Re-thinking the ‘disciplinary’ power of accounting: A Foucauldian reading of how disciplinary accounting knowledge translates into managerial strategy in a Portuguese bank
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper seeks to re-frame the importance of a diachronic understanding of accounting’s centrality (i.e., focusing on a sense of history) to modern modes of managing as a precondition for considering how it contributes to management change initiatives synchronically (i.e., focusing on the present). It offers a re-appraisal of how a Foucault-inspired approach may enable understandings of how the diachronic is implicated in what goes on in the synchronic episodes so well studied in recent critical research into accounting, management and strategy. It then offers a reading of how a change initiative undertaken in a Portuguese bank, Iberian Bank, takes place at three levels of development and involving different sets of protagonists. It thereby seeks to open out, within accounting research, the kind of historically-informed research of ‘the present’ recommended within the strategy field by Robert Chia (2004).
期刊介绍:
Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations