Silencing Through Management Accounting Practices: A Case Study of Cost-efficiency in a Public Administration

Abstract

This paper investigates how accounting practices create silence within organizations. Organizational silence designates a collective-level phenomenon characterized by the widespread withholding of information, opinions or concerns, by employees about work-related problems or issues (Morrison & Milliken, 2003; Brinsfield et al., 2009).

Six months of observation over a 15 months period and twenty-four interviews detail the use of tableaux de bord and management accounting to justify decision-making and raise accountability among managers who are asymmetrically equipped to read and use accounting. This paper explores silence as a form of resistance to surveillance but also as a reaction of financially illiterate, or disinterested actors to management accounting practices.