ROLES AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ACCOUNTING IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOEL AMERNIC * AND RUSSELL CRAIG ** T his paper aims to enhance understanding of accounting concepts and practices in the industrial relations community by contrasting the alleged technical and non- technical roles of accounting. By non-technical roles, we mean the ideological, social and perception-fashioning roles of accounting procedures and processes. Our principal con- tention is that the industrial relations community would benefit from improved aware- ness of the non-technical character of accounting—especially through alertness to the rhetorical features and social construction of accounting. Four often-unapparent non- technical roles of accounting in industrial relations are discussed and their significance is highlighted. This paper is based upon our separate experiences of teaching accounting to indus- trial relations students and practitioners over the past 25 years. It is stimulated by the conviction that accounting deserves to be acknowledged in industrial relations as an equivocal and rhetorical social practice that is a socially-constructed means of financial expression and rhetoric. Accounting should not be regarded merely as a set of arcane but ideologically-innocent techniques or practices specified by the accounting profession. It is important to develop a critical language awareness (Fairclough 1992) of the accounting language used in industrial relations. Accounting language is a part of the language of New Capitalism, which is characterised by ‘an increasing gap between rich and poor, less security for most people, less democracy, major environmental damage’ (Fairclough 2000). Our focus on accounting as language is important, for, as Fairclough argues: ... imposing the new order [New Capitalism] centrally involves the reflexive process of imposing new representations of the world ... new ways of using language are an important part of the new order ... the struggle over the new order is partly a struggle over language. Accounting language, such as ‘economic value added’ (discussed later)—as part of the language of New Capitalism—helps create legitimacy and acceptance for narrow corporate strategies to the detriment of non-management stakeholders (see also Amernic et al . 2000). Accounting language may also steer corporate industrial relation strategies, as we outline later. * Professor of Accounting, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, M5S 3E6, Ontario, Canada. Cross-appointed to the Centre for Industrial Relations, Uni- versity of Toronto. ** Professor of Accounting, National Graduate School of Management, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. Email: russell.craig@anu.edu.au THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS,VOL. 47, NO. 1, MARCH 2005, 77--92