Values and Accounting

If values are to mean anything to an organization, it has to be apparent that they are not empty values, but active premises for its decisions. That does not mean that an organization can limit itself to ethical premises. There are always many types of premises. Decisions require an ongoing balancing, which might eventually become second nature and routine. The important thing is that values remain sufficiently active for them to offer resistance and avoid being outstripped every time there is a slight dip in the financial accounts, sales figures or interest rates, or if political decisions change the basis for the organizational planning. In rough times, it can seem tempting to scrap ethical concerns and focus on ‘the necessities’, but it could also be argued that, particularly in difficult times, ethics becomes indispensable because it delivers premises for decisions when other premises — financial or technological — are wonky. Ethics is not superfluous; or in the words of Voltaire: ‘The superfluous is a highly necessary matter.’ There is no inherent conflict, and no inherent harmony, between ethics, money and power. It all depends on the way in which the money is made and the power exercised.