Three '-isations': thinking with but beyond the sociological in comprehending accounting in a global context

This essay seeks to render accounting's relation to globalisation understandable in a hermeneutic rather than sociological way. We address accounting's relation to globalisation first through Bartelson's three approaches to understanding globalisation in general, approaches that he terms transference, transformation, and transcendence. We offer brief allusions to how existing critical accounting work may or may not speak to these different approaches. We then suggest that accounting's place within globalisation embeds practices and rationalities which others have referred to as 'accountingisations'. We conclude the essay with some remarks on the emancipatory potential and transcendental horizon of orienting accounting toward what we rather nervously term 'worldisations', an idea which grants the construction of meaning absolute priority in understanding global processes and account giving in ways that have little to do with the narrowly circumscribed senses of accounting that dominate the existing literature.