Page 352 - Cultures and Organizations

Pyramids, Machines, Markets, and Families: Organizing Across Nations 317

In Chapter 1 culture was shown to be manifested in the form of sym-
bols, heroes, rituals, and values. Accounting is said to be the language of
business: this means that accounting is the handling of symbols that have
meaning only to those initiated in business. At the level of symbols one

also finds money. Money has no intrinsic value, nor an intrinsic meaning,
other than that which is attributed to it by convention. It also means dif-
ferent things to different people. For example, it means one thing in the
culture of accountants and something else in the culture of bankers. There
is a national component to the meaning of money: in Chapter 5 the impor-
tance of money was associated with masculinity. In more masculine soci-
eties, such as the United States and Germany, accounting systems stress

the achievement of purely financial targets more than they do in more
feminine societies, such as Sweden and the Netherlands. In societies that
are shorter-term oriented, such as the United States, the systems’ stress is
obviously more on short-term results than is the case in societies that are
longer-term oriented.
Accountants themselves are unlikely to ever become heroes in orga-
nizations, but they have an important role in identifying and anointing
heroes elsewhere in the organization, because they determine who are the
good guys and the bad guys. Their major device for this purpose is account-
ability: holding someone personally responsible for results. As measurable
results are more important in masculine societies than in feminine ones,
the former’s accounting systems are more likely to present results in such
a way that a responsible manager is pictured as a hero or as a villain.
From a cultural point of view, accounting systems in organizations

are best understood as uncertainty-reducing rituals, fulfilling a cultural
need for certainty, simplicity, and truth in a confusing world, regardless of
whether this truth has any objective base. Trevor Gambling, a professor

and former accountant from the United Kingdom, has written that much

of accounting information is after-the-fact justification of decisions that
were taken for nonlogical reasons in the first place. The main function of

accounting information, according to Gambling, is maintaining morale in
the face of uncertainty. The accountant “enables a distinctly demoralized
modern industrial society to live with itself, by reassuring that its models
and data can pass for truth.” 25
This explains the lack of consensus across different countries on
what represents proper accounting methods. For the United States these
methods are collected in the accountant’s holy book of generally accepted