People as prophets: liberation theology as a radical perspective on accounting

Abstract

This paper presents Latin American liberation theology, a contextual theology, as a radical perspective to inform and critique accounting and issues of accountability.The notion of sacred and secular is explored as a dualism which limits theological insights at the socio-political level. By rejecting dualism, liberation theology presents an alternative ontological stance. Studies in critical accounting have focussed on the repressive nature of accounting. This paper provides critical accounting with a theological insight that has the potential to inform an emancipatory or enabling accounting project. Enabling accounting has been studied from the perspective of gender, class, ethnicity and environment (Chew and Greer, 1997). Adopting liberation theology as a critical perspective provides a means of critiquing extant accounting practice from the episteme of the economically marginalised and a Christian mandate for who to enable and why