The Narrowness of Finance and the Wider Epistemology of Accounting: Toward an Organic and Intercultural Finance

Abstract

Finance has long sought to establish itself as a science of rational decision under uncertainty, aspiring to the predictive authority of the natural sciences. In this pursuit, it has narrowed its field of vision, abstracting from the cultural, ecological, and moral contexts that give economic life its meaning. Accounting, paradoxically, has evolved in the opposite direction. Once regarded as a technical craft, it has become increasingly interdisciplinary and reflexive, engaging with sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy. This essay argues that finance must now undertake a similar epistemological widening. Drawing on intercultural wisdoms and organic traditions that have long prioritized trust, reciprocity, and balance, finance could rediscover its moral and ecological vocation. The essay calls for a re-embedding of finance in the living, plural world from which it has abstracted — a renewal of value as relationship, not just ratio.

1. Introduction: The Asymmetry Between Accounting and Finance

It has become a curious paradox that accounting — the practice often caricatured as conservative and procedural — now sustains a far more expansive epistemological horizon than finance, its supposedly more dynamic sibling. While accounting scholars debate accountability, ethics, and environmental limits, finance remains largely confined within the parameters of optimization, efficiency, and rational expectation. The conceptual life of finance science has become narrow, parochial, and technocratic, even as the crises it confronts — inequality, ecological collapse, and institutional distrust — are planetary in scope.

This asymmetry reveals a deeper philosophical problem: the epistemology of finance has been built upon an ontological reduction. The complexity of human and ecological relations has been rendered calculable through models that treat social and moral life as noise. The result is an apparatus that can price everything and understand nothing.

2. Finance’s Positivist Turn: The Pursuit of Purity

The intellectual formation of modern finance was driven by a longing for scientific purity. From the mid-twentieth century onward, its leading theorists sought legitimacy by mimicking the predictive formalisms of physics. Capital markets were modeled as efficient information processors; agents were rendered rational, identical, and self-interested; uncertainty became a variable to be priced, not a condition to be lived with.

This positivist turn yielded extraordinary technical power — the capacity to model, price, and trade in dimensions previously unimaginable. Yet it also exiled meaning from the discipline. Questions of trust, purpose, and justice were relegated to “externalities.” Finance became a language of detached calculation, not situated judgment. Its models could describe volatility in exquisite detail, but not vulnerability; they could optimize portfolios, but not communities.

Finance’s dream of purity — of being a “value-free” science — thus produced a moral and cognitive narrowing. By abstracting from the social and ecological conditions of its own existence, it turned capital into an autonomous logic, disembedded from life.

3. Accounting’s Interdisciplinary Expansion

Accounting, by contrast, never achieved — nor sought — such detachment. Its practitioners and researchers have remained close to institutions, people, and the moral ambiguities of organizational life. Precisely because accounting must justify numbers, not merely generate them, it has evolved toward reflexivity.

Over recent decades, accounting research has engaged deeply with anthropology, sociology, environmental science, and philosophy. It has explored how numbers construct realities, how reporting frameworks shape moral perception, and how different cultures enact accountability. It has recognized that measurement is not neutral but constitutive — that to account is to create a world of meaning.

This interdisciplinary openness has made accounting the more conceptually adventurous field. It has produced languages for social and ecological accountability, for feminist and postcolonial critique, for reimagining value beyond profit. While finance pursued abstraction, accounting rediscovered relation.

4. The Epistemic Consequences: Finance Without Culture

The narrowing of finance has not only intellectual but planetary consequences. A discipline that disavows culture cannot understand the crises it helps to produce. The failures of contemporary finance — speculative excess, systemic inequality, environmental degradation — are not mere market anomalies; they are the predictable outcomes of an epistemology that denies its own moral content.

When finance models trust as “counterparty risk,” it translates a social virtue into a technical variable. When it treats ecological limits as “externalities,” it renders the living world an afterthought to price dynamics. The language of finance has become incapable of moral imagination. It can describe liquidity but not loyalty, growth but not goodness.

In this sense, finance today faces an epistemic crisis: it cannot think beyond the metaphors that sustain its own blindness. The more it refines its models, the less it perceives the world.

5. Intercultural Wisdom and the Possibility offered by my book ‘Organic Finance‘

Yet all over the world, cultures have cultivated other forms of value practice — organic, contented, and grounded in reciprocity. From the communal credit systems of West Africa and South Asia, to the gift economies of the Pacific, to the cooperative banking movements of Europe and Latin America, there exists a vast repertoire of financial wisdoms that build trust and community rather than expropriate or destroy.

These traditions remind us that finance is not a law of nature but a social and moral technology. It can either deepen relationship or dissolve it. The study of such intercultural practices does more than offer ethical inspiration; it offers epistemological repair. They demonstrate that value can be measured in continuity rather than accumulation, in sufficiency rather than excess, in stewardship rather than speculation.

An organic finance would therefore not reject quantitative modeling, but situate it within the wider ecology of meaning. It would reframe fiduciary duty as the care of shared futures. It would regard liquidity not as freedom from attachment, but as the rhythm of reciprocal circulation. It would ask not merely, How much return? — but Return to what?

6. Conclusion: Toward a Re-Embedded Epistemology of Value

The widening of finance’s epistemology is not a matter of academic diversification but of civilizational necessity. The planetary crises of inequality and environment expose the moral limits of a system that has confused objectivity with truth. Finance must recover its cultural and ethical memory — its origins in trust, obligation, and the care of continuity.

Accounting has shown that it is possible to integrate critique, culture, and community into the study of numbers without losing rigor. Finance must now do the same. It must learn again that value is not an object to be measured but a relationship to be honored.

The renewal of finance as a truly human science will depend on its willingness to listen — to the plurality of wisdoms that already know how to live well with the world. In their grounded, organic, and contented practices lies not nostalgia, but the epistemic future of value.