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The Impotence of Accountability: The Relationship Between Greater Transparency and Corporate Reform
Abstract
This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the “progressive era” in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to “publicity,” which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to turn the corporation into an entity more sensitive to the public interest. Specifically, two interrelated contributions are made to existing literature on accounting and corporate governance. Firstly, the paper documents the early historical development of the now taken‐for‐granted phenomenon of accounting and adjudicating at the entity level (Miller and Power 2013). Secondly, the paper offers a rejoinder to present‐day projects of corporate governance which identify better and enhanced accountability as key to the successful reform of the corporation. During the progressive era, accounting expanded and territorialized new spaces, bringing trusts out of a hitherto secretive, private realm and into the view of the public. Yet this was not enough to engender substantive corporate reform.
... This study provides two contributions to the existing literature. First, it highlights the coconstruction of efficiency auditing; its roots residing in the entanglement of various actors and the circulation of ideas (Miller et al. 2013;Mennicken, and Miller 2012;Radcliffe, Spence, and Stein 2017). We show that the territorialisation processes which drove the development of efficiency auditing were sustained by an audit programmatic that was not limited to the domestic arena. ...
... By interrogating the records of the time, we can see elements of the thinking of actors involved in the reform of government auditing in Canada, and we can see the products of their work. Our textual analysis sought to identify recurrent patterns of interest, goals and shared assumptions that became embedded in the Committee's deliberations (Free 2007;Radcliffe et al. 2017) [INSERT APPENDIX 1 HERE] In exploring these archival materials, we sought to understand the strategies of power that brought efficiency auditing to life in the Canadian context. As analysis of the data progressed, particular attention was paid to the tactics and initiatives of Auditors General and related actors in the presentation and acceptance of efficiency auditing as a legitimate technology of government. ...
... These items garnered further sustenance from hostile economic conditions in the early 1970s characterized by 5 In addition, a guide to "cost-benefit analysis" was later issued for use by departments and agencies in assessing existing programme and new proposals (Treasury Board of Canada 1976). 6 A similar dynamic is illustrated by Radcliffe et al. (2017) in a recent history of corporate governance in the US. 7 The Office of the Auditor-General was formed in 1878 with the appointment of John Lorn McDougall under the auspices of the Audit Act, 1878 (An Act to provide for the better auditing of the Public Accounts, S.C. 1878, c. 7, ss. ...
Previous research has highlighted the crucial roles that accounting plays in both the construction and development of the State. However, only limited attention has been paid to how accounting is both conceived and implemented as a technology of government. Taking a historical perspective, and through extensive archival analysis of the Canadian experience, we explore here the ways in which accounting practices were significantly expanded and elaborated over time. Progressively, accounting was successful in increasingly infiltrating the machinery of the State, resulting in greater power and influence being accorded to State accounting professionals. We contribute to existing governmentality research on accounting in two principal ways. Firstly, we demonstrate how the territorializing power of accounting has transnational dimensions. The Canadian initiative was galvanized by simultaneous initiatives taking place in the United Kingdom, the United States and a range of other Commonwealth nations. The similar trajectories of these various initiatives leads to a view of accounting as something that is co‐constructed across borders, a process we refer to here as transnational territorialization. Secondly, we demonstrate the crucial role played by key individuals in this transnational territorialization. Auditors‐General worked both individually, and in concert, to skillfully sell the evaluative potential of accounting to key power brokers in the State apparatus, thereby creating advantageous positions for themselves. This highlights the crucial role required by skillful and reflexive social agents in the elaboration of accounting technologies, something that hitherto has been under‐appreciated in extant literature on government auditing.
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... Despite the "dream" of a rational and perfect information seem to be still impossible (Radcliffe et al., 2017;Quattrone, 2016;Roberts, 2009), in today's society, accountability can be enhanced through digital innovation processes. Digital innovation allows for enhanced availability, richness, and usability of data, which are presumed (but not guaranteed) to favor the transparency of organizations' procedures (Maione et al., 2022), helping to articulate new forms of stakeholder involvement and participation on management issues (Secinaro et al., 2022), even more so during extraordinary times (Saint-Bonnet, 2001). ...
... This statement confirms that, when the agents-in-focus draw upon their conjuncturallyspecific internal structures, through a hermeneutic process, they tap into deep and detailed knowledge to be confident of the conclusions of their agency (Mutiganda and Jä rvinen, 2021). Although ensuring rational and perfect information is a utopia (Radcliffe et al., 2017;Quattrone, 2016;Roberts, 2009), pragmatic skills allow for sharing ideas and dialogue (Secinaro et al., 2022), increase stakeholders' participation, detect their expectations and foster new contextualized learning paths to cope with extraordinary times: ...
Purpose
This study aims to explore what and how digital innovation, as a knowledge-based and multi-dimensional process, can be used to increase the accountability of public and private sector organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
Taking an interpretivist approach, qualitative research is designed around Strong Structuration Theory (SST). A content analysis of relevant documents and semi-structured interviews focusing on the relationships between digital innovation and accountability in extraordinary times is conducted.
Findings
The results show the existence of digital innovation barriers and facilitators that can have an impact on accountability during extraordinary times. The research highlights how managers of public organizations focus largely on the social dimension of knowledge (i.e., competencies shaped by collective culture), while managers of private organizations focus mainly on the human dimension of knowledge (i.e., skills gained through learning by doing).
Research limitations/implications
The paper enriches the accountability literature by historicizing SST for extraordinary times and by utilizing a multiple-dimensional approach to digital innovation. Also, the work underlines specific strategies organizations could usefully adopt to improve accountability through digital innovation in the public and private sectors during extraordinary times.
Originality/value
This article emphasizes the crucial integration of technological components with knowledge. In particular, the digital innovation is considered as a strong synergy of human and social dimensions that compels organizations toward enhanced accountability, particularly in the face of extraordinary challenges.
... Miller was centrally involved with the Ideology and Consciousness journal, which was associated with post-Althusserian thought (Louis Althusser was a highly influential Marxist intellectual, associated with theorizing ideological state apparatuses, a prelude to governmentality). Governmentality itself has become one of the most prominent theoretical positions within IA (Jeacle, 2015;Mennicken & Miller, 2012;Neu, 2000;Radcliffe et al, 2017;Spence, 2010). Mike Power is well known for his work into the Audit Society (Power, 1994(Power, , 1997, the Risk Society (Power, 2009), and most recently, accounting infrastructures (Power, 2015). ...
... Going beyond the boundary of an organization, accounting can mediate between the micro level of the organization and wider meso and macro levels. By way of illustration, Radcliffe et al (2017) demonstrate how wider rationalities of corporate reform in the progressive era in the United States intertwined with specific programmes enacted by public sector regulatory bodies who, in turn, relied crucially on the elaboration of accounting as a means of identifying corporate malfeasance. In this way, accounting at the entity level made wider discourses of corporate reform both thinkable and possible. ...
Strategic change in public sector organizations has been well documented. This article suggests that public management research would benefit from a greater appreciation of how calculative practices are deeply imbricated with, and constitutive of, organizational life. In turn, the article argues that the field of interdisciplinary accounting has much to learn from public administration, especially in terms of leadership. The overarching argument is that understanding strategic change in public organizations can be enhanced by bringing together insights from the academic fields of public administration and interdisciplinary accounting. In this respect, organizational reform can be understood as a triptych, involving strategic change, leadership and accounting practices. We illustrate this thesis through a case study of strategic change in the world's largest public service broadcaster—the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It is shown how, during the tenure of one organizational leader—John Birt—accounting became pivotal to his leadership.
... Yet limited attention has been given to the ways in which auditors control their knowledge, perhaps because this knowledge is considered elusive (Hines, 1989). In auditing, knowledge control It connects what emerged as standard setting to the earlier regulatory conceptions of accounting as a means of corporate control (Radcliffe et al., 2017), and spells out the SEC's regulatory view of auditors as "free labor" to pursue its goals, which has also been documented elsewhere (Larsson, 2005). In light of auditors' incomplete control of their knowledge, the study suggests that today's standard setting is located between the actors that participated in the regulatory debates. ...
... Such anti-trust activities to re-instate competition were expressive of the time's "anti-bigness ethic" that also stood behind the FTC (McCraw, 1984, p. 82). Regulatory conceptions of accounting mirrored the progressive thought, in that accounting was seen as part of a system of corporate control to ensure competition and oversight (Clark, 1926;Radcliffe et al., 2017). Such a system of uniform accounting methods was used in the strictly regulated railway sector (Adams, 1918), but was at times also considered for other industries and on a national level (Miranti, 1990). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze how “New Deal” regulatory initiatives, primarily the Securities Acts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), changed US auditors’ professional knowledge conception, culminating in the 1938 expansion of the Committee on Accounting Procedure (CAP), the first US body to set accounting principles.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper combines Halliday’s (1985) knowledge mandates with Hancher and Moran’s (1989) regulatory space to attain a theory-based understanding of auditors’ changing knowledge conceptions amid regulatory pressure. It draws on a range of primary and secondary sources to examine the period from 1929 to 1938.
Findings
Following the stock market crash, the newly created SEC aimed to engage auditors as a means to regulate companies’ accounting practices based on a set of codified principles. While entailing increased status, this new role conflicted with the auditors’ knowledge conception, which was based on professional judgment and personal integrity. Pressure from the SEC and academics eventually made auditors agree to a codification of their professional knowledge and create the CAP as a cooperative regulatory solution.
Originality/value
The paper explores the role of auditors’ knowledge conceptions in the emergence of today’s standard setting. It is suggested that auditors’ incomplete control of their professional knowledge made standard setting a form of co-regulation, located between the actors occupying the regulatory space of accounting.
... Where substantial public resistance may be directed at efforts toward decreasing the availability or quality of government-sponsored healthcare, contracting with auditors to detect and prevent fraud results in less public scrutiny and provides an example of using accounting information and technology to legitimize decisions from a cost perspective (Nielsen, Mathiassen, and Newell 2014). At the same time, in demonstrating the potential harm the technology produces to the quality of healthcare, our case provides an example of the unintended consequences of AI-enabled tools and analytics (Radcliffe, Spence, and Stein 2017). Future research may examine the purpose, objectives, and outcomes of data analytic-driven audit mandates in terms of their political aims as well as the role of audit and auditors in contributing to policy making or policy aims. ...
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools and analytics hold the potential to radically alter audit processes by disseminating centralized audit expertise. We examine this potential in the context of data analytic-driven audits mandated to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in a government-sponsored healthcare program. To do so, we draw on semistructured interviews with healthcare providers (i.e., auditees) subject to healthcare audits. Our work shows how use of paraprofessional auditors guided by AI-enabled tools and analytics reflects a very different audit environment. Specifically, auditees’ experiences suggest paraprofessional auditors lack specific expertise and credentials to conduct data-driven audits, apply judgment in deference to technology, and disregard the impact of AI-driven decisions on the public interest. Such experiences raise potential concerns for all audits over unbridled use of AI-enabled tools and analytics by novice-level auditors/paraprofessionals, but even more for audits conducted in contexts where adherence to professional norms is essential to minimizing public interest consequences.
JEL Classifications: M42; M48.
... Many accounting historians from a critical perspective emphasize that accounting is used as a method of social control and so argue that regulatory reform was more symbolic than substantive (Doron 2016;Merino and Mayper 2001;Radcliffe, Spence, and Stein 2017). A few researchers have pointed out how the ICC used accounting to shift wealth and income to economically underdeveloped regions (Acikgoz, Miranti, and Palmon 2022;Collier and Miranti 2020), facilitating unstated policy goals. ...
This paper focuses on the Interstate Commerce Commission's (ICC's) application of accounting to achieve public policy goals for the U.S. railroad industry. The ICC began in 1887 with a mandate to ensure competition in the transportation industry, with rate oversight as one tool. During the Progressive Era, from 1901 to 1921, the ICC used accounting to ensure rate equity; a second implicit goal was to reduce the rail industry's informational asymmetries to investors, morphing over time to ensuring a reasonable return to investors. In the 1920s, the ICC used accounting to reduce securities speculation, facilitate regional rail consolidation, and govern industry finance. This accounting-based model of regulation continued until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when new economic circumstances called into question the ICC's ability to serve the most pressing public policy concerns. The technologies used by the ICC, however, continued to be exploited by other regulatory bodies.
... To assess commitment of transparency and accountability in public sector, Radcliffe et al. (2017) propose administrative control by asking five questions about the level of disclosure to citizens by public sector organizations and governments regarding financial and performance reports; how taxes are being spent; organizations' or governments' achievements and what remains to be done; and how citizens are being affected by specific programs. ...
... The first strand of research examines the methodology by which accounting knowledge can be used to practice organizational power (Chiapello and Baker, 2011;Collier and Miranti 2020;Hoskin 1998;Loft 1986;Miller and O'Leary 1987;Miranti 1989;Raffnsøe et al. 2017;Tinker and Neimark 1988). While the second stream of research analyzes the effect of accounting practices on government processes, particularly with regard to issues of regulatory capture (Baker and Quéré, 2014;Bernstein 1955;Bowden 2015;Deringer 2018;Doron 2016;Kracman 2019;Martin 1971;Merino and Neimark 1982;Radcliffe et al. 2017;Soll 2014;Stevenson-Clarke and Bowden 2018). ...
Our study presents a research framework that examines the implementation of social accountability development within football clubs, taking into account the social accounting practices that should be regulated in the football industry. We use a methodological model proposed by A. G. Puxty and developed by the research work of Peter Miller in order to highlight the role of football club accounting as a social practice. We show that the progressive development of social responsibility in the football industry requires the establishment of a sectoral framework for the strategic integration of social responsibility that takes into account the specificities of football. To develop our integrative research framework, we conduct a methodical review of 181 empirical studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation to provide a status quo of the current state of affairs. Our integrative framework is based on four levels: a normative level, a strategic level, an operational level and a higher level. We find that the strategic integration of corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the sports industry is also subject to continuous change. The results of the study confirm that further cross-review processes between literature on strategic CSR integration and research on integrated reporting in the football industry have the power to moderate the next stage of the research.
... One area involved extending our understanding of how accounting knowledge may be used to exercise organizational power (Chiapello and Baker, 2011;Collier and Miranti, 2020;Hoskin, 1998;Hoskin and Macve, 1996;Loft, 1986;Lowe and Tinker, 1977;Miller and O'Leary, 1987;Miranti, 1989;Raffnsøe et al., 2017;Tinker et al., 1982;Tinker and Neimark, 1988;Tyson et al., 2004). A second line of research evaluated how accounting practices have influenced government processes, especially concerning the issues of regulatory capture and ineffectiveness raised by political scientists Marver H. Bernstein and Gabriel Kolko (Acikgoz, 2015;Baker and Quéré, 2014;Bernstein, 1955;Bowden, 2015;Chatov, 1975;Cortese, 2011;Deringer, 2018;Doron, 2016;Kolko, 1965;Kracman, 2019;Martin, 1971;Merino and Mayper, 2001;Merino and Neimark, 1982;Radcliffe et al., 2017;Sivakumar and Waymire, 2003;Soll, 2014;Stevenson-Clarke and Bowden, 2018). ...
Employing a methodological model proposed by Anthony G. Hopwood and refined by Peter Miller, which emphasizes the role of accounting as a social practice, this study examines how the US Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) accepted the application of the value of service accounting in rate-setting to facilitate the redistribution of income and wealth to the undeveloped economies of the South and West regions of the US.
... Furthermore, evidence of tax avoidance and profit shifting by extractive MNCs, as well as tax deals that benefit MNCs and/or state elites, but whose benefits do not benefit society, continue to prompt discussions on fair and efficient corporate taxation (Losson, 2015;Taylor et al., 2015). As such, the specific objectives underlying the way that corporate activities are regulated and the way regulators and interested actors conceptualize transparency (Mehrpouya & Salles-Djelic, 2019), accountability (Radcliffe et al., 2017), and corruption as accounting and disclosure objectives (or whether they remain as such) represent important concerns for both research and policy-making. ...
We examine responses to pressures to act on extractive firm country-by-country reporting (CbCR) by three regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, the European Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Debates over CbCR of payments that extractive firms make to governments center on improvements to transparency, governance, and accountability and raise questions about the division of regulatory labor in terms of where and by whom global reporting issues are undertaken and why. Our comparative analysis suggests that while the three regulators resist or respond reluctantly to similar pressures to act on CbCR, each responds in distinct ways that reflect and impact regulatory mandates. Specifically, we show how the regulators’ responses constitute the purpose, problematize the objectives, and construct the perceived interests served by CbCR in relation to each regulator’s mandate. We highlight how these responses can be understood through modes of discursive ignorance (McGoey, 2019) and the uncomfortable knowledge (Rayner, 2012) that each regulator may engage with when pressures challenge how regulators make sense of the world. Our study highlights that regulatory responses are based partly on what regulators assume are their mandates, their legitimacy and ways of operating. It analyzes their self-understandings and defense mechanisms, thereby providing an elaboration of responses to pressures for action and offering a richer political economy of regulation that highlights sensemaking in these processes. We further elaborate on what these responses imply for the division of regulatory labor around pressures to act on global reporting issues, as well as broader implications for participation in and ignorance around accounting regulatory projects.
... To assess commitment of transparency and accountability in public sector, Radcliffe et al. (2017) propose administrative control by asking five questions about the level of disclosure to citizens by public sector organizations and governments regarding financial and performance reports; how taxes are being spent; organizations' or governments' achievements and what remains to be done; and how citizens are being affected by specific programs. ...
The term “transparency” in economics and finance is defined very broadly as a process by which information about existing conditions, decisions, and actions is made accessible, visible, and understandable. Transparency is understood as the effective flow of information or as the process in which the information is prepared and disclosed in a safe, understandable, and timely manner (IMF Working Group 1998; Kopits and Craig 1998; Vishwanath and Kaufmann 1999). In particular, transparency is the opposite of secrecy (Florini 2000).
... As an essential component of our contemporary system of corporate governance, corporate financial reporting legislation is largely focused on the economic rights of shareholders (Dillard et al. 2004). The preferences of other stakeholders on the reporting of corporate responsibility have largely been relegated to areas of voluntary disclosure (Lauwo and Otusanya 2014;Radcliffe et al. 2017). Despite this, the last decade has witnessed increasing calls for mandatory disclosure of corporate responsibility associated with difficult societal issues. ...
The extraction of natural resources is a controversial business practice that has profound ethical and economic risk implications for both firms involved in extractive activities and society at large. In response to these implications, the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 directed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to create the first ever rules requiring annual corporate responsibility disclosures. The two proposed rules, requiring disclosure of the source of “conflict minerals” and of payments to foreign governments by extractive firms, conjured intense debate among stakeholders, largely related to the risks of firms providing (or not providing) the information. These risks span from required disclosures increasing compliance costs for firms to non-disclosure threatening human rights. In this study, we seek to understand the way in which stakeholders perceive the risks associated with corporate responsibility disclosures. We analyze comment letters submitted to the SEC related to the two disclosure rules through the lens of Douglas’s (Hughes et al., The Journal of Law & Economics 29:29–59, 1986) cultural perspectives of risk. We find consistencies across the two proposed disclosures with regard to the presence of three risk perspectives within the comment letter discourse for each proposal. We find inconsistencies, however, in the underlying nature of risk perceived across the two rules, which we argue reveals an aspect of risk that incorporates ethicality and is ultimately linked to reputational considerations. We complement these insights by analyzing the market reaction to the proposed regulations. Overall, our analysis suggests that stakeholders’ perceptions of risk have consequences for how risk is perceived and acted upon in the market.
... The resulting agency used accounting technologies as a way to gain legitimacy, while concurrently allowing the public accounting profession to maintain self-regulation. Radcliffe et al. (2017) argues that the intent behind financial regulatory reform in the early twentieth century, including the SEC, was to appear to tackle problems in corporate governance while the real beneficiaries were not users of financial information but the accountants whose role in the financial marketplace expanded. In their opinion, the regulatory changes were initiated by a 'misguided belief in the power of accounting'; rather than sparking corporate reform, the proliferation of accounting reports merely obscured corporate America's continued disregard for the public interest. ...
Enlightenment ideals relating to individual and group autonomy versus state power have long shaped socioeconomic ordering in the Western world. This article explores how competing Enlightenment ideologies influenced the development of two different accounting-based regulatory models in the United States, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Both commissions experimented with both models with different outcomes. The ICC, formed in 1887, ultimately followed a Hamiltonian approach involving direct intervention of the federal government to regulate the monopoly power of railroads. Almost half of a century later, after the 1929 Crash, the SEC was formed to re-establish public confidence in the nation’s financial markets. That resulted in reducing investors’ risk perceptions by assuring greater transactional transparency and probity. The SEC settled upon a Jeffersonian approach, which supported the delegation of responsibility for the application of accounting knowledge in regulation to professional groups rather than government officials. This approach characterized the emergent bureaucracy of the United States’ fast-expanding national executive state.
Recent research into the uses of accounting as a technology of government has used Foucault's notion of “counter‐conduct” to shed light on various ways in which the governed can seek to alter the regimes to which they are subjected. This paper unpacks the notion of counter‐conduct further in order to develop a clearer conceptualization of how regimes of government can change over time, with or without clearly identifiable attempts by the governed to influence such changes. We develop our argument based on a longitudinal field study of sustainable waste management practices in a municipality in the English East Midlands. We track the municipality's attempts to become more sustainable in the context of an evolving central government performance management regime that went through a series of legislative and administrative iterations—namely, Best Value, Comprehensive Performance Assessment, and Comprehensive Area Assessment. We conceptualize these iterations of central performance management and the related changes in local government practices and technologies of governing as a series of overlapping “modes of governing” (Bulkeley et al., 2007, Environment and Planning A , 39 (11), 2733–2753). We suggest that accounting research can benefit from the notion of modes of governing because it sheds light on the theoretically expected, but empirically underresearched, copresence of multiple rationales, programs, and technologies of governing, all operating at the same time.
This study examines the impact of the accountability system for material misstatements (ASMM) on the sensitivity of executive compensation to accounting earnings in China. Using a difference‐in‐differences model, we find that the ASMM significantly decreases the sensitivity of executive compensation to accounting earnings, which we attribute to the monitoring and unintended effects of the ASMM. As executives’ cost to manage reported earnings for more bonuses is significantly heightened by the ASMM, their high compensation sensitivity to reported earnings, which contain earnings management, reduces. The unintended consequence is that executives’ risk aversion is also incentivized to preserve performance pay while the ASMM restricts earnings management, and boards reduce executives’ compensation sensitivity to accounting earnings to encourage their risk taking. These phenomena are more pronounced in companies with high agency conflict, audited by non‐Big 4 auditors, and less followed by analysts. The results indicate that corporate governance reforms that introduce personal responsibilities in China can improve the accuracy of accounting earnings but decrease the efficiency of assessing executive hard work. The board reacts to this change by increasing the role of stock returns in executive compensation contracts. This is consistent with the view that the principal dynamically adjusts executive compensation contracts to make them incentive compatible (Tirole and Laffont, 1988; Hall and Knox, 2004; He, 2011). Our study provides critical implications for the importance of institutional environments to impact governance reforms in emerging markets and beyond.
As early as 2015, financial regulators were developing disclosure frameworks aimed at enabling capital markets to price climate risks. Yet the literature on sustainability disclosure offers little insight into how regulatory agendas change, instead focusing on how nongovernmental organizations drive voluntary disclosure. To address this deficiency, this paper charts how financial regulators came to embrace climate risk, analyzing how an array of non‐state initiatives became coordinated in highlighting climate‐related impairment risks. This coordination is conceptualized via scholarship on decentered regulation, allowing a first, theoretical, contribution by constructing and demonstrating one analytical approach to studying substantive change on sustainability. This paper draws on a 25‐month participant observation of a United Nations standard‐setting project, supported by semi‐structured interviews. This allows a second, empirical, contribution by mapping how an accounting device, the so‐called “carbon budget” (the maximum amount of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions that limits the probability of exceeding 2°C of warming to 20%), coordinated this array of non‐state action toward resolving a core trade‐off: if we burn our current fossil fuel reserves, we will exceed our warming targets. The paper then shows how these coordinated efforts pressured regulatory authorities to intervene on how finance affects and is affected by climate change.
This chapter explores MFIs structures and points up areas for further study. The duties and obligations of Bangladeshi microfinance institutions are described. The chapter covers corporate governance in these firms. This section reviews MFIs governance practices. A review of a few of Bangladesh's top MFIs demonstrates the variety of approaches they use to meet the financial needs of their consumers. This comparative analysis aids in identifying the advantages and disadvantages of institutional models, which might result in more efficient and long-lasting microfinance operations.
The authors propose a critical reinterpretation of a case study embedded in the historical period of post-WWII in Southern Italy. This period is characterised by relevant socio-political and economic consequences at a global scale, and it has been scarcely investigated from a business perspective. The authors consider the connections between war damages accounting, adverse collateral events, and agricultural accounting as tools to claim for social changes. The analysis specifically concerns the damages caused to the warehouses of hemp growers in the province of Caserta (Campania region, Italy). This area was known as Terra di Lavoro (‘land of work’ (authors’ translation)) since the Middle Ages to outline the poor conditions of hemp growers. The features of the accounting analysed herein, in the light of neo-institutional theory, show how it was used as a technology for problem-solving and a potential trigger for the agrarian reform of 1950.
This paper adopts a governmentality framing to examine how form‐based practices and counter‐conduct measures that permeate the banking industry are employed by bank executives who wish to be governed differently in a way that results in the control of customer conduct. Using the data set of the HSBC Case History Hearing released by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on July 17, 2012, the paper shows how rationalities, programs, and technologies of governance are reproblematized, resulting in changed program policies and technologies. The study also makes two contributions to the literature. First, the paper contributes to our understanding of form‐based practices in the banking industry as a governance mechanism—specifically, how particular practices such as risk management, staff training, and customer training can be coupled with counter‐conduct to circumvent the rules. And second, by looking at rationalities, programs, and technologies, the paper suggests how executives problematize issues in a manner that leads to program changes and to changes in the governmental technologies that depart from the overarching rationalities of the industry.
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Obesity has become a topic of public discourse in Britain with claims that it is now one of the major causes of ill health and premature death. In an effort to tackle this obesity ‘crisis’, the UK government has introduced mandatory calorie labelling on menus. This legislation requires that the number of calories associated with a meal option, together with the recommended calorie consumption per day, be displayed on menus. Such ‘calorie accounting’ seeks to prompt the consumer to make menu choices consistent with public health ambitions and to encourage food establishments to reformulate lower calorie menu offerings. Drawing on the concepts of technologies of government (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose & Miller, 1992) and biopedagogy (Harewood, 2009; Wright, 2009), this paper suggests that calorie accounting operates as a technology of biopedagogy which seeks to discipline and govern the body in contemporary neoliberal society. The paper also contributes to recent accounting scholarship on counter-conduct (Foucault, 2007) by highlighting how calorie accounting produces a form of counter-conduct that coexists with conformity to governmental goals. The paper draws upon three primary data sources: a documentary analysis of 44 policy documents on obesity and calorie reduction, an analysis of 112 responses to a public consultation exercise on calorie labelling, and 20 interviews with relevant actors.
This paper aims to bring to the attention of the accounting research community the opportunities and challenges associated with using public inquiry data for accounting research. We have conducted a systematic review of prior contributions in accounting that incorporate public inquiry data, and identify trends in the types of inquiries, data, and analytic techniques used within the existing literature. Extending out of this analysis, we identify three broad lines of enquiry within accounting research that can be informed by public inquiry data, and provide guidance for future research in the form of specific research topics, questions, and exemplars that illustrate the possibilities of this empirical approach. Finally, we articulate the limitations of public inquiry data and identify strategies researchers may use to realize these possibilities in their own research endeavors.
Given the urgent need for change that has become even more evident during the pandemic, it seems fitting to critically reflect on our responsibilities as scholars, educators and colleagues, individually and as members of a purposeful, supportive community, in facilitating a more sustainable world. We share a roundtable discussion that was part of the 13th Spanish CSEAR conference in hopes that the conversation will continue within the community regarding some of the perceived roles, opportunities and responsibilities post-pandemic. The perspectives shared are from a group of scholars at different stages in their careers, who have different profiles, and see their responsibilities differently. These individual and collective perspectives address personal and professional aspirations, the focus and purpose of research, and the role of CSEAR as we move into the future. Hopefully by sharing perspectives from different vantage points ranging from the beginning to the end of the ‘academic life cycle’, we can stimulate and facilitate meaningful dialogue and debate within, and about the future of, our community leading to a more resilient, active, caring, supportive, inspiring, encouraging and helpful environment and more effectively further the transition to a more sustainable world.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test if activism by civil society organisations (CSOs hereafter) in successfully mobilising resistance to the Government of Ghana “collateralization” of gold resources and other mineral royalties in 2020 (dubbed the “Agyapa deal”) espouse tenets of Foucault’s (2009) “governmentality” and “counter conduct” dispositions.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on Dean’s (1999) discussion of government analytics to highlight how CSO activism can simultaneously challenge government practice and share in it. This paper uses an evidence-based and interpretive qualitative content analysis approach. This paper relied on secondary data sources from 1 January 2020 to 21 August 2021. Data collection involved an extensive review of secondary materials concerning the Agyapa deal, relying on the author's local knowledge to identify the likely sources of information.
Findings
This paper exposes how the counteractions of CSOs, underpinned by the desire for so-called “good governance”, invariably extend governmentality and other neo-liberal ideals. In this case, CSOs' actions espoused the ideals of marketisation, extended governable spaces, engrained subjectivation and treated citizens as incapable of formulating and advancing their desires without overt help. Secondly, it provides evidence that massive deployment of accountability and other calculable practices, however wilful, complement efforts at shaping public opinion.
Practical implications
CSO counter-conduct is merely symbolic rather than substantive. Substantive counter-conduct requires the citizenry to actively lead the problematisation process, holding CSOs accountable for acting on their behalf. The current trajectory where CSO accountability is primarily to their international financiers, predominantly neo-liberal advocates, raises questions about “in whose interest they seek another form of governance?” Practically, the splinter of interests that may emanate from citizenry directly led counter-conduct can affect garnering the critical mass needed to force a policy change. That said, however, there is a case for citizenry “making themselves” rather than “being made” within the governmentality process.
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first application of the Foucauldian and Dean framework to a data set from Ghana.
This study examines how and why the board of statutory auditors, an important accounting institution, has continued to operate from its establishment in 1882 until today, with little change in its nature and role. This is despite the fundamental changes that have occurred in the Italian social, economic and political environment. This study reveals that even though Italy’s societal institutions have substantially changed, the board of statutory auditors has continued to exist, with no material change in its nature, across different historical blocs, such as monarchy, fascism, post-war socio-democratic republic, neoliberal republic, and major changes in Italian politics and economy. This long-lived accounting institution has also faced a series of potentially significant sources of change, which appeared dramatic at first sight, but had no significant far-reaching historical impact, as hegemony was unaffected. In Italian society, the board of statutory auditors has provided a reassurance role, in principle this is to monitor company directors, a role which is perceived to benefit all society. However, in practice, this institution has provided a legitimating, rather than a substantive monitoring mechanism. It helped to exercise the ruling class’ hegemonic control, whose power was diffused across society through civil institutions during various historical blocs.
Data Science theory and practice can be operationalized in different ways but is the Data Mining technique that is one of the most used by institutions today because it allows to discover and generate knowledge about the databases they have. More than that, this data mining approach integrated with expert knowledge can promote the machine learning that in this work helps IT Governance to improve Accountability. For this purpose, a data base was set up with almost six hundred companies with a consolidated maturity evaluation of four dozen technological processes for a didactic analysis of use and approximation of this technique to the management context.
The office has been a central site of organizational planning, accountability, and control since the 19th century. Yet it has been the subject of relatively little accounting research. Through the dual theoretical lenses of Foucaultian and Labour Process theories, this study employs historical photo‐elicitation methodology to investigate the implementation of management control and accountability in the scientifically managed office which emerged in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis reveals the manner in which accounting records created new modes of disciplinary control and surveillance within the office and how accounting tasks were deskilled in a gradually feminized and mechanized office environment. We also witness the role of accounting in the physical structuring of office space through the assembly line arrangement of office furniture to facilitate paper flows and the installation of record keeping systems of surveillance. In addition, our visually derived historical account of these transformations in office administration allows us to reflect on some contemporary issues. The production‐line design and efficiency so promoted by scientific management served as a forerunner to the today's open‐plan office, as well as influencing contemporary office management philosophies such as Activity‐Based Working (ABW). Furthermore, we seek to inform current debates on the role of accounting in contemporary neo‐liberal society. In the history of the scientific office, we gain an early glimpse of the subsequent role that accounting comes to play within a neo‐liberal agenda as a powerful technology of micro‐measurement and micro‐management.
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This article examines the connotative evolution of the term "publicity. "An historical analysis of articles imtten in magat^ines, journals, and nempapers from 1890 to 1930 illustrates bow corporations and government co-opted ideas of the progressive movement into self servingpructices. Progressives vieu^edpublicity as a moral reform that would open politics and business to public scrutiny and help prevent corruption. Over time, publicity evolved into a communication strategy for corporations seekingpublic approval This study found that the change from a "broad searchlight" of publicity to a "narrowflashlight" of positive information in the hands of public relations experts allowed business and government to shape public opinion rather than be influenced by it. D uring the progressive era, a mix of businessmen, social reformers, and educators sought to restore moral and civic purit)' by reforming business, society, and government, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter snid progressives wanted baek the economic independence and political freedom destroyed by great corporations and corrupt political machines and their leaders, but they also recognized that these organizations were there to stay and could benefit society.' They resolved to make business and politics more accountable to the people by using publicity to expose abuses. Prominent New York City banker Henry Clews, writing in 1906, typified the progressives' attitude toward publicity: We arc now on ilic liigh road to the correction of a multitude of abuses and the country is to be congratulated upon this salutary movc-tnent for improvement and reform in our business methods. Our greai remedy is PUBLICITY', and the enforcement of the law, , , , So let us have more light—the light of
Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault's term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline. Governmentality brings Foucault very close to Max Weber's concern with rationalization and the ways that individuals come to govern themselves. Governmentality looks at administrative powers and knowledges that shape our everyday lives. For Foucault, as for Weber, administrative power is not of secondary importance but essential to the 'successes' and 'failures' of disciplinary institutions and societies.
Under conditions of growing interconnected- ness of the global economy, more and more stakeholders are exposed to risks and costs resulting from business activities that are neither regulated nor compensated for by means of national governance. The changing distribution of risks poses a threat to the legitimacy of business firms that normally derive their legitimacy from operating in com- pliance with the legal rules of democratic nation states. However, during the process of globalization, the regula- tory power of nation states has been weakened and many production processes have been shifted to states with weak regulatory frameworks where businesses operate outside the reach of the democratic nation state. As a result, business firms have to address the various legitimacy challenges of their operations directly and cannot rely upon the legitimacy of their regulatory environment. These developments challenge the dominant approach to corpo- rate governance that regards shareholders as the only stakeholder group in need of special protection due to risks not covered by contracts and legal regulations. On the basis of these considerations, we argue for a democratization of corporate governance structures in order to compensate for the governance deficits in their regulatory environment and to cope with the changing allocation of risks and costs. By way of democratic involvement of various stakeholders, business firms may be able to mitigate the redistribution of individual risk and address the resulting legitimacy deficits even when operating under conditions of regulatory gaps and governance failure.
This paper examines how the category of failure was economised and made calculable. It explores the preconditions for this shift in three stages. First, it explores how failure came to be ‘forgiven’ in both the US and the UK across the nineteenth century, how it came to be defined as something that is economic or financial, rather than personal or moral. Second, it explores the rapid growth of narrating and rating failure in the mid-nineteenth century, with particular attention to the formation of credit rating agencies from the 1840s onwards. We consider also the roles played in this process by two fortuitous technological developments: the typewriter and carbon paper for copying. Third, we examine the emergence of the calculative infrastructure, which has helped to establish an industry of attempts to forecast failure from the beginning of the twentieth century, initially on the basis of financial ratios, and more recently through the use of risk indexes. We use the term ‘calculating failure’ to describe this transformation and economisation of both the ideas and the instruments of failure, and suggest that this has significant implications for the study of strategy.
This essay aims to introduce readers to the social studies of accounting, atten-ding in particular to the roles and relevance of Foucault’s works for this field. We provide a brief overview of social studies of accounting, discuss recent developments in Foucault orien-ted accounting scholarship, and position the articles that appear in this special issue in the context of these developments. In the concluding section, we argue that accounting is an in-herently territorializing activity. The calculative instruments of accountancy transform not on-ly the possibilities for personhood, they also construct the physical and abstract calculable spaces that individuals inhabit. A focus on territorializing shifts attention to the links between calculating and governing.
Social scientists who study the mass media share a widely held "ideal of conservation" which assumes that face-to-face interpersonal communication is characterized by continuous feedback between participants, multichannel communication, spontaneous utterance, and egalitarian norms. Compared to this image of what face-to-face conversation is like, communication by mass media seems inferior. It is argued, however, that this "ideal of conversation" does not correspond closely to most actual conversations. It is argued further that the rise of the mass media is itself responsible for the development of an ideal of conversation and is responsible for making ideal conversations more often realized in practice. The contribution of the mass media to face-to-face conversation has been to make conversation, particularly between men and women and between adults and children, more egalitarian and to enlarge the possibility of spontaneous conversation. It is suggested, finally, that research on the mass media will be improved if it appraises the nature of conversation more realistically.
At the turn of the twentieth century American politics underwent a profound change, as both regulatory minimalism and statist command were rejected in favor of positive government engaged in both regulatory and distributive roles. Through a fresh examination of the judicial, legislative, and political aspects of the antitrust debates in the years from 1890–1916, Martin Sklar shows that the arguments did not arise simply because of competition versus combination, but because of the larger question of the proper relations between government and the market and between state and society.
This paper investigates whether, in theoretical terms, corporations can be citizens. The argument is based on the observation that the debate on “corporate citizenship” (CC) has only paid limited attention to the actual notion of citizenship. Where it has been discussed, authors have either largely left the concept of CC unquestioned, or applied rather unidimensional and decontextualized notions of citizenship to the corporate sphere. The paper opens with a critical discussion of a major contribution to the CC literature, the work of Logsdon and Wood (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Logsdon and Wood 2002). It continues with a consideration of the nature and role of metaphors for business and of the contestable nature of the political concept of citizenship. It evaluates corporations as citizens through a four-dimensional framework of democratic citizenship offered by Stokes (2002). The analysis suggests that corporations do not easily fit the “liberal minimalist” model of citizenship. It finds, however some possibilities for fit with the three more participatory models. The paper concludes by cautioning against basing corporate citizenship on legal and administrative status or identity, and mapping out specific criteria by which we might determine whether corporations could be considered as citizens by virtue of their participation in processes of governance.
Introduction / Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose -- Liberal government and techniques of the self / Graham Burchell -- Governing "advanced" liberal democracies / Nikolas Rose -- Liberalism, socialism and democracy : variations on a governmental theme / Barry Hindess -- The promise of liberalism and the performance of freedom / Vikki Bell -- Security and vitality : drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth century / Thomas Osborne -- Lines of communication
How are we to make sense of the way work is organised and controlled? To what extent is its design the result of technological demands, the interests of capital or processes of negotiation and struggle? In recent years labour process analysis, revived by Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital , has been most influential in shaping our thinking about this question. With contributions from leading authorities in the field, this book reviews the contribution of the labour process theory to the study of work organisation. Providing a fresh response to criticisms of 'Bravermania' and lost momentum, the volume explores the theoretical foundations of labour process analysis and suggests new directions for its development
En 1984, Michel Foucault, déjà très affaibli par sa maladie, livre dans le dernier de ses entretiens : "Il me semble que dans "L'Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique", dans "Les Mots et les Choses" et aussi dans "Surveiller et punir", beaucoup de choses qui se trouvaient implicites ne pouvaient pas être rendues explicites à cause de la fa\c con dont je posais les problèmes." C'est dans le tournant des années 1975-1976 que la production philosophique de Michel Foucault change en effet brusquement de style. Aux vastes analyses structurales et historiques succède le propos plus fluide d'une herméneutique du sujet que développeront en particulier les cours au Collège de France. Ce ne sont plus des événements culturels, des pratiques collectives et leurs conditions de possibilité dans l'ordre des discours qu'explore désormais le philosophe mais la fa\c con dont le sujet assume les vérités et les jeux de pouvoir dont il est l'objet. Le souci de soi, la sexualité, le corps et ses disciplines sont les grands thèmes des derniers travaux de Foucault. Ils dominent la plupart des textes rassemblés ici. Leur lecture permettra d'apprécier l'ampleur de l'infléchissement de l'U00F8euvre et surtout de lire autrement les grands écrits de la première période. Sur Foucault : "Foucault", de Gilles Deleuze ;"Michel Foucault", de Frédéric Gros ; "Michel Foucault, un parcours philosophique", de Hubert Dreyfus et Paul Rabinow. "–Emilio Balturi"
A decade of crises has reminded us of the fragility of the international financial system. Conventional wisdom holds that uncertainty is the basic problem of financial governance, and attempts to contain ambiguity have dominated recent financial reform efforts. Jacqueline Best, however, contends that ambiguity can play a valuable role in international political and economic stability. The stability of the postwar era depended, Best suggests, on a carefully maintained balance between coherence and ambiguity. In her view, the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange-rate regime was caused in large part by the increasing rigidity of the system and its corresponding inability to accommodate ambiguity.
This is a novel argument in an area much discussed by economists and political scientists. Their debate has focused on uncertainty as a technical problem and transparency as the solution. Although such policies are presented as technical, Best demonstrates that they are also political, have cultural consequences, and may prove counterproductive. Rather than assume that transparency is the ultimate goal, Best argues, we must recognize that ambiguity is pervasive, substantive, and potentially constructive. To read this book is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which politics is fundamental to economic theory and practice and to understand why the economy requires political leadership in order to flourish.
This chapter suggests that Michel Foucault is a nuisance for scholars of organizations, albeit a productive one.
Foucault disavowed the study of organizations, yet his work was fundamentally concerned with the administering
of lives, a central concern of scholars of organizations. The chapter explores this tension by examining four
displacements that Foucault sought to effect: first, a move from asking ‘why’ type questions to ‘how’ type
questions; second, a concern with subjectivity that discards the ethical polarization of subject and object in favour of an analysis of the historically varying ways in which the capacities and attributes of subjects are constituted; third, a focus on practices rather than organizations, and a concern to analyse sets or assemblages of practices in terms of how they emerge and how they are stabilized over time; fourth, a focus on rationalities in the plural. It then examines the ‘Foucault effect’ in organization studies.
This paper addresses the processes of reconciling hierarchies and American ideals and suggests ways in which the socially functional and radical traditions of corporate history could be extended to include such concerns. It focuses on the concepts through which hierarchies and managerial authority were rendered thinkable as positive components within American society and traces the formation of the notion of a dispassionate, professional managerial authority exercised through corporate hierarchies out of the ideals of American political culture. The reconciliation of hierarchy with American political culture is analyzed across the period 1900–1940 in three sections: the Progressive years, the 1920s, and the 1930s. This focus on a period that was decisive for both the modern corporation and the administrative literature associated with it provides considerable scope for extending critical studies of the corporation and management.
This paper encourages scholars of management to pay attention to the mutually constitutive nature of accounting, organizing, and economizing. This means viewing accounting as much more than an instrumental and purely technical activity. We identify four key roles of accounting: first, territorializing, the recursive construction of the calculable spaces that actors inhabit within organizations and society; second, mediating, that much of what accounting instruments and ideas do is to link up distinct actors, aspiration, and arenas; third, adjudicating, that accounting plays a decisive role in evaluating the performance of individuals and organizations, and also in determining failings and failures; and fourth, that accounting is a subjectivizing practice par excellence, that it both subjects individuals to control or regulation by another, while entailing the presumption of an individual free to choose. The entanglement of these four roles, we suggest, is what gives the “accounting complex” its productive force, such that it is perhaps the most powerful system of representation for social and economic life today in many national settings. We examine these issues through a selective review of the accounting literature based on the construction of two intellectual histories. One deals with the growth of scholarly interest in organizations which created the conditions for a behavioral turn in accounting research and the embedding of accounting within management scholarship. The other schematic history deals with the emergence of normative accounting pedagogy and theory from practice. This was challenged by an empirical “revolution” drawing on the methods of analytical economics which was broadly market-based, facing away from management. We argue for a third body of work which reacts to the reductionism of both and which focuses on the processes by which accounting representations and metrics are simultaneously powerful interventions which shape people, practices, and organizations. We suggest that accounting is a mechanism by which the economization of organizational life becomes elaborated and institutionalized.
This paper focuses on the insertion of accounting and auditing knowledge into wider areas of practice, and examines the processes of auditing change through studying the development of "efficiency auditing" using events in one jurisdiction, the Province of Alberta, Canada, as an exemplar. These developments are interpreted through use of Miller and Rose's (1990; Rose & Miller, 1992) theoretical concerns with governmentality, and especially the links between generally stated political rationalities and more specific programmes for action. In studying the association of ideas of efficiency with auditing, and the developing belief that efficiency could be investigated or procured through audit scrutiny, it is argued that these events can be understood in terms of an intersection between wider discourse (concerning, for example, best management practice, appropriate auditing roles, etc.) and local circumstance. The specific interpretations that result are understood as providing one set of conditions by which auditing (and accounting) are linked to the social (Burchell et al., 1985). Further research (Radclifife, 1995) attends to the logistics of how one might audit for efficiency, using fieldwork to trace the technologies which provide practitioners with particular mechanisms for action (Miller & Rose, 1990).
This study documents the rate of compliance by Canadian public firms with corporate governance recommendations imposed by the Canadian Securities Administrators. Canada uses a "comply or explain" governance structure in which harmonized provincial regulation establishes mandatory disclosure of governance practices. Firms can be compliant with these requirements either by voluntarily adopting the recommended best practices (i.e., adopt) or by explaining the alternative practices implemented to achieve the same governance principle (i.e., explain). Firms that fail to comply (i.e., neither adopt nor explain) are in violation of Canadian securities regulation with respect to governance. Using a hand-collected sample of 742 Canadian public companies and 16 governance recommendations, our results show that an average of 82 percent of firms complied by adopting the best practice and an additional 4 percent complied by explanation. Our study also shows that 39 percent of Canadian publicly traded firms were completely compliant with all 16 recommendations examined in this study, either by adoption or explanation. To provide a broader context for these results, we compare rates of compliance in Canada to rates in Australia, a country broadly similar to Canada with comparable governance recommendations. The Australian Securities Exchange supplied data sample of 1334 Australian companies reports a complete compliance rate of 74 percent compared to Canada's 39 percent complete compliance rate. Our analysis shows that compliance by adoption of best practice is more common in Canada, whereas compliance by explanation is more common in Australia. In our analysis of compliance with individual recommendations, we find that half of the recommendations are more likely to be complied with in Australia, and the other half are more likely to be complied with in Canada.
The Argument
This paper argues that science and technology studies need to adopt a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. The factory, it is suggested, is as much a site of invention and intervention as the laboratory. As a site for the government of economic life, the factory is a laboratory par excellence . One particular factory is studied — the Decatur, Illinois, plant of Caterpillar Inc. — as it is rethought and remade in accordance with ideals of cellular manufacturing, Just-In-Time systems, customer-driven manufacturing, and competitor benchmarking. But it is not just the changes at the factory itself that are studied. The paper analyzes the linkages and relays between the redesign of a particular manufacturing plant and the plethora of calls for a revitalization of North American manufacturing industry and a new form of economic citizenship. The paper examines the remaking of a factory as an assemblage , a historically specific and temporarily stabilized complex of relations among ways of problematizing the factory in a multiplicity of locales. There are four steps to the changes analyzed here: a problematizing of the factory at the level of North American manufacturing as a whole in the 1980s; a problematizing of the notion of competitiveness at Caterpillar Inc, through the calculative practices of competitor benchmarking and related expertises; a diagraming of the ideal factory in systems terms; and the embedding of notions of the product, of competitiveness, and of a new economic citizenship in the “Assembly Highway” at the Decatur plant. Rethinking the factory took place within this assemblage of relations, rether than at any one site
This paper addresses the processes of reconciling hierarchies and American ideals and suggests ways in which the socially functional and radical traditions of corporate history could be extended to include such concerns. It focuses on the concepts through which hierarchies and managerial authority were rendered thinkable as positive components within American society and traces the formation of the notion of a dispassionate, professional managerial authority exercised through corporate hierarchies out of the ideals of American political culture. The reconciliation of hierarchy with American political culture is analyzed across the period 1900-1940 in three sections: the Progressive years, the 1920s, and the 1930s. This focus on a period that was decisive for both the modern corporation and the administrative literature associated with it provides considerable scope for extending critical studies of the corporation and management.
This paper investigates the key drivers behind the origins of value-for-money (VFM) audit in Canada and the aims, intents, and logics ascribed by the original proponents. Drawing on insights from governmentality and New Public Management, the paper utilizes analysis methods adapted from case study research to review a wide range of primary documentation (e.g., Hansards from the Public Accounts Committee, House of Commons debates, the so-called Wilson report and the FMCS study) and secondary documentation (newspaper articles, Office of the Auditor General internal publications, journal articles). Major findings indicate a rise of a management consulting culture within the Auditor General’s office following the appointment of James Johnson Macdonell. VFM legislation effectively operationalized practices drawn from management consulting expertise by invitation of the consultant. It was offered as an answer to the growing scope and size of government, which had become problematized by the Auditor General in terms of parliament losing control over the public purse. The Auditor General’s invocation of financial crisis led to a substantial broadening of mandate and increase in resources for that office.
This paper proposes some new ways of analysing the exercise of political power in advanced liberal democratic societies. These are developed from Michel Foucault's conception of ‘governmentality’ and addresses political power in terms of ‘political rationalities’ and ‘technologies of government’. It draws attention to the diversity of regulatory mechanisms which seek to give effect to government, and to the particular importance of indirect mechanisms that link the conduct of individuals and organizations to political objectives through ‘action at a distance’. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of language in understanding the constitution of the objects of politics, not simply in terms of meaning or rhetoric, but as ‘intellectual technologies’ that render aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation. It suggests that governmentality has a characteristically ‘programmatic’ form, and that it is inextricably bound to the invention and evaluation of technologies that seek to give it effect. It draws attention to the complex processes of negotiation and persuasion involved in the assemblage of loose and mobile networks that can bring persons, organizations and objectives into alignment. The argument is exemplified through considering various aspects of the regulation of economic life: attempts at national economic planning in post-war France and England; the role ascribed to changing accounting practices in the UK in the 1960s; techniques of managing the internal world of the workplace that have come to lay special emphasis upon the psychological features of the producing subjects. The paper contends that ‘governmentality’ has come to depend in crucial respects upon the intellectual technologies, practical activities and social authority associated with expertise. It argues that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized through expertise, are key resources for governing in a liberal-democratic way.
From nineteenth-century traditions of corporate secrecy, American manufacturers have moved slowly toward more public and credible financial disclosure practices. Professor Hawkins examines the variety of pressures from the business community, the accounting profession, the government, and the public which has impelled this movement and governed its direction and tempo.
The 1860–1900 period was both the “birth” of Canada but also the birth and institutionalization of a specific set of social relations between the federal government and First Nations peoples. This study examines the roles played by accounting and funding relations within the process of nation building. Throughout this formative period in Canada’s history, governance was attempted via the introduction of financial legislation and enacted by the Indian Department and agents in the field. As our analysis highlights, legislative initiatives, Indian Department pronouncements and the activities of agents imposed, enlisted and implied a variety of accounting technologies. This study not only explores how the federal government has used accounting/funding mechanisms in the attempt to translate government policy regarding indigenous peoples into practice but also provides a history of the present by examining the historical consequences of these interventions.
This paper critically examines government auditing through use of Taussig's [Taussig M. Defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1999] observations regarding the “public secret”, or “knowing what not to know” [Taussig M. Defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1999. p. 2] together with his related concept of analysis as defacement. These ideas are combined with prior research which suggests that government auditors express audit findings with care so as to work within prevailing discourses. The auditors’ approach can at once be seen as pragmatic, in aiming to affect whatever change or improvement is possible, and limiting, in that they are constrained both by themselves and others from making observations that may be publicly unpalatable. While other work uncovers this approach in general, this paper explores the consequences of auditors in effect maintaining public secrets, using the findings of a performance audit of the Cleveland (Ohio) City Public Schools as an exemplar.