Accounting, Foucault and debates about management and organizations

Abstract

Purpose Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history. Design/methodology/approach Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas. Findings Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later. Originality/value This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.

The strange potential of ANTi-History: a reply to Reveley

“…ANTi-History has been the subject of critique (Bowden, 2018, 2019, 2021; Mollan, 2019; Muldoon, 2020, 2021; Bowden and Stevenson-Clarke, 2020). Some have been “colourful” (Mollan, 2019, p. 504) because of both the style in which they are penned and their inconsistency.…”

Accounting and accountability practices in the obraje of San Ildefonso of Quito: An eighteenth century productive proto-capitalist model

“…In 1767, when the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish domain, the company's assets were confiscated by a new institution specifically created for that role by the State: The Administration of Temporalidades . This institution had the task of recording all the assets belonging to the Jesuits, verifying the rents and debts and then administering them on behalf of the crown, or selling them, according to whichever was deemed most convenient (Cushner, 2011).…”

“…Most recent governmentality studies in this literature have consequently presented a new perspective on the use of accounting systems. Research has shifted from consideration of accounting as an instrument for information and data collection to determine managerial decisions, to a multi-purpose instrument, adaptable to differentiated control needs (Bowden and Stevenson-Clarke, 2020;Ezzamel and Bourne, 1990;Hopwood, 1987Hopwood, , 1990. In this sense, following the outline provided by the studies of Michel Foucault (1979Foucault ( , 1980, the accounting history literature has deepened the relationship between knowledge and power, highlighting the role exercised by accounting as a tool to 'know' (Ezzamel, 1994;Heizmann and Olsson, 2015;Hoskin and Macve, 1986;Maran et al, 2016;Miller and O'Leary, 1987).…”

Bridging the Understanding of Sustainability Accounting and Organizational Change

“… 1. Rather than scientific disciplines in themselves, research on organization studies and accounting may be considered separate sub-disciplines of the business and management discipline as a common branch of knowledge (Woodside, 2016). However, as in previous papers comparing the development of both research streams (see, for instance, Bowden & Stevenson-Clarke, 2021), we will refer to research on organization studies and accounting as “disciplines” of their own to emphasize the fact that they seem to have been developed, at least as far as to the study of the link between SAR and organizational change is concerned, as autonomous and somehow disconnected arenas. …”