When Janice Stein is asked what the next generation of leaders will be like, she answers that they will be “risk-taking innovators with a conscience.”
A professor in U of T’s political science department, Stein holds many impressive academic credentials: the Harrowston Chair of Conflict Management, a founding director of the Munk Centre for International Studies, and the coveted title of University Professor. The latter is the highest distinction awarded to faculty at U of T, and is currently bestowed upon only 30 people.
Stein’s lecture, entitled “Held to Account: Challenges of Governance from the Local to the Global,” was presented last Monday at the Isabel Bader Theatre as part of the University Professor Lecture Series, an initiative sponsored by the Global Knowledge Foundation. Michael Goldberg, a fourth-year student and president of the foundation, explained that the purpose of the series is to “provide students with an opportunity to hear the great minds of the university.”
In her lecture, Stein raised the question of accountability in our society. She also distinguished between accountable government and responsible government, arguing that the old language of responsibility is increasingly being replaced with the narrow language of accountability. Stein argued that the system is blamed now rather than individuals taking responsibility—thus easing the conscience of the individual.
Using the institution of the family as an example, Stein asked whether parents should be held accountable for their teenage son or daughter caught driving drunk. If not, are they responsible? We confuse the meanings of accountability and responsibility when they actually mean quite different things, she said.
Serious challenges to corporate accountability are also becoming a matter of public debate, as the Enron scandal illustrated. To whom are corporations accountable? Stein said there is no clear answer.
The language of accountability will not take us as far as we need to go, Stein suggested. Accounting problems conceived in narrow terms are devoid of the aspect of responsibility. We need to “broaden our language of accountability beyond what we can measure to include values we don’t measure,” she said We need to think about responsibility. Stein warned that if we fail to think about responsibility, we will become “societies of accountants.”
