider its name, the threat is growing ever closer to us.
Activism in accounting can take many forms:
Accounting shapes reality. We must use our tools to confront and resist the structures that sustain discrimination and power asymmetries. We cannot afford to wait until we are taken down one by one because, let us remember:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me….
(Martin Niemöller)
