“So I beg you, just let me suffer silently and see how I can cope with it.” Accounting, Corruption, and (A)Morality
基于尼日利亚社会学家Ekeh的理论和加纳实地数据，研究政治商业精英如何利用会计手段掩盖腐败，损害社区利益，并区分了非道德与道德，提出“中间公共”概念。
In this article, we draw on the writings of Nigerian-born sociologist Peter P. Ekeh and, using extensive and hard-to-reach fieldwork data, we seek to understand how members of the Civic Public—the political and business elite—managed to obscure and obfuscate their corruption via accounting tools and strategies at the expense of the communities they serve, i.e., the Primordial Public. We find that members of the Civic Public engaged in a series of accounting schemes—some simple, others complex—to divert vast sums of much-needed funds away from the intended beneficiaries of a major charitable initiative established to provide aid for the un(der)-employed youth of Ghana. We make important contributions to the study of accounting, corruption, and morality. First, we disaggregate amorality from morality, situating these terms both theoretically and contextually, before discussing how members of the primordial public are systemically and culturally socialized to the elite's amorality. We build on and extend Ekeh's arguments in two ways. First, we discuss the emergence of a third public, which we call the “In-between”. Second, we argue that members of this third public are increasingly at risk of being dragged into morally dubious actions by and on behalf of their elite peers as they are persuaded toward morally dubious actions and behaviours.