Accounting, Organizing, and Economizing: Connecting Accounting Research and Organization Theory

Michel Foucault and the Administering of Lives

“…Insofar as much of these attempts to act on the actions of others entail attempts to economize social relations (see Çalışkan & Callon, 2009Çalışkan & Callon, , 2010; see also Miller & Power, 2013), both within the already marketized realm and beyond, this linking of a concern with the subject and a preoccupation with relations of power enabled Foucault to provide a highly perceptive analysis of the phenomenon of liberalism and neo-liberalism. For such governmental rationalities depend on seeking to govern well by governing less.…”

“…This way of understanding and analysing the roles of accounting and its imbrication in a more general economizing of the entire social field is relatively recent (see also Miller & Power, 2013). From the 1950s to the 1970s, the social scientific understanding of calculative technologies in organizations remained dominated by behavioural studies of budgeting and management control systems (see e.g.…”

“…This, together with a reluctance on the part of some to set aside the comforting categories of domination and emancipation that Foucault's work did so much to transcend, means that there has been less attention to detailed empirical analysis of practices and the assemblages in which they operate, together with an overpreoccupation with theoretical micro-differentiation. As a result, we know rather less than we should about the remarkable transformations that have taken place across the past two decades and more in administrative apparatuses and the administering of lives in the West and the Rest (Hall, 1992), many of which have taken place within the orbit of neo-liberalism and associated endeavours to economize the entire social sphere (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009(Çalışkan & Callon, , 2010Mennicken, 2008;Mennicken & Miller, 2012;Miller & Power, 2013). …”

Quantifying, Economising, and Marketising: Democratising the social sphere?

“…But here again we counsel against taking economising as self-evident and constant over time. By economising, we mean the ideas and instruments through which individuals, activities, organizations, nation states, regions, projects, and much else besides are constituted as economic actors and entities (Miller and Power, 2013), a definition that has much in common with the definition proposed by Michel Callon and his colleagues (see e.g. Çalışkan and Callon, 2009; but see also Muniesa, 2014).…”

“…Finally, to get to grips with the power of numbers it is crucial to attend to the relations between quantifying and subjectifying (Foucault, 2001(Foucault, [1982; Mennicken and Miller, 2014;Miller and Power, 2013). Accounting measures, including prison and hospital performance ratings, quantifications of decency, mortality statistics and other performance measures, alter the power relations that they shape and are embedded within.…”