Accountability, Representation & Control (MN7262)
Discuss whether the concepts of accountability, representation and control can help explain the Euro crisis. Use course materials in your answer.
GAO LU
Student number 120938023
Date: 13 January 2013
Totur: Paul Brook & Geoff Lightfoot
Word account: 2733 1. Introduction
ARC (Accountability, representation and control) can be treated as a process of management. In fact, in order to make sense those three words, it would be best to divide this process into four parts, accounting, accountability, representation and control.
Accounting is a kind of activities which started from ancient times. when people know how to keep information, they began to find ways to keep those information and want to show others, such as the mural which can keep a scene for other people to see what happened in that particular moment and use shell to do account activities. In other words, accounting is a human activity which uses a “thing” represents another original one, and this practice, which can be called the process of representing (Lightfoot 2012. P. 3). However, the “thing” we often use is not completely the truth, like Armstrong (2002) mentioned, the accounting activities are not like a printer to copy the reality, it does not just show you the accounting report to give you a statement that maybe the truth, or maybe not. Armstrong (2002) prefers to treat accounting as a social activity, in his theory, social element such as human understanding, personal interest and social environment can greatly affect accounting activities, because the account report must be read by someone, and the contained information should be used by those specific people in order to know the general situation and then make decisions (Yong, 2006 cited in Paton and Littleton, 1940). Throughout the whole process, it may be a question about whether the information can