THE HOUSING OF ACCOUNTING ON THE MAKING OF FINANCIAL MAN

The aim of this paper is to empirically explore the role of accounting in making people financially capable, and in that contribute to the theoretical understanding of accounting as a social practice. This is done by illuminating how the accounting discourse is presented and conceptualized to address individuals in situations related to their private, everyday lives – a field of analysis which has received little empirical attention in previous accounting research. Analysing the home-pages of certain actors within the sphere of the housing market reveals that in order to make financial and accounting concepts comprehensible to people, they have to be connected with values, ideals and concerns, hold as critical by the individuals they are to transform. Thus, the paper shows that it is in the linkage between the vocabulary of accounting and other discursive vocabularies that abstract notions of economic discourse are presumed to be made knowable, and hence people are made financially responsible