constitutes a set of moral discourse with a solid conscious consensus about what is the proper and morally right way to conduct public economic policies.
When even monetary-policymakers and bankers alike are not overtly conscious of their ethics, their decisions and predictions are premised on values and norms that shape their decisions. At the minimum, they harbor views on the determinants of economic outcomes. Contextually, and in general, Americans tend to explain economic outcomes with more emphasis on individual efforts than on luck (partly because of perceived opportunities for social mobility). Alberto Alesina et al have shown that this is not the situation in Europe where the emphasis tends to be put on luck.14 This difference in attitude has definite ethical implications. Americans, unlike Europeans who favor some protection schemes and income redistribution, are willing to tolerate more income inequality and prefer focusing their gaze on equality of opportunity.
Exercises
1. Define and explain the seven elements of business.
2. Describe the importance of accounting to ministerial leadership in the twenty-first century.
3. Using the model of relationship-product for corporation, explain how your church can increase its membership.
4. What do you understand by monetary policy and what are some of the “ceremonies of innocence” deployed to increase public buy-in of actions of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States?
1 For a discussion of the effective management practices of the church, see Wimberly, Business of the Church.
2 I am here drawing from the work of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977).
3. Generally central bankers have significantly pared down this definition, making monetary policy to be only decisions and actions taken to control the quantity and price of money and credit in an economy. They have basically limited themselves to using only three tools: open market operations, setting of discount rate, and bank reserve requirements, and perhaps a very weak fourth tool, moral suasion. “Using these three tools, the Federal Reserve influences the demand for, and supply of, balances that depository institutions hold at Federal Reserve Banks and in this way alters the FFR [federal fund rate]. The FFR is the interest rate at which depository institutions lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other depository institutions overnight. Changes in the FFR trigger a chain of market events that affect other short-term interest rates, foreign-exchange rates, long-term interest rates, the amount of money and credit, and ultimately, a range of economic variables, including employment, output, and prices of goods and services.” Liu, “More on the US Experience,” 7.
4. Winter, Community and Spiritual Transformation, 104.
5. Ibid., 45.
6. Ibid., 41.
7. Taylor, Confidence Games, 27–28.
8. Wolf, Why Globalization Works, 274.
9. Madsen, Morality and Power, 22.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Yeats, “Second Coming,” 211, quoted in Madsen, Morality and Power, 166.
12. Central banking may be described as a form of civil religion—especially in the former West Germany and in the United States. For a good description of civil religion in America, see Bellah, Beyond Belief, 168–89.
13. There are nineteen persons on the board. The President of the United States appoints seven of them for fourteen-year non-renewable terms. The remainder is appointed by the twelve Federal Reserve banks appointed by banks subject to approval by the seven. Only five of the twelve can vote in the Open Market Committee, giving the seven appointed by the president ultimate authority.
14. Alesina et al, “Inequality and Happiness.”
Chapter 1
Introduction to Basic Accounting
Accounting Is a Narrative
Accounting data or reports never come to us raw; they are mediated through narrative. All accounting is a story. It is an imagination (abstraction) with the virtues of economy, consistency, and broadband resonance. Though the language that paints this picture is always simple and restrained, it is filled with panorama and process. The accounting reports of a corporation deal with images that are at the very margins of reality. They are neither a perfect rendition of the past nor a perfect predictor of the not-yet. Yet they capture a period, a fleeting moment as the past slides into the future with the accountant’s capacity to present the absent as the real. Figures and data are not unmediated undeniable realities, which can be abstracted from practices of representation and the stories they create or describe.
Accounting is a story of how an organization has worked and why it works. It shapes how the persons in the organization view the reality of the organization, how they should respond to life, and what the organization might become. Accounting presents how an organization imagines itself in terms of the flow of financial resources at its disposal and how others imagine it.
Understanding the “identity” of the organization being portrayed by accounting is crucial for a pastor defining the clarity of her organization’s or mission’s goals. Accounting records, reports, and analyses shape unique expectations and characters of organizations. Accounting reports are not just simple narratives of financial flows meant for board or committee meetings; they are part of the social ecology of ministerial leadership.
The accounting world, the community of practitioners, is a narrative-formed one. As narrative it also presents a particular view of the world. It is based on two philosophical ideas. First, is the idea that an organization is a unit, a single entity that can be identified in and of itself. The organization is an entity that can be succinctly distinguished from others and a set of accounts can be kept to recognize and record its activities. Second, there is the notion that equality is the fundamental principle in the organization’s life: assets must exactly match liabilities (Assets = Equities; Assets = Liabilities + Owners’ Equity). The whole process of measuring, recording, and reporting the transactions of an entity must always end up with this equality.
The social practice of accounting takes the form of ideas and principles that are clearly based on or warranted by this set of central convictions. Any effort to understand the mindset and “social ethics” of accounting as a profession or discipline in itself must recognize the critical significance of its narrative. “Every social ethic involves a narrative, whether it is concerned with the formulation of basic principles of social organization and/or concrete policy alternatives. . . . The form and content of a community is narrative dependent and therefore what counts as ‘social ethics’
