Accounting's sense of place and purpose is informed by social imaginaries. The imaginaries of the sphere of the economic, the public, and the planet help accountants make sense of their surroundings and the world at large, help them coordinate and form alliances with other forms of expertise, and frame their understanding of what matters. Recent disputes over materiality and declarations by the profession to serve the “people and the planet” suggest that accounting's sense of place and position is variable, yet its long-standing imaginaries indicate that it is also regular and steady. By discussing how imaginaries of the economic, the public and the planet prefigure how accounting connects us with the world from our “bubbles” (Sloterdijk), the paper makes a case for paying more attention to how these imaginaries shape our understanding of what accounting is about and can become, how they might lock accounting into position, and us with it.

Tacit coordination is a pervasive aspect of accounting practice. This paper teases out insights on tacit coordination from existing scholarship, starting with studies of everyday life accounting, then turning to professional practice. It develops an understanding that, in the application of rules and accounting standards, in producing, framing, auditing and using statements, records, apologies or excuses, accounting practitioners tacitly coordinate towards the passing of accounts. This passing can be articulated in terms of structures, agencies and processes of tacit coordination involved in making accounting happen. The implications of this understanding of accounting practice and the importance of the wider domain of enquiry it is indicating are discussed with respect to the stewardship position of accounting professionals and the further development of accounting theory. The passing of accounts charges accounting practitioners with the stewardship of silence and indicates a broader case for accounting theory to address the full continuum of accounting practices. One vital role of such theory is to offer antidotes against the idea that any account, any slice of information, or any amount of ‘big data’, could speak for itself – or that it should.