Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa

Accounting [1_TD$IF]for meaning: On 22 of David Foster Wallaces

The Pale King
[TD$FIRSNAME]Christopher[TD$FIRSNAME.] [TD$SURNAME]Michaelson[TD$SURNAME.] *
[2_TD$IF]Ethics & Business Law, University of St. Thomas, Opus College of Business, 1000 LaSalle Avenue, TMH 443, [3_TD$IF]Minneapolis, MN 55402, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history: The Pale King (2011) is David Foster Wallaces iconic portrait and parody of a modern
Received 4 February 2014 workplace that is also, not accidentally, an accounting institution [6_TD$IF] namely, the United
Received in revised form 31 December 2014 States Internal Revenue Service. Many reviewers summarize its topic as boredom [7_TD$IF] of
Accepted 5 January 2015
work in general, and tax accounting in particular. However, its longest section is a nearly
Available online xxx
one hundred-page, rst-person narrative of how one Chris Fogle found his calling in
accounting, including an accidental encounter with a professor who deemed it to be
[8_TD$IF]Keywords:
nothing less than heroic. Examined through the lens of ethical criticism, 22 of The Pale
Accounting
Critical theory King is an important text for examining moral questions about what makes work
Ethical criticism meaningful and whether we have obligations to perform it ourselves and provide it to
Meaningful work others. Through the lens of literary critical theory, it can also be read as a commentary on
the meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) of accounting and what its methods imply about
what has meaning and value in work and life.
2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. An introduction to [9_TD$IF]The Pale King

David Foster Wallaces (DFWs) The Pale King (PK) [10_TD$IF](2011) is that rare work of serious literature that examines the sort of
work done in ofces, particularly its potential to drain meaning from human life. Such work is often satirized in television
and lm but usually lurks only in the background of great literature, an incidental feature of characters lives marginalized by
endeavors more interesting and allegedly more central to the human condition as love, hate, war, peace, crime, and
punishment. PK depicts work [1_TD$IF] tax accounting in a public sector institution, in particular [12_TD$IF] that routinely involves, well,
routines, pushing paper and counting numbers that add up to the possibility of radical boredom. This boredom is sometimes
even more coercive than what is experienced by manual laborers working with their hands to manufacture things, producing
alienation and abuse that eats away from within. At the same time that PK explores large ethical issues about the role of
meaningful work in the good life, it can be explored critically as a treatise on how accounting professionals make meaning
and how their work shapes identities along with ethical and material worldviews.

The author thanks Bruce Buchanan of New York University for reviewing an early draft of this paper and for hours of conversation about DFW in
particular and literature in general. The author also thanks Brian Shapiro of the University of St. Thomas for thoughtful direction on accounting scholarship.
In addition, the author thanks a team of University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business MBA candidates in Spring 2013 and a team of New York University
Stern School of Business MBA candidates in Summer 2014 for taking a risk and reading PK for a class project, inspiring themselves and others to think
critically how we account for and make meaning in business.
* Tel.: +1 651 962 4349.
E-mail address: cmmichaelson@stthomas.edu

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2015.01.013
1045-2354/ 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
2 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx

22 of PK [13_TD$IF] the longest continuous narrative in Wallaces nal, unnished, posthumously published novel [14_TD$IF] is the story of
one such ofce worker and how he went from his wasted youth to work at the United States Internal Revenue Service. Like
most of Wallaces oeuvre, it is broadly a paradigm for the life of consciousness (Burn, 2014), how our ability to perceive
thoughtfully inuences our ability to live meaningfully. More specically, it is an iconic exploration of accounting [15_TD$IF] its
potentially heroic imposition of meaning upon the world, and its potentially pointless assignation of value to phenomena the
meaning of which cannot be accounted for in the language and worldview of accounting.

2. Method and research questions

Even while DFWs work is taken seriously by contemporary literary critics, PK is unlikely to be known by and considered
relevant to scholars of work, management, accounting, and ethics. Soon after his death in 2008, Wallace was anointed by
critics and contemporaries as the best mind of (Scott, 2008) and voice of a generation (Max, quoted in Raz, 2012). He was
notorious enough to elicit from his well-known peers expressions of both affable envy (e.g., Zadie Smiths Wallace. . . can do
anything with a piece of prose. . .Goddamn him (2000, quoted in Raine, 2013)) and jealousy (e.g., Bret Easton Ellis tedious,
overrated, tortured, pretentious (Flood, 2012)). Several anthologies of Wallace criticism have already been published, an
unusually rapid scholarly response following the rst international colloquium on his work in 2009 (Hering, 2010). However,
the serious consideration of narrative ction as an instrument and object of scholarship of accounting and other
management-related disciplines remains rare ([16_TD$IF]Author, in press; Badaracco, 2006; Younkins, 2014). Moreover, PK scholarship
is in its infancy (Burn, 2014) and the book may yet be undiscovered by many accounting and management scholars who
might have a use for or interest in it.
In one respect, this paper uses PK as a narrative instrument through which to explore moral questions about work in
general. Ethical criticism, as this aspect of the analysis can be termed, employs a story as an instrument of life, studying the
decisions and actions of characters to examine the behaviors of real people. Literature captures our interest and attention
(Posner, 1998), cultivates our moral imagination (Werhane, 1999) and moral elevation ([17_TD$IF]Algoe & Haidt, 2009), elicits
situational attention to concrete scenarios (Nussbaum, 1990), develops sympathy (Booth, [18_TD$IF]1988; Weisberg, 1992) and
emotional intelligence (Kreamer, 2012; Mar[19_TD$IF], Djikic, & Oatley, 2008), offering a reective alternative to the constant forward
push of the world of work (Author, 2011) to aid in the humanistic formation of managers (Gagliardi, 2006). [20_TD$IF]Using stories to
explore human morality comes naturally to us (Gottschall, 2012), and Wallace evolved into an author who expected and
encouraged readers to apprehend his work this way (Burn, 2012). While engaging in ethical criticism does not by itself make
human beings more ethical (Booth, 1988; Posner, 1998), the intentional examination of ethical aspects of the human
condition, such as the performance and provision of meaningful work, can be a step toward cultivating better behaviors and
lives (Nussbaum, 1990; Younkins, 2014). Ethical criticism does not shy away from labeling PK a great novel insofar as it
greatly serves a central function of literature (from the standpoint of ethical criticism) to enable moral examination.
In another respect, this paper approaches PK as a discursive text that is part of the interplay between its author, its
audience, and the world outside (Hartman, 1992). This critical perspective on literature is less concerned with the story as a
contained whole and more attuned to the readers relation to the narrative and the narratives relation to the social
conditions which gave rise to a work of art about boredom in an accounting institution and the way in which accounting
inuences the worldviews of those who do it. The son of a Wittgenstein scholar, Wallace irts in PK with both the early
Wittgensteins theory of language in which accounting functions representationally, purporting to constitute an accurate
picture of reality, and the late Wittgensteins anti-realist epistemology, in which the language of accounting introduces order
onto the world but in doing so also coercively imposes its perspective on what is and what is not worth accounting for. From
this vantage point, the essentiality of PK is in the interplay between these competing worldviews and how they lead
accountants to explain their reason for being [21_TD$IF] and, more generally, how they inuence accountants and others perception
of meaning in the workplace and in life.
Thus, the research method of this paper applies these literary critical methods to the analysis of PK, traversing disciplinary
boundaries between the humanities, accounting, and social sciences in the context of management and work. Chris Fogles
story in 22 is an afrmation of the calling he hears to enter the accounting profession and also a break from mostly negative
narratives about accounting, which when performed at the Internal Revenue Service is often rendered to be one and the same
with boredom. It is the lengthiest of several excerpts in the book from an unidentied narrators interview project of IRS
employees on how they came to work there. Underlining the general theme of boredom in PK are some of these interviewees
reections on their workplace, including several in 14, the section in which the interviews begin: observing that people who
have worked at the IRS for more than thirty years have the look of being blind (Interviewee #945634233), wanting to write a
play with a man at a desk doing nothing until the audience leaves (917229047), wasting time trying to read other peoples
handwriting (965882433), having a high pain tolerance (947676541), and seeing many IRS employees being in a Stare, not
even daydreaming but just staring (943756788). Although the themes and contrasts that situate 22 within PK certainly
warrant analysis, focusing here on 22 allows for a fuller examination of the themes that it uniquely introduces.
22 has been described by one critic as the moral center of PK (Miller, 2011). The narrative arc of the section covers
Fogles years as an aimless college student, doing drugs while transferring in and out and from institution to institution and
his divorced parents divide on whether he needs someone to squeeze his shoes (a phrase which Fogle attributes to his
father repeatedly) or to offer unconditional love and support (which his mother offers seemingly out of guilt). The section
contains climactic material [2_TD$IF] both in the form of a Jesuit accounting professors sermon to future accountants and in Fogles
 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx 3

own conviction to follow that professors direction [23_TD$IF] about the meaning and purpose of accounting. Typical of the
misdirection in the narrative and in Fogles life, he only hears the sermon because he has mistakenly entered the wrong
classroom. Fogle resolves to transform his world for the better through accounting and thus concludes his account of how he
ended up working for the IRS.
Fogles discovery of a meaningful calling in accounting stands in contrast both to his own wastoid years and the lives
wasting away in boredom in many other sections of PK. It can be read as a microcosm of PK as a whole, in which the
preponderance of activity (in 22, doing drugs, watching television, working odd jobs; in the novel, waiting for a smoking
break, making idle conversation, poring over tax returns) seems neither to have an end in time nor in purpose but surrounds
brief but momentous episodes of apparent enlightenment (in 22, when Fogle accidentally wanders into the classroom
where the professor delivers the soliloquy on the heroism of accounting, seeming to rise above the line items of tax returns
and balance sheets to see the whole; in the novel, in such episodes as a trafc jam, when the narrator seems to rise above
the congestion to propose a simple reconguration of roads that would alleviate frustration for thousands of drivers and
passengers each day). Just as Wallace blurs the distinction between narrative and reality by posing as David Wallace, the
narrator, within certain sections of his novel into which he mixes partial truths, the author does not make it perfectly clear
whether the reader is to trust Fogles account of becoming an accountant. Fogles story is told with disarming candor that
makes it [24_TD$IF] despite fantastical elements involving his fathers death (arguably one of the most spectacularly descriptive
tragicomic scenes in the entire history of literature) and the encounter with the other-worldly accounting professor [25_TD$IF]
perfectly believable, but on another level the reader may be left to wonder whether the author really means to give credence
to the possibility that accounting could be heroic. Or rather is he mocking the idea by allowing Fogle to buy into it?
Analyzed from the standpoint of ethical criticism, 22 thus raises at least three important questions about the
intersection between moral responsibility and work. The rst is raised by Fogle himself and his journey from wastoid to
accounting professional: Do workers have a moral obligation to seek meaningful work? The second is suggested by Fogles
and other employees experiences of working within an institution that for some seems what they were born to do and for
others seems purposeless: Do employers have an obligation to provide meaningful work? The third is suggested by the
professor, who in his intonation that they are being called to account gives his students some foundations from which to
make meaning of their chosen profession: What makes work (in general, or accounting in particular) meaningful?
These questions intersect with important research questions to an accounting profession faced both with the practical
challenge of calling future students and professionals to it and justifying its contribution to the good life in a world of scarce
resources, increasingly attuned to the value of seemingly immeasurable things: How do narratives reinforce or challenge
accountant stereotypes? What makes accounting satisfying and signicant? How should value be accounted for? How value
is accounted for may in turn inuence why accountants do what they do and accounting institutions conception of why
performing their work may or may not be satisfying, signicant, and ultimately, meaningful.

3. Do workers have a moral obligation to seek meaningful work?

Research on meaning, meaningfulness, and work traverses a variety of disciplines, and there is no denite consensus on
the meaning of meaningful work. However, there are points of conuence between the work of organization scholars and
philosophical ethicists. Organization scholars have employed primarily a psychological perspective (Author et al., 2014;
Rosso[26_TD$IF], Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010) that considers meaning from the perspective of the working subject. While meaning is
value-neutral and should imply only signication, meaningfulness is perceived to have a positive valence (Rosso et al.,
2010) and to be purposeful and signicant (Pratt [27_TD$IF]& Ashforth, 2003). So, from a subjective perspective, meaningful work is
any work that the subject considers to be meaningful. Ethics scholars, on the other hand, have often employed a
philosophical perspective (Author et al., 2014) to consider meaningfulness in the form of job characteristics (Bowie, 1998)
and conditions (Arneson, 1987; Schwartz, 1982) required to protect workers alleged moral right to seek work that is
subjectively meaningful to them. However, the characteristics themselves may not make work meaningful. Rather, they
preserve the possibility that workers may have the autonomy to choose work that is meaningful. Taking the work of
organization and ethics scholars together, meaningful work has been said to have these subjective and objective
dimensions (Ciulla, 2000). Although meaningfulness may be necessarily subjective (Pratt [27_TD$IF]& Ashforth, 2003: 311), it must
have objective attractiveness (Wolf, 1997: 211) in the sense that it must matter (OBrien, 1996) and is often
worthwhile (Metz, 2012). Psychologists (Wrzesniewski[28_TD$IF], McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997) and philosophers (Pence,
2001) have proposed tripartite theories of work as jobs (or labor), careers (or workmanship), and callings, whereby jobs are
generally subjectively perceived merely to be a means to other ends, whereas callings are meaningful ends in themselves
(although they may at the same time serve other valuable ends), the highest level of subjective career success (Dobrow [29_TD$IF]&
Tosti-Kharas, 2011: 1004).
Fogles story in 22 of PK invokes a related question not generally posed by the psychological or philosophical literature:
Do workers have a moral obligation to seek meaningful work? This question is suggested by Fogles self-deprecating
narrative in which he characterizes his life before accounting as so much wasted time. Fogles apathetic youth may also be
seen to emerge from the specic context of that narrative: late 20th-century suburban American afuence and permissive
parenting, in which difdence is an option, failure is not catastrophic, and the pursuit of subjective meaningfulness is an
available luxury. To the extent that early 21st-century economic shifts have increased prosperity and income inequality in
4 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx

some emerging markets at the same time, the question as to whether seeking meaningful work is a moral obligation is ever
more universally relevant.
Fogle unburdens himself of his narrative in response to an off-the-page question from an unidentied questioner as to
how I arrived at this career (156), an adult reecting on his lost youth as a self-described wastoid (164). An ordinary,
middle-class, post-Boomer late-1970s American student cycling his way through three different colleges before discovering
his calling, Fogle thinks back on his existence as a kind of nihilist (164) with a sort of necessary regret, as though it were a
painful but unavoidable process required to achieve his present position. He went through the motions of classes without a
conscious appreciation of their purpose, experimented with drugs and alcohol, and maintained an arrogance even though
he had never to that point done anything of which to be proud. His mother and father, who separated during those years,
clashed over how to spur him to achievement, his mother insisting that he was trying to nd [his] path in life (158). His
father, who would turn out to be the more inuential gure in Fogles eventual career choice, agonizes over his sons
aimlessness [30_TD$IF] particularly, his lack of employability [31_TD$IF] as a moral failure, planting the seed for Fogles introspection. At a loss
for what to do, the father at turns vocally threatens to withdraw nancial support for the sons education or [32_TD$IF] as when he
returns home early from meetings only to nd his son and two friends taking bong hits in his living room [3_TD$IF] silently turns
away, resigned to his sons catastrophic lack of regard for anything that matters. This view, that nihilism is a choice that we
are free to make but that so choosing is morally wrong [34_TD$IF] is a perspective that the son will come to share with his father: I
was, in a way, too free, or. . .this kind of freedom wasnt actually real [35_TD$IF] I was free to choose whatever because it didnt really
matter. But that this, too, was because of something I chose [36_TD$IF] I had somehow chosen to have nothing matter (225). Fogles
view of his lifes work to that point echoes DFWs view of the modern workplace, that workers and their employers
go through motions without reecting upon whether any of it matters [37_TD$IF] or without reecting upon their measures of
what matters.
The idea, that nding ones path in life means discovering ones place in the market for work, places great expectations
upon work to be more meaningful than it often seems. How can one live the good life if ones so called real jobs are
unbelievably boring and meaningless (157), as Fogles between-college attempts at discovering motivation were,
providing parking garage security, taking tickets at a sports arena, and working the cheese product injector. . .on
the production line at a Cheese Nabs plant (157), not only seemingly pointless but even arguably deleterious to the good
life. Between such jobs he would re-enroll in college, determined to avoid the fate of his father, who had not had the
luxury of parents who enabled an extended period of directionless exploration. The elder was perceived by the younger to
have settled for his career out of economic and practical necessity: He had wanted to go to more than just technical
college but he had bills to pay. . .The point is that he was very smart and somewhat unfullled, like many of his
generation (169).
These ideas together [38_TD$IF] that nihilism is a moral failure and that meaning in life is to be sought through meaningful work [39_TD$IF]
raise the question as to whether workers are morally obligated to seek meaningful work. On the one hand, the Protestant
ethic (Weber, 1958), embodied by Chris father, might extol the virtue of most hard work even if the work itself does not have
overtly moral ends. On the other hand, the unwillingness of the son to settle for mindless work that he perceives as
meaningless, or for that matter mindlessly to follow his fathers dutiful path to work without consideration for meaning,
might be perceived to be morally admirable. After all his years of aimlessness, he discovers his calling. Recounting
his unlikely path to the Internal Revenue Service, Fogle concludes, The fact is that there are probably just certain kinds of
people who are drawn to a career in the IRS (178), who, as an accounting instructor put it in a seminal moment in the
students development, are called to account (235). The actual manner by which Chris believes he was called to account
involves a comical combination of events involving mistaken perception: rst, believing against reason that a soap opera
television announcer is speaking directly to him about his lack of direction in life, and then mistakenly entering the wrong
college classroom in which he is introduced to accounting. Anecdotally, this chain of events suggests that the discovery of
ones calling might involve the intervention of fortune. Meanwhile, not all workers are so fortunate. Much of the worlds
population depends upon the very forms of work [40_TD$IF] factory jobs and menial labor (ILO, 2006) [41_TD$IF] that Chris has the economic
standing to reject because of the parental assistance he receives. In this respect, his freedom to choose to work or not to work
until he falls into his calling is a comparative luxury. That is, we can deduce the message that workers may have an obligation
to seek their callings, and although they may deserve moral admiration if they are fortunate enough to nd it, they may not
deserve moral blame if it eludes them.
Similarly, supernaturalist theories of the meaning of life suggest that a good life involves the search for meaning but does
not necessarily require nding it (Flew, 1963) if the discovery of meaning is beyond the moral agents control (Metz, 2002).
Meaning of life theories generally nd meaning and meaningfulness in some higher purpose [42_TD$IF] often spiritual for
supernaturalist theories and a rationally derived end in itself for naturalist theories. Those ends in the latter case may involve
certain rewards (Audi, 2005), achievements ([43_TD$IF]Brogaard & Smith, 2005; James, 2005), moral conduct (Dahl, [4_TD$IF]1987; Thomas,
2005), and achievement of self-understanding (Velleman, 2005) as foundations of a meaningful life. On either set of theories,
work is that walk of life through which human beings have substantial opportunity to pursue that search or obtain those
forms of self-realization. Through Fogles story, DFW goes farther than the scholarly literature to connect work to the pursuit
of meaningful life. He suggests [45_TD$IF] much as he said in his speech, This is Water (2009) which warned of dreary, annoying,
seemingly meaningless routines of which adult daily life is composed if the adult in question doesnt choose consciously
what to do and think about [46_TD$IF] that in a world in which work is so central to human identity, workers who do not continuously
engage in the search for their calling have morally failed themselves.
 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx 5

4. Do employers have a moral obligation to provide meaningful work?

Like philosophical perspectives on meaning, the management literature on calling (e.g., Dobrow [47_TD$IF]& Tosti-Kharas, 2011;
Rosso et al., 2010; Wrzesniewski et al., 1997) positions it as morally admirable but not obligatory. [48_TD$IF]Dobrow and Tosti-Kharas
(2011: 1003)[49_TD$IF] dene calling as a consuming, meaningful passion people experience toward a domain. They go on to
associate calling with certain elements of experience. These include a feeling of destination, as when Fogle compares how he
fell into accounting to a Christian girls salvation story. . .that enormous, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, life-changing
experienc[e], the product of everything in your previous life-experience which has led up to it and made you exactly who
and what you are when the experience hits you (216). A second element is centrality to ones identity, illustrated by Fogles
belief that most of what I really know about myself I learned in the Service (167). Another element is the sense that ones
work is signicant; for example, how Fogle is moved by the accounting instructors assertion that the accounting profession
to which you aspire is heroic (230). A nal element is passion about the calling domain.
This element of passion runs counter to the impression of boredom which permeates Fogles account of his work,
however, and to the overall thesis of PK. During the initial recruiting presentation that Fogle attends, he observes that there
were also several intervals when the recruiter trailed off and sat in a heavy, incongruous silence during which he may or may
not have been asleep (248). Fogle concludes that it is an act, part of a test of recruits to determine whether they had the
characteristics necessary to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion, and
absence of comprehensive info. The Service was. . .looking for cogs, not spark plugs (249). Ironically, tedium is the dening
characteristic of the in-service meetings that Fogles father had to attend during his sons wastoid years that form the
impression in the younger man, before his revelatory experience, that work is something to be avoided for as long as possible.
Then, during the revelation, the professor who inspires Fogle justies his characterization of accounting as heroic because it
requires the courage to overcome boredom: Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often
tedious? Perhaps. But brave?. . .Enduring tedium over real time in a conned space is what real courage is (231).
What sets Fogles acceptance apart from some other characters experience of boredom in PK is that he has somehow
bought into the very sense of obligation to endure tedium that as a young man he could not understand in his father. One of
Fogles co-workers at Lake James Illinois IRS Post 047 is Lane Dean, Jr., who works there to support his wife and baby who
became his family when he reluctantly committed to marry after inadvertently getting his girlfriend pregnant. This was
boredom beyond any boredom hed ever felt (379). Between the tedium of examining les, Dean listens to the ambient
sounds of ripping paper and the squeaky wheels of the carts used to deliver les to desks like his to which he is conned;
counts his progress, motivated but also tormented by the knowledge that his productivity is being measured; stares into
space; shuts his eyes but instead of praying for inward strength now he found he was just looking at the strange reddish
dark and the little ashes and oaters in there (380), disappointed on opening them that it is not yet time for a break, those
fteen-minute intervals toward which he desperately lurches during the intervening tedium. Never before in his life up to
now had he once thought of suicide (380). Another early section of PK relates a news report about another colleague of Fogle
and Dean who died at his desk from a heart attack on a Tuesday but was not discovered until Saturday. He was very focused
and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didnt say anything. He was always
absorbed in his work, and kept to himself (30). Readers who have known such work or such people may laugh in recognition
of these experiences, but not because they are actually funny. Rather, they point out the obvious to the reader who has been
inured by the apparent urgencies of life and work to accept the unacceptable. Ofce boredom, when not disrupted by a sense
of meaning or by other mitigating factors, has real adverse effects, harming health (Watson, 2012), producing stress
(Brennan [50_TD$IF]& Vinter, 2012) and unhappiness (Gann, 2012), leading to self-centeredness (de Rond, 2012), and ultimately stiing
productivity (Goudreau, 2012). The tragedy that DFW highlights is that there are institutions, and managers of those
institutions, which provide such work to employees. Those employees become conditioned to tolerate the daily pain, what
Studs Terkel referred to in Working [51_TD$IF](1974) as a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
DFWs only biographer to date, D.T. Max, surmises that DFWs own death, by suicide, was caused partially by despair over
boredom (2012). Not his own boredom, necessarily, for he was more likely to feel creative frustration at the multiplicity of
ideas and opportunities seeking to emerge from his pen (like trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm (Max,
2009)), and depression, to which he was evidently predisposed. But a good deal of that depression was about a world that, in
DFWs other writing, was all too enamored of escapist entertainment, and in PK, was all too willing to accept boredom as a
necessary condition of work. The tedium which DFW describes in the working lives of accountants is eerily similar to the
work-lives of Adam Smiths pin-manufacturers from whose experience of repetitiveness we are expected naturally to recoil
(Schwartz, 1982) and de Bottons [52_TD$IF](2009: 242) public accountants who seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work
which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. The reader of The Wealth of Nations is not supposed to be the assembly-line
worker but rather the capitalist, deploying resources to realize the productive powers of labor. In PK, ticking and tying tax
returns is depicted as a gloried variation on assembly-line work while wearing fancier clothes, without the benet of a
tangible work product. The reader might be a worker seeing herself or himself in those clothes, or a critical reader, perceiving
the blue-collar laborer in white-collared clothes.
But boring work is not necessarily meaningless work, as explained by the professor who termed accounting heroic.
Necessary work can be meaningful because it is necessary while being tedious nevertheless. What the accounting professor
reveals, and what research corroborates, is that we can craft meaningful work by imbuing it with a higher, potentially even
heroic, purpose (Wrzesniewski [53_TD$IF]& Dutton, 2001). Fogles job is similar to Deans, but Fogles approach to it is hopeful whereas
6 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx

Deans is hopeless. In this regard, meaningful work is made by the employee; employers make or break the opportunity for
employees to seek meaningful work. Thus has the management literature on the meaning of work raised the question as to
whether and to what extent organizations should engage in the management of meaning (Pratt [54_TD$IF]& Ashforth, 2003) as a
method, for example, of improving the subjective experience of work and thereby enhancing workplace productivity [5_TD$IF] or as a
warning that such practices could devolve into manipulation (Author et al., 2014; Pratt[56_TD$IF], Pradies, & Lepisto, 2013). Ethicists
have generally gone far enough to set minimum conditions for meaningful work, such as moral and mental autonomy and
fair compensation (Bowie, 1998; Schwartz, 1982), and employee participation in workplace governance (Hsieh, [57_TD$IF]2005;
Moriarty, 2010). But as much as they have steered clear of meaningless work, they have not gone as far as PK to aspire to work
that contributes to meaningful life, to challenge the very attitudes and practices that permit desperate boredom to be an
accepted fact of organizational existence (Author, 2005).

5. What is the value of meaningful work?

In the seminal episode in which Fogle discovers he has been called to account, the instructors speech about heroism
occurs after class has formally ended. He exhorts his students [58_TD$IF] along with Fogle, who is there by mistake, meaning to
attend a Political Science class but having wandered into an Advanced Tax class instead [59_TD$IF] to inform you of certain
truths. . .You will hesitate, you will feel dread and doubt [about] dolorous forecasts as to the sheer drudgery of the
profession you are choosing, the lack of excitement or chance to shine on the athletic elds or ballroom oors of life
heretofore [60_TD$IF](229230). Outside of clocked time, the professor reects on the meaning of that of which, inside of clocked
time, he has been reviewing the ner technical points. It is as though the professor realizes, like the early Wittgenstein, that
what really matters in life must be expressed outside of the formal boundaries which conne us, external to our formal
linguistic capability to express. And yet, on the precipice of that realization, the professor ultimately gets the world wrong,
as the early Wittgenstein did: In todays world, boundaries are xed, and most signicant facts have been generated.
Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classication, organization,
presentation (234). The mistaken worldview which the instructor articulates is that anything of signicance can be
captured in the quantitative language of accounting.
As Fogle listens in awe of this accounting spiritualist, he begins to believe he has found his path in life, while he gets
the markers of that path somewhat wrong. Walking into that lecture hall a different person than when he exits, he
immediately in the presence of that professor and the other students felt uncomfortable about my painters pants and
untied Timberlands (220). During the class, he observes with naive admiration many supercial markers of what he
comes to understand to be professional respectability: I suddenly, for the rst time, understood the meaning of my
fathers term no-nonsense, and why it was a term of approval (221). He notices, for example, that all the students take
notes [61_TD$IF] a capability which he observes requires a kind of intensively split concentration (221) to record the prior point
while taking in the next one. The reader is led then to wonder whether such split concentration is actually possible or if
by reecting on the moment prior one is actually failing to live in the present. He is further impressed by the way the
accounting students keep their multiple pencils sharp and lined up as if the next regiment of soldiers readying for battle.
They carry briefcases rather than backpacks to maintain their papers and conduct this and other aspects of their lives in
so organized a fashion that several digital watches beeped the hour in sync (227). On his way to becoming one of
them, Fogle transforms his own look in the only partially correct belief that the outer markers of the professional
accountant are, like the numbers he pores over, accurate representations of the meaning of what those markers and
numbers purport to represent: After that, the rst thing I can remember doing over the holiday recess in Libertyville
was getting a haircut. I also then went to Carson Pirie Scotts in Mundelein and bought a dark-gray ventless wool suit
[and] a pair of Nunn Bush leather wing tips and three dress shirts. . .of the button-down type [62_TD$IF](235236). As he
expresses without quite knowing the tragic signicance of what he is saying about a worldview in which everything
can be counted so it lulls one into not realizing the value of what cannot be monetized [63_TD$IF] This kind of work changes
you (156).
It is not as though Fogle is a completely changed person, converting to this buttoned-down accounting worldview. Even
before his conversion, he displays an unsettling tendency to get meaning wrong. While in elementary school, he goes
through a sudden period where I couldnt read [64_TD$IF] not literally, but where his brain counts the words rather than
appreciating their meaning. Sprinkled throughout the section is evidence of this almost idiot savantic tendency to lapse into
counting words. . .as a sort of background noise or unconscious process, a little like breathing [65_TD$IF](162163). This need for
numbers rescues him from the apparent aimlessness that he could not gure out for himself when studying literature, where
nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable. . .nobody ever explained. . .what your
ultimate motivation was supposed to be (157) [6_TD$IF] a deliberate contrast to accountings stereotypical bottom line thinking.
Unbeknownst both to the student and to the accounting instructor, it is just at the point that Fogle stops counting that they
begin to reect meaningfully on intangible value: Fogle focuses on the meaning of the words, which resist measurement,
instead of on the measurable number of words. In the midst of the instructors heroic speech, It suddenly occurred to me
that I had no idea how many words hed spoken since that 8,206th one at the conclusion of the review. I was aware of how
every detail in the classroom appeared very vivid and distinct. . .It felt as though he and I were at opposite ends of some kind
of tube or pipe, and that he really was addressing me in particular (232).
 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx 7

6. Accounting and/as/for meaningful work

Of course, the instructor was not addressing Fogle in particular, but in making sweeping generalizations about accounting
to a tax accounting audience, he succeeded in making Fogle feel as though a particular message had been addressed uniquely
to him. At the same time, the messages that Chris perceives as applying to him and that can be examined from the
perspective of ethical criticism can also be taken critically as claims about the way in which accounting inuences
perceptions of value among those whose world is inuenced by accounting. As demonstrated by the very existence and
content of this academic journal, there is a burgeoning community of scholars examining accounting-related texts
and phenomena from a critical perspective. In other management-related elds, this perspective has informed scholars
understanding of organizations as phenomena in and of language (Boje[67_TD$IF], Oswick, & Ford, 2004: 571), the meaning of
workspace design as reections of workers values and priorities (Strati, 1992), and the linkage between organizational codes
and identity (Romani [68_TD$IF]& Skzudlarek, 2014), intention (Holder-Webb [69_TD$IF]& Cohen, 2012), and power relations (Winkler, 2011) (as
summarized in Author, 2014).
The intonations of the accounting professor construct a heroic image of accounting as order in an otherwise chaotic
universe. This worldview accords with the early Wittgensteins association with the logical positivist creed that
meaningfulness is a function of veriability, that what matters can be measured. Meanwhile, Fogles penchant for counting
everything, including the number of words uttered by the professor in his speech, parodies the conation of quantication
with value. PK only covers a fraction of the accounting landscape, primarily tax accounting, yet at a very general level, the
tension between what is meaningful and what can be measured is a deeply important problem given novel treatment in 22
of PK and scholarly attention in academic research. One of the valuable contributions accounting can make to human well-
being is measuring what is measurable without mis-measuring what is meaningful but not measurable [70_TD$IF] whether we take
accounting to refer to the general practice of taking account of things, or to engaging in the profession of accounting.
As the late Wittgenstein might have expressed it, accounting is a language-game, a form of storytelling that seeks to make
sense of the world, frequently but not always in quantiable terms. Inasmuch as accounting is often thought of as imposing
measurements on hitherto incomparable phenomena, it performs a useful and even, as the professor in PK asserts, heroic
function. But when it imposes a common unit of measurement on hitherto incommensurable goods, the story it tells can
illuminate or falsify. Thus, Fogles professors image of accounting as an analytical discipline that creates order, but does not
actually create things, is itself not entirely true. Sometimes to the point of offensiveness, 22 of PK exaggerates the contrast
between the analytical and creative disciplines, exploits stereotypes about accountants and accounting, and caricatures the
worldview that quantitative data can accurately represent reality. Some of this is for literary effect, and some is no doubt a
relic of the fact that PK was left unnished. Nonetheless, to read 22 of PK as a narrative of meaningful work is also to account
for the meaningfulness of Fogles choice of profession.

6.1. Seeking meaningful work: How do narratives reinforce or challenge accountant stereotypes?

Fogle is arguably the only IRS accountant in PK who chooses his work to fulll a perceived moral obligation to seek
meaningful work. Many of the other accountants throughout PK exploit the same stereotypes that are prevalent in popular
culture and the public imagination: anti-social (represented in the extreme by the employee who dies at his desk and nobody
notices, and in relative moderation by the discomfort of Dean in talking to colleagues during smoking breaks), rigid (one of
the astounding qualities that makes PK a work of literary art is its ability to discuss technical tax statutes in an engaging way),
and dull (it is no accident that DFW chose accounting as the profession through which to explore the overriding theme of PK,
boredom). In short, these characteristics suggest a lack of interest in meaningfulness. The prevalence of these stereotypes in
popular culture have been studied by scholars examining lm (Beard, 1994; Dimnik [71_TD$IF]& Felton, 2006; Felton, Dimnik, & Bay,
2008) and others particularly concerned about the way public and especially student perceptions of accounting could shape
the future character and quality of the profession (Bougen, 1994; Friedman [72_TD$IF]& Lyne, 2001; Tinker & Koutsoumadi, 1997). It
should be noted that these studies [73_TD$IF] and perhaps with them, the stereotypes [74_TD$IF] tend to have a distinctively North American
perspective, as does PK, of course, although this does not render the characterizations altogether irrelevant in other cultural
contexts. Moreover, several of the studies note the necessity of grouping together unlike types of accountants (e.g., auditors,
bookkeepers, and tax accountants) into a single accountant stereotype for the sake of analysis.
DFW takes such liberties as well, for example by implying the general accountant stereotypes as depicted in such a highly
specialized setting as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service might apply to other accountants and even to the modern workplace
at large. However, even while the accountant caricature is taken to the extreme in Fogles perception of the briefcased,
professionally dressed, sharp-penciled students around him, he depicts an important element of variety amid the uniformity
in the form of the professor. That is to say that while the accounting students might manifest the very characteristics to
satisfy the stereotype that the mental models of ordinary people like Fogle at the time are programmed to perceive, the
professor himself is a radically different type: a hero, motivated by meaningful ends. Yes, he nds heroism in the orderliness
and order-making of the accounting profession, but he does so with eloquent panache, inspiring Fogle and the other students
in the lecture hall to a kind of silent, stunned rapture. Meanwhile, although Fogle himself cleans up and gets himself a suit,
the wastoid within him is evidence that, beneath the veneer of the stereotypical accountant he encounters in the lecture hall
and later, in the IRS, there remains endless human variety. Research studies have noted that although the beancounter
stereotype remains powerful in the public imagination, it is not the only type of accountant depicted in popular culture. For
8 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx

example, Dimnik and Felton (2006) nd a relatively even distribution in lms of accountant types: Dreamer (26%), Plodder
(24%), Eccentric (7%), Villain (23%), and even Hero (20%). Friedman and Lyne (2001) focus primarily on the beancounter
stereotype but note even within that basic image there is a wide variety of nuances.
Like the present study, scholarship that examines accounting in reference to narrative art seeks to use that art both to gain
greater insight into the human condition in general and the accountant in particular and to shape perceptions about the
human condition and the accountant. Lister (2010) argues that the study of literature can cultivate in accountants the ability
to make sense of ambiguity that is unavoidable even in situations requiring accounting rigor. Beard (1994) calls for more
such studies on meaning [75_TD$IF] by which we may suppose is meant both interpretive meaning in literature and meaningfulness
in life. In a study of how accountant ethics are depicted in lm, Felton et al. (2008) suggest that the impulse for accountants in
lms to behave ethically seems to come less from stereotypical adherence to professional codes and more from the pursuit of
human happiness. As in these examples, Fogle challenges accountant stereotypes to demonstrate the possibility that
accounting can answer the call to do work that one perceives to be meaningful.

6.2. Providing meaningful work: What makes accounting satisfying and signicant?

Employers obligation to provide meaningful work may be taken as a responsibility to provide work that is well-nigh
signicant or that is merely satisfying. In the parlance of the scholarly literature, as a result of the professors speech, Fogle
nds meaning in work (Pratt [27_TD$IF]& Ashforth, 2003), that is, a signicant purpose rendering a kind of moral justication for the
accounting endeavor. For example, accounting, in the form of internal auditing, has been characterized as a positive moral
force with the capacity to bring dark practices into the light of day, as in the Worldcom case, when Cynthia Cooper pursued
the truth as an ethical obligation (Boyce, 2013). The application of accounting methods to non-nancial (generally,
environmental and social) measurement and management has inspired claims that the profession is making progress in this
regard, from the relatively humble goal of estimating a fair price for externalities (Thornton, 2013) all the way to the lofty
achievement to help to realize heaven on earth (Molisa, 2011: 453).
Fogles pursuit of meaning in work might seem somewhat heavy (Boyce, 2013) for the average worker in PK who seems
to be bored with the mundane reality of working for pay. However, even for them, the quest for meaning at work [76_TD$IF]
practices that focus on enriching ones organizational membership (Pratt [27_TD$IF]& Ashforth, 2003: 317) but that do not rise to the
level of making a signicant social contribution [7_TD$IF] has the potential to enhance their job satisfaction. Numerous studies have
explored the relationship between the job satisfaction and commitment for accountants. For example, Aranya[78_TD$IF], Lachman, and
Amernic (1982) identify income, promotion, security, self-esteem, and autonomy as work needs the [79_TD$IF]fulllment of which can
determine both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Norris and Niebuhr (1983) nd linkages between
professionalism, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, and more recently, Suddaby[80_TD$IF], Gendron, and Lam (2009:
409) note that professional commitment obtains among a majority of accountants, despite profound changes in the context,
content and location of their work. These ndings suggest that in a eld about which there has been consternation (as
implied in several studies referenced above, as well as in Cory, 1992; Geiger [81_TD$IF]& Ogilby, 2000; James & Hill, 2009; Lan,
Okechuku, Zhang, & Cao, 2013) over the past few decades about how to supply the demand for talent, there are measurable
and manageable steps that can be taken to attract students whose quest for meaningfulness is primarily focused on having a
comfortable work environment and a predictable career path. Indeed, Nelson[82_TD$IF], Vendrzyk, Quirin, and Kovar (2008) nd that a
preponderance of students who major in accounting is most inuenced by the promise of job availability.
But will recruiting students who care more about a safe and predictable livelihood only serve to reinforce negative
stereotypes of the profession and to result in failure to achieve the loftier potential for signicance that some envision for it?
Multiple studies suggest already that accounting attracts a disproportionate share of students who favor the Sensing,
Thinking, and/or Judging Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (Andon[83_TD$IF], Chong, & Roebuck, 2010; Briggs, Copeland, & Haynes, 2007;
Haynes, Briggs, & Copeland, 2008; Swain & Olsen, 2012) in contradistinction to the arguably literary values (Intuiting,
Feeling, and Perceiving) represented by a work of narrative ction like PK. [84_TD$IF]Briggs et al. (2007: 511)[85_TD$IF] conclude that the
preponderance of STJ personality types entails that [w]e need a better mix of personality NOW, among other things to
ensure that alternative personality indicators are fairly valued by accounting methods and measures. The same authors in a
later article, however, propose that personality types may differ in different contexts, asserting that accountants
personalities may not be the same at work as they are at play. This assertion reinforces a critical point in PK, that if we are
consumed by our work, then our quest not only for meaningful work will either be fullled or fail there, but with it, our
chance for meaningful life will be exhausted by work. The pages outside of 22 are littered with characters who neither nd
meaning in nor at work, yet who have no identity outside of work. There is thus an interdependency among the three
questions that frame this analysis: the workers obligation to seek meaningful work, the employers obligation to satisfy that
ambition through the provision of choice, and how the profession meaningfully accounts for value.

6.3. The value of meaningful work: How should value be accounted for?

And so as PK in telling its story makes a powerful point about human value and work, it also reinforces a broader point
about value in general that some accounting scholars have been sounding for some time: that accounting is another form of
telling stories (Evans, 2009) and rendering history (McWatters [86_TD$IF]& Lemarchand, 2010) and that the ideal of valuing everything
with a common currency is a useful but unattainable ideal (e.g., McSweeney, 1997). Such concepts as intangible value and
 C. Michaelson / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxxxxx 9

goodwill have long been used as convenient buckets into which to place difcult-to-measure assets and more generally to
acknowledge the indeterminacy of valuation methods (Power, 2001). Ultimately, literary methods such as metaphor
(Walters-York, 1996) and narrative (Krom [87_TD$IF]& Williams, 2011) can help accounting methods tell a fuller, fairer, and more
understandable story, to render intangibles more tangible. Ultimately, although DFW showed considerable talents for
analytic philosophy in the tradition of the early Wittgenstein, he chose literature as his primary mode of expression (in
keeping with the ethos of the late Wittgenstein) because, as he suggested, it used more of his brain (Max, 2012).
Therein is the promise and possibility of non-nancial accounting and reporting, that as nancial accounting makes sense
of the torrent of nancial data (235), it can also potentially derive meaning from the torrent of non-nancial data. For
example, expressing the social and environmental legs of the three-legged stool of the triple bottom line in the language of
accounting confers meaning upon this information and, for some, may also give meaningful importance to it. Like the
professor, triple bottom line reporting exhorts the profession to expand its view of what matters beyond the nancial bottom
line but is limited by the very worldview demanded by the language of that bottom line and the requirement to measure the
potentially unmeasurable. The language of accounting is culturally constrained (Doupnik [8_TD$IF]& Richter, 2003), vulnerable to
gaps in correspondence between reference and referee (for example, regarding intangible assets) (Tollington [89_TD$IF]& Spinelli,
2012), and rife with unbearable ambiguity (McSweeney, 1997). To succumb then with full faith to that bottom-line
thinking, single or multiple, provides a full representation of value impoverishes our thinking about our different ways of
knowing, none of which are complete (Gleiser, 2010), and can even be potentially dangerous when we overemphasize
science at the expense of poetry (Midgley, 2002). Accounting is ultimately not the precise representation of life Fogles
accidental professor represents it to be. As the early Wittgenstein admitted, We feel that even if all possible scientic
questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all [90_TD$IF](1922: 6.52).

7. Literary ction and value

In this readers judgment, PK, especially 22, is a new classic, destined to endure in the slowly growing canon of literature
about work and accounting. Unfortunately, introducing PK through this medium of scholarly analysis risks ruining it in the
way that explaining a joke renders it unfunny, but doing so is necessary work. PK itself is not at all unfunny, evidence of
its authors prodigious talent to entertain while writing about boredom. Its answers to the three questions of ethical criticism
that structure this paper are emphatic: Yes, the failure to seek meaningful work for oneself is a moral failure, as
demonstrated in the wasted life of Chris Fogle before he gets serious about his vocation. Yes, the consequences of division of
labor [91_TD$IF] specialization that entails repetitive tedium without end [92_TD$IF] are morally tragic, all the more so because we accept
boredom as a necessary byproduct of productivity. And, the monetization of meaning is the ultimate step in this tragic
acceptance of the cliche that what gets measured gets done.
Critical theory also enables reection on the very meaning and value of accounting itself. PK equivocates about
accounting: Fogle, as the narrator of his own story, submits to the instructors extreme, hyper-orderly, economic caricature
of the accounting worldview. What is not captured by this worldview is an endlessly interesting narrative about the wastoid
life that Fogle left behind that resisted all order and accountability. This perspective on PK invites us to consider what else
that is full of meaning does measurement leave behind, potentially impoverishing human notions of value? As a classic
portrait and parody of a modern accounting institution and its stereotypically rigid worldview, PK is thus an anthem of the
potential meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) of accounting [93_TD$IF] why it is done, what makes it potentially satisfying and
signicant, and how it conditions and is conditioned by human conceptions of value.

Uncited references

[94_TD$IF]Bazerman and Tenbrunsel [96_TD$IF](2002) and Wallace (1996, 1997,

2003, 2009).

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Please cite this article in press as: Michaelson, C. Accounting [1_TD$IF]for meaning: On 22 of David Foster Wallaces The Pale
King. Crit Perspect Account (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2015.01.013