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Much of accounting is concerned with the affiliation between an entity and its investors.
It investigates what accounting data are to be collected, how the collected data are to
be processed, how the processed data will be transmitted, and how the investors would
evaluate the transmitted data according to their own perceptions (mostly dominated by the
information analysts or professional investors, either for their technical skill or for their ability to
insider trading) to reach decisions that will augment their economic interests either in the form
of periodic returns or in terms of one-time capital appreciation. Whether the investors'
group will be better off or worse off provided with all the necessaries and conveniences for which
it has the occasion, is the starting point of almost all accounting inquiries. In a society guided
by rugged individualism, every question and complement with regard to investors' interests
and claims are present (explicitly or by implication) in accounting analysis. Therefore, it will
not be unjust to say that mainstream accounting has not at all been interested in the plurality
of focus in evaluating an array of perfectly distinguishable interests of a large number of
stakeholders associated with the entity. This powerful tradition in accounting analysis,
somehow extraordinary, gets ahead of the key fact that organization is a
`collectivity' (Hall, 1972, p. 9) (or `coalition' in the popular sense often used in politics). As a corollary to that, it tries
to eschew the distinct issues with regard to a variety of interests, claims or rights of a number
of legitimate participants and ends up with a simple measure of participants' interests, claims
or rights and its fulfillment. That measure, all are aware of, is `profit', recognized as a
unique measure of an enterprise's accomplishment over its efforts. Though `profit' does have a
meaning of its own, it is hard to understand the logical inquisitiveness of the arithmetical
simplicity (modern accounting has not gone much beyond it), supremacy of the measure to all others
and its applicability in all contexts at the exclusion of the distinguishable motivations of a
large number of corporate associates in their diverse needs and expectations in which assessment
of interest is quite relevant. Why it is hard to perceive is because of the fact that it is
quite dubious to get one singular measure to unify the enormous complexities clouded by a
variety of interests, claims or rights associated with a large number of corporate actors in a
modern organization. Added to this, since the days of Pacioli, it is hard to appreciate the
continual ascendancy of the arithmetical exactness of the accounting numbers over the
remarkable inexactness of content (in regard to the unique choice of a magic measure applicable in
all contexts so that it becomes all things to all people) over a long period of time. Such a
narrow model postulated by profit-exclusiveness as a natural corollary of egotism, ethical
neutrality and free-market mechanism, widely known as `agency theory' in the literature of
accounting, is a complete mismatch as a framework of analysis in the face of plural motivations of
modern organizations.
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