Description
This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven
different research perspectives that have flourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach.
It is contended that these different approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of significant and
interesting disciplinary insights
Alternative management accounting research—
whence and whither
Jane Baxter, Wai Fong Chua*
School of Accounting, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Abstract
This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven
di?erent research perspectives that have ?ourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach.
It is contended that these di?erent approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of signi?cant and
interesting disciplinary insights. As a form of collective non-positivist enterprise, alternative management accounting
research has demonstrated: the many di?erent rationalities of management accounting practice; the variety of ways in
which management accounting practice is enacted and given meaning; the potency of management accounting tech-
nologies; the unpredictable, non-linear and socially-embedded nature of management accounting change; and the ways
in which management accounting practice is both constrained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its exponents. In
conclusion, we consider how alternative management accounting research may sustain its distinct contributions in the
future. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Celebrating alternative management accounting
research
In the 25 years since its inception, Accounting,
Organizations and Society (AOS) has forged a
formidable reputation for disseminating manage-
ment accounting research. In particular, this jour-
nal has developed a loyal readership because it has
created a pluralistic discursive space—a space in
which so-called ‘alternative’ management
accounting research is encouraged (Colville, 1981;
Cooper & Hopper, 1987; Ha¨ gg & Hedlund, 1979;
Hopwood, 1976, 1983; Kaplan, 1986; Tomkins &
Groves, 1983). It is not an exaggeration to state,
as a consequence, that AOS has changed how
management accounting research is taught and
done. This is no small achievement. However, the
passing of signi?cant milestones is not only an
opportunity for celebration; it is also an occasion for
re?ection, to consider the legacies of this research.
What have we learnt that is ‘di?erent’ or ‘new’?
The ?rst purpose of this paper is to consider the
substantive contributions of the main streams of
alternative management accounting research in
AOS from 1976 to 1999. The amount of work that
could be included in the domain of interest—
alternative management accounting research—is
clearly very large and it is not possible to do jus-
tice to this considerable and diverse body of work
in a single short paper. We, therefore, decided to
con?ne our attention to those papers that mobilise
a ‘non-positivist’ language to typify management
accounting practice (see, for example, Burrell &
Morgan, 1979; Chua, 1986; Colville, 1981;
Cooper, 1983). We focus on research that draws
0361-3682/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PI I : S0361- 3682( 02) 00022- 3
Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (W.F. Chua).
on non-positivistic strands of social theory; thus
choosing to review research that re?ects the inter-
pretive, critical and postmodern turns that have
occurred more widely throughout the social sci-
ences of the period (see Bernstein, 1976; Lyotard,
1984). Accounting is a discipline of the social and
it seemed important to us to understand it in the
context of a broader set of discourses from the
social sciences.
The second purpose of this paper is to re?ect on
selected contemporary developments in social the-
ory and suggest how these pose new and interest-
ing avenues for the interrogation and study of
management accounting practice. We focus on the
key issues of increased global and technological
connectivity, as well as the development of hybrid
social forms. In outlining these issues we indicate
how they may be connected to the enterprise of
alternative management accounting research, rais-
ing general questions that indicate possibilities
resident in these current streams of thought.
2. Characterising alternative management
accounting research
In this section of the paper we review extant
alternative management accounting research. The
papers included in our review are listed in the
Appendix. As can be seen from the Appendix, we
outline seven identi?able streams of this research:
a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
radical alternative; institutional theory; structu-
ration theory; Foucauldian approach; and a
Latourian approach.
1
Each of these is discussed
brie?y, as a prelude to our consideration of the
more general contributions of alternative man-
agement accounting research.
2.1. Non-rational design school
The non-rational design school was one of the
earliest streams of alternative management
accounting research to appear in AOS. This parti-
cular perspective questions presumptions of
rationality in organisational choice—that is, an
elaboration of clear, consistent and transitive
goals; comprehensive searches for feasible alter-
natives to problems; a consideration of these
alternatives in terms of costs and bene?ts; and
optimised decision strategies (Carley, 1980). The
non-rational design school, in comparison, is
motivated by literatures that suggest: organisa-
tional goals are unclear and unstable (Cohen,
March, & Olsen, 1972); search is limited and local
(Cyert & March, 1963); and that the process of
analysis and choice may be politically motivated
(Pfe?er, 1981), incremental in nature (Lindblom,
1959), routinised by the application of procedures
(Cyert & March, 1963), or more fortuitous than
considered (March & Olsen, 1979).
Researchers a?liated with this network of ideas
have forged innovative connections between man-
agement accounting information systems and
organisational functioning. For example, Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson (1978) and Cooper, Hayes, and Wolf
(1981) argue that management accounting infor-
mation systems unduly constrain organisational
functioning, particularly learning in and about
organisations. Hedberg and Jo¨ nsson (1978) argue
that management accounting practices are ‘‘stabi-
lizers’’ (p. 47) that standardise thinking and
action. Cooper et al. (1981) argue, similarly, that
management accounting systems are ‘‘coercive’’
(p. 182) because they limit choice processes and
legitimate the very conditions that enable such
structuring to occur (for example, organisational
culture and power relations within organisations).
Boland (1979, 1981) and Banbury and Nahapiet
(1979) argue that if such a constitutive role is
ascribed to management accounting practice, then
design processes must be examined critically. They
argue that developing and implementing manage-
ment accounting information systems requires
more than an exhaustive list of users’ needs
(Boland, 1979). It is contended that there must be
a conscious examination of the values embedded
in management accounting information system
design. Banbury and Nahapiet advocate a con-
sideration of the ‘‘source’’ and ‘‘content’’ (pp.
171–173) of these values. Boland (1981) illustrates
1
It should be noted that the seven alternative perspectives
adopted in this paper are illustrative and di?erent papers may
draw more broadly from the literature than our initial categor-
isation suggests.
98 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
the quite di?erent values that may be found
between particular design methodologies—for
example, the enabling of ‘‘personal growth’’ or the
creation of ‘‘future forms’’ (p.116)—by comparing
and contrasting the work of Argyris and Church-
man respectively.
As such, research from the non-rational design
school helps us to appreciate the problematic
construction of management accounting infor-
mation systems and their constitutive/constraining
role in organisational sense-making—a character-
isation that is quite distinct from ideas about the
sensible allocation of resources that underscores
other accounts of management accounting infor-
mation systems and their use.
2.2. Naturalistic approach
‘‘Naturalistic’’ research (Hopper, Storey, &
Willmott, 1987) seeks to investigate management
accounting practice in its ‘‘everyday’’ organi-
sational context (Tomkins & Groves, 1983), that
is, in situ. Whilst this perspective has yielded
intrinsically interesting and ‘landmark’ studies of
management accounting practice (for example,
Berry et al., 1984), the proliferation of research
questions pursued, and practical di?culties sur-
rounding access to theoretically interesting orga-
nisations, has resulted in a highly fragmented
body of research. There is little that is cumulative
within the naturalistic research perspective—each
study addresses a unique aspect of management
accounting practice. Yet some ostensible connec-
tions may be o?ered.
There are studies about budgeting (Boland &
Pondy, 1983, 1986; Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1986;
Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989; Jo¨ nsson,
1982; Llewellyn, 1998) that characterise this tech-
nology in interesting ways. Budgets are depicted as
ways of: helping to express and a?rm national
cultural values (Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobs-
son, 1989); introducing greater resource con-
sciousness in the process of public sector reform
(Llewellyn, 1998); and reinforcing the ‘‘powerless
position’’ of an occupational group (Covaleski &
Dirsmith, 1986), for example. There are other studies
about organisational decline that illustrate the lack
of a substantive contribution from management
accounting to ?nancial turnarounds (Czar-
niawska-Joerges, 1988; Ezzamel & Bourn, 1990).
Other naturalistic studies demonstrate a common
concern for the importance of talk in accounting
work (Ahrens, 1997; Preston, 1986; Rosenberg,
Tomkins, & Day, 1982), describing how sig-
ni?cant aspects of management accountants’
work—negotiations (Rosenberg et al., 1982),
informing others (Preston, 1986) and providing
customised solutions to problems (Ahrens,
1997)—are achieved by an oral management
accounting culture. Studies by Dent (1991),
Mouritsen (1999) and Vaivio (1999) illustrate,
amongst other things, that the organisational
contexts in which management accounting is
practised are changing, sometimes quite funda-
mentally [becoming more pro?t-oriented (Dent,
1991), more ?exible (Mouritsen, 1999), more cus-
tomer-oriented (Vaivio, 1999), for instance], and
that management accounting both contributes to
these changes, and is changed by them also.
Finally, there is the study by Berry et al. (1984)
that reminds us that management accounting may
not always be as important as we think. Physical
rather than ?nancial controls were dominant in
the National Coal Board. From these studies,
therefore, we learn that management accounting
technologies are enacted quite di?erently from one
organisation to another; conveying local values,
meanings and nuances.
2.3. The radical alternative
The radical alternative has left a distinct imprint
on AOS by linking management accounting prac-
tice to ‘‘the politics of emancipation’’ (Giddens,
1998, p. 41). The radical alternative draws on the
ideas of Marx (see Atkinson, 1972; Keat & Urry,
1982), the Frankfurt school (Habermas, 1968,
1976; Marcuse, 1986), and the labour process lit-
erature (Braverman, 1974) to highlight how the
practice of management accounting is implicated
in the creation and perpetuation of an unequal
society. Such an unequal society concerns writers
from the radical alternative because not all its
members have equal life chances. Resources (such
as justice, education, and health care, for example)
are not distributed evenly or on the basis of need.
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 99
The radical alternative is deeply concerned by
these disparities between resources and needs for
two key reasons. First, it is argued that inequality
undermines social stability by promoting deep-
seated forms of con?ict and repression. Second, it
is argued that members of organisations and
society (unwittingly) internalise and accept values
that reproduce an unequal society.
Alternative researchers working under the aus-
pices of the radical perspective do so in two main
ways. First, they mobilise its critical rhetoric in
discussions about management accounting
(Cooper, 1983; Hopper et al., 1987; Laughlin,
1987). Second, they use its radical theories to
orientate empirical investigations of management
accounting practice (Armstrong, 1987; Arnold,
1998; Hopper & Armstrong, 1991; Neimark &
Tinker, 1986; Tinker, Menno, & Neimark, 1982).
The empirical studies that have been conducted
within the radical alternative are mainly historical
(cf. Arnold, 1998). As a cohort these papers create
a form of antipathetic discourse that highlights the
non-benign nature of management accounting
practice. Management accounting practice is inex-
orably intertwined with ‘‘managerialist’’ systems
of ideology and manifest in, for example, con-
structions of ‘‘value’’ (Tinker et al., 1982), ‘‘new
economic citizenship’’ (Arnold, 1998), the intensi-
?cation of control over labour processes (Hopper
& Armstrong, 1991), and the use of control sys-
tems in multi-national and conglomerate organi-
sations (Armstrong, 1987; Neimark & Tinker,
1986). In short, the radical alternative mobilises
research to provide a platform for critique, change
and improvement within organisations, in parti-
cular, and society, in general.
2.4. Institutional theory
Institutional theory has emerged as a reaction to
epiphenomenal constructions of collective beha-
viour, that is, the characterisation of collective
behaviour as an aggregation of individual actions
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). In comparison, insti-
tutional theory focuses on socially-generated rules
as an explanation of this. Alternative management
accounting research has been in?uenced mostly by
the institutionalism of organisational theory and
sociology. In organisational theory and sociology,
there has been an explicit movement towards cog-
nitive and cultural explanations of institutions,
focusing on the meaning and accomplishment of
various rules that structure behaviour in organi-
sations and society.
Drawing on the arguments of Meyer and
Rowan (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell (1991),
management accounting practices, such as bud-
geting and casemix accounting, are seen as
‘rational myths’ that confer social legitimacy upon
organisational participants and their actions
(Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1983, 1988; Covaleski,
Dirsmith, & Michelman, 1993). The emergence
and prevalence of these forms of management
accounting practices is attributed not only to the
exigencies of technical imperatives, but to the
existence of rationalised norms that ‘‘specify in a
rule-like way the appropriate means to pursue
them’’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 343). As such,
the environments of an organisation now pro-
liferate. There is the ‘technical’ environment and
various ‘institutionalised’ environments—legal,
professional, regulatory, and so-on. Researchers
adopting institutional theory argue that the form
that management accounting practices assume is
in?uenced by the complexities of these multiple
constructions of the environment and the expec-
tations that they convey.
2.5. Structuration theory
Giddens’ theory of structuration has created a
small but distinctive contribution to alternative
management accounting research. Structuration
theory is concerned with conceptualising the inter-
connection between the agency of individuals
(their capability to make choices) and the repro-
duction of social structures (‘‘rules’’ and ‘‘resour-
ces’’). Giddens argues that the routinised nature of
much of human behaviour accounts for the repli-
cation of given structures across space and time.
Correspondingly, rules can maintain their saliency
in structuring behaviour long after the face-to-face
interactions (or ‘‘co-presence’’) necessary to con-
stitute such regularised practices have ceased. Yet
Giddens acknowledges that change is possible.
Human agents can choose to act in ways that are
100 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
di?erent from prevailing norms and rules. Also,
behaviour may have unanticipated consequences.
Giddens’ work (1976, 1979, 1982, 1984), therefore,
highlights the ways in which our behaviour has
an impact on its societal context and, corre-
spondingly, how society leaves its imprint on our
behaviour.
Whilst Giddens’ work has fostered some spirited
meta-theoretical debate within AOS (Boland,
1996; Scapens & Macintosh, 1996), structuration
theory has had only a small impact on character-
isations of management accounting practice.
Roberts and Scapens (1985) draw parallels
between Giddens’ structures and accounting sys-
tems. Accounting systems are seen as ways of reg-
ularising organisational functioning across time
and space. Such organisational routines are parti-
cularly important when face-to-face contact is not
possible between management accountants and
the users of a system (for example, in companies
operating in more than one place). The accounting
system becomes a way of supplementing local
meanings and norms by imposing discipline on the
work of dispersed organisational participants.
Roberts’ (1990) case study of a conglomerate
organisation, in comparison, illustrates how face-
to-face meetings were used to develop an alter-
native form of accountability from divisionalised
systems of measurement and control, allowing
shared meanings and strong systems of reciprocity
to be built both locally and interpersonally.
2.6. Foucauldian approach
Alternative management accounting research
also re?ects the in?uence of the late French
sociologist, Michel Foucault (see, for example,
Foucault, 1972, 1977, 1978).
2
Foucault’s work has
been pivotal in generating so-called ‘new histories’
of management accounting. Following Foucault’s
theme of ‘‘archaeology’’ (1972), new histories out-
line and examine the conditions of possibility—‘‘the
social and organisational practices and bodies of
knowledge’’ (Hopwood, 1987, p. 230)—that
enable particular management accounting tech-
nologies to emerge at given times and places. For
example, Burchell, Clubb, and Hopwood (1985)
discuss the emergence of value-added accounting
in the United Kingdom during the 1970s within a
matrix of various discourses about industrial rela-
tions reform, corporate reporting and economic
management. Other con?gurations and con-
?uences of historically-located forms of social,
economic, and political discourses are shown to be
associated with cost accounting in the United
Kingdom between the two world wars (Loft,
1986), the emergence of standard costing in the
early years of the twentieth century (Miller &
O’Leary, 1987), and the emergence of DRGs pay-
ments in the US hospital system (Preston, 1992).
This research challenges simplistic accounts of
management accounting technologies and their
origins. There is nothing inevitable about man-
agement accounting’s causes and trajectory. There
are, however, complicated and unpredictable
interactions between di?erent forms of discourse
and institutional structures.
In other studies, Foucault’s (1977) work on
‘‘discipline’’ and ‘‘docility’’ has been appropriated
to deliver provocative constructions of manage-
ment accounting control. For example, Miller and
O’Leary (1987) argue that standard costing was
used in the early twentieth century as a form of
‘‘discipline’’, a way of making labour more e?-
cient, focused and compliant. Knights and Col-
linson’s (1987) ?eld study demonstrates how
economic forms of discourse contribute to the
submission of workers. More recently, Miller and
O’Leary’s (1993) case study of cellular manu-
facturing in Caterpillar Inc. examines the role of
management accounting in creating new dis-
ciplinary forms that they describe as ‘‘calculable
spaces’’. New management accounting techniques,
such as ‘‘investment bundling’’ and ‘‘manufactur-
ing resource planning’’, were nourished by the
environment of Caterpillar which promoted dis-
courses about ‘‘?exibility’’, ‘‘modernity’’, ‘‘world-
class’’, ‘‘quality’’ and the like. Such Foucauldian
research provides a strong contrast to more tradi-
tional characterisations of management account-
ing control. Management accounting control
2
Although an early reference to Foucault may be found in
Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, and Nahapiet (1980),
arguably, it was not until 1987 that this particular research
perspective gathered momentum in AOS (Hopwood, 1987;
Knights & Collinson, 1987; Miller & O’Leary, 1987).
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 101
becomes a re?ection of institutionalised webs of
power—be they from the ‘old’ economy and its
concern for ‘‘e?ciency’’ or the ‘new’ economy and
its concern for ‘‘world-class’’ products and services.
2.7. Latourian approach
Followers of Latour (1987, 1993, 1996) are con-
cerned with understanding accounting techno-
logies in the context of networks of human and
non-human ‘actants’. Correspondingly, it is
argued that management accounting numbers are
‘‘fabrications’’ (Preston, Cooper, & Coombes,
1992, p. 561) or inscriptions ‘built’ to take on the
appearance of ‘facts’. Case studies illustrate how
management accounting numbers are constructed
to accommodate and persuade diverse interests
within organisations. For example, the research of
Pinch, Mulkay, and Ashmore (1989), Preston et
al. (1992) and Chua (1995) argues that the con-
struction of budgeting numbers within British,
North American and Australian hospital systems
respectively, involves co-opting the interests of
medical practitioners, hospital administrators and
policy setters in these arenas. As a result, we begin
to recognise the fragility of management account-
ing numbers. These numbers are built on the
shifting and transient interests of disparate groups
of organisational participants who work inces-
santly to maintain the ‘‘position’’ (Latour, 1987,
p. 50) of (their) numbers and in?uence over orga-
nisational functioning.
This research has also introduced the distinctive
idea of ‘‘translation’’ to characterisations of man-
agement accounting practice. Latour (1987) uses
the term ‘‘translation’’ to re?ect how the interests
of fact-builders, and those that they conscript
within their networks, are converted into ‘facts’
(p. 108). It has been argued that the mundaneness
of management accounting numbers facilitates the
embedding of partisan values into daily routines
and organisational functioning. For example,
Miller (1991) argues that DCF analysis was used
in the United Kingdom during the 1960s to trans-
late the interests of government policy makers,
concerned with issues of economic growth, into
organisational processes and activities. Likewise,
Ogden’s (1997) discussion of privatised water
companies (also in the UK) discusses how new
accounting performance measures established the
political objectives of the Conservative Govern-
ment within these particular enterprises.
2.8. Contributions of alternative management
accounting research
As the foregoing narrative has conveyed,
alternative management accounting research has
sustained a number of diverse perspectives.
Each has its trademark theories, studies and
interpretations of management accounting prac-
tice. But is there more to this research than an
overarching commitment to non-positivism? In
the following sections we explore its disciplinary
accomplishments.
2.9. A critique of means-end reasoning
When considered as a collective enterprise,
alternative management accounting research is
distinguished by its disengagement with means-
end reasoning. It severs closely-coupled connec-
tions between organisational goals and the con-
tribution of accounting technologies. [And the
longitudinal case study by Ezzamel and Bourn
(1990) demonstrates the extent of the dislocation
that may occur in practice between pressing orga-
nisational needs and management accounting
work.] Instead, this research constructs a variety
of rationalities for management accounting prac-
tices that are only loosely-related to the pursuit of
organisational goals.
Researchers, such as Hedberg and Jo¨ nsson
(1978) and Cooper et al. (1981), o?er the notion of
‘playfulness’ as a counterpoint to means-end rea-
soning. In highly ambiguous situations, manage-
ment accounting practices may be invoked to
discover their role within organisations, to test the
limits of their usefulness, and to act as a conduit to
promote organisational learning—both about
‘means’ and ‘ends’ (see Burchell et al., 1980).
Similarly, a theme of ‘‘experimentation’’ is adop-
ted in the work of Pinch et al. (1989) to describe
how purposes are crafted, clari?ed and con?rmed
as a result of the practice of management
accounting.
102 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
The work of Boland and Pondy (1986), Czar-
niawska-Joerges (1988), and Czarniawska-Joerges
and Jacobsson (1989) advocates a symbolic form
of rationality for management accounting prac-
tice. Various management accounting practices
are seen to be sensible because of the values they
sustain (such as a rea?rmation of the importance
of consensus within the Swedish culture), rather
than the material resources that may be managed
as a consequence of using technologies of the
craft. It is further argued that management
accounting practices possess a rationality when
considered from the viewpoint of the localised
goals of particular organisational participants.
Political processes in organisations may link man-
agement accounting to the goals of powerful sub-
groups, rather than the espoused objectives of the
organisation as a whole (Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1986; Jo¨ nsson, 1982).
Studies by alternative researchers also suggest
that reasoned accounts of organisational func-
tioning may be forged if we look beyond organi-
sations for meaning. Studies conducted under the
auspices of structuration and institutional theories
recognise a di?erent form of rationality stemming
from systemic norms and structures. The budget-
ing behaviours studied by Covaleski and Dirsmith
(1983), as a case in point, illustrate how extra-
organisational expectations may be seen as a way
of understanding ?nancial information ?ows in
the nursing services area of US hospitals. In a
similar vein, research by Miller (1991) and Ogden
(1997), mobilising the Latourian notion of ‘‘action
at a distance’’, links the rationality of management
accounting practice to contemporary government
policies (about ‘‘growth’’ or ‘‘privatisation’’ and
‘‘choice’’). Foucauldian studies (such as Burchell
et al., 1985; Loft, 1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987;
Preston, 1992) likewise forge connections between
the purposes of practices and networks of institu-
tionally-located discourses. Hopper and Arm-
strong claim that management accounting
practices are better understood as modes of dom-
ination rather than optimisation—indeed, control
over labour may work against goad-directed
behaviours by encouraging organisational dys-
functions. Finally, Pinch et al. (1989) illustrate
that the valued ends of management accounting
may seem unintended and unrelated to over-
arching organisational goals. Management
accounting may help to attain ‘weak con-
sequences’. A key player in Pinch et al. (1989)
study stated that the implementation of clinical
budgeting had been ‘successful’ because it enabled
organisational participants to ‘‘become better
social actors’’ (p. 293)! ‘Success’ was not judged in
terms of cost containment or medically-signi?cant
outcomes in this instance. As such, there is no
privileging of economic and calculative reasoning
within alternative management accounting
research.
2.10. A critique of the ‘real’
Alternative management accounting research
problematises the constitution of ‘reality’ by
characterising it as a product of ongoing con-
structive or interpretive acts. As such, organisa-
tional participants are seen as continuously
ascribing meanings to sets of practices that become
known as management accounting. Correspond-
ingly, there are many possible constructions of
practice over time and space; some similar, some
quite di?erent.
The ?eld studies by Mouritsen (1999) and
Ahrens (1997), for example, bring this position
into clear view. In Mouritsen’s study of a Danish
manufacturing organisation, he outlines the com-
peting interpretations that organisational partici-
pants attribute to the practice of ‘?exibility’. The
CFO of this particular organisation characterised
?exibility as a cost-increasing practice, as well as a
practice that made it increasingly di?cult to man-
age using established plans and budgets. In com-
parison, the production manager constructed
?exibility as a set of practices that would enable
co-operative relationships to be established
between product-developers, production teams,
workers and management. Ahrens’ (1997) research
casts these interpretive di?erences more broadly.
He examines the contrasts, or ‘‘tensions’’ (p. 619),
in management accounting practice between the
UK and German divisions of an organisation.
According to Ahrens’ ?eld study, Germanic con-
structions of management accounting were more
heavily in?uenced by bureaucratic concepts,
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 103
whereas in the UK division that he observed
management accounting practice was made
meaningful by adopting a customer focus. Neither
of these studies smoothes over the interpretive
tensions that they raise. Instead they are used to
illustrate the variety of ways in which manage-
ment accounting is constructed and constituted.
The dialogical material included in Ahrens’
(1997) study further illustrates the ‘‘?exibility’’
and ‘‘fragility’’ (p. 167) of the meanings that
management accounting practice may assume. It
is through conversational interplays that the ‘real’
is negotiated, amended and perpetuated. But as
Mouritsen’s study also indicates, non-human
actants (such as computer-based technologies and
paper-based plans) may be in?uential also in
shaping interpretations of management account-
ing practice.
In addition, alternative research avoids unitary
constructions of practice because of its varied the-
orisations of a particular phenomenon. Take bud-
geting as a case in point. Budgeting is portrayed a
political process (Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1986;
Jo¨ nsson, 1982), a union of ‘‘natural’’ and
‘‘rational’’ processes (Boland & Pondy, 1983), a
process of cultural reinforcement (Czarniawska-
Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989), an opportunity for
playfulness (Cooper et al., 1981), a form of insti-
tutional isomorphism (Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1983), and experimentation (Pinch et al., 1989).
These varied constructions of budgeting illustrate
how this critique of the ‘real’ is, in part, accom-
plished by the theoretical pluralism that alter-
native research welcomes.
2.11. A critique of accounting’s impotence
Alternative management accounting research
enables us to comprehend the potency of manage-
ment accounting practice. It is more than ‘‘a mere
collection of techniques’’ (Burchell et al., 1980,
p. 6). Rather management accounting technolo-
gies cannot be separated from the formation and
exercise of power in organisations and society.
Consequently, the technologies of the craft favour
some organisational participants and disadvantage
others; sometimes with transparent partiality and,
at other times, in less apparent ways.
The apolitical imagery of practice is challenged
by alternative research that illustrates the manifest
couplings that can occur between management
accounting and power in and around organi-
sations. A ?eld study by Jo¨ nsson (1982), for
instance, relates how the budgetary process in a
Swedish local government organisation became
highly politicised. Faced with the prospect of a
reduction in their budget, one of the budgetary
committees engaged the support of its clients to
stage demonstrations against possible funding
cuts, capturing the attention of the press and
exerting pressure on the Executive Committee. A
seemingly innocuous exercise in rational resource
allocation, given a context of increasing economic
stringency, resulted in a minor form of civil unrest!
Similarly, Boland and Pondy’s (1986) transcript of
a budget-cutting meeting in a US high-school
demonstrates the interconnectedness of manage-
ment accounting and the political in practice.
Budget cuts are discussed by organisational parti-
cipants in such a way that indicates a very keen
sense of their political consequences—participants
at the meeting agree that a supply dollar saved
does not have nearly the same ‘‘impact’’ as a
teaching dollar saved (p. 413). Moreover, as the
budget meeting progresses and potential cost
reductions are related to particular teachers’ posi-
tions and individual teachers’ life histories, the
budgetary process becomes incapable of sustain-
ing any fac¸ ade of an unimpassioned, technical
process. Likewise, the research of Preston et al.
(1992) and Chua (1995) further reinforces the
overtly political nature of management accounting
practice. The clinical budgeting cases that they
describe convey a sense of the machinations that
were occurring within organisational and inter-
organisational networks of clinicians and admin-
istrators. They may choose to describe this as
‘accounting in action’, however, it looks remark-
ably like politics in action too.
Nonetheless, the partnership between manage-
ment accounting practice and power is not always
so obvious. The connection may be much more
surreptitious. And a hallmark of alternative
research is its preparedness to consider these less
obvious connections. The Latourian research, for
example, outlines the very long networks that
104 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
translate values of external policy makers into
organisationally located management accounting
practices—reproducing and fortifying these sour-
ces of power anew. The research of Miller (1991)
and Ogden (1997), outlined previously, illustrates
the connections that can be forged between the
interests of government policy makers and parti-
cular management accounting practices. The few
studies informed by institutionalism (Covaleski &
Dirsmith, 1983) and structuration theory
(Roberts & Scapens, 1985) further illustrate this.
For example, Covaleski and Dirsmith discuss
budgeting in the nursing services area in terms of
its compliance with extra-organisational expecta-
tions about information ?ow and use. These
extra-organisational expectations were not traced
to an identi?able government program or policy,
as in Miller’s (1991) and Ogden’s (1997) research.
In comparison, the institutional expectations that
Covaleski and Dirsmith invoke convey the values
and interests of those who can no longer be
nominated and identi?ed—the moment of co-
presence has passed but its in?uence endures in
other times and places, such as the 41 North Amer-
ican hospitals that these researchers examined.
Less benign constructions of the latent potency
of management accounting are contained in the
radical and Foucauldian research. Radical
research seeks to expose the values embedded in
management accounting practice. And radical
research aligns management accounting practice
with ‘‘managerialist’’ interests (Hopper et al.,
1987). The historical study of Tinker et al. (1982)
argues that it is the conceptualisation and
measurement of ‘‘value’’ that consolidates this
linkage between the practice of the craft and its
partisanship. Management accounting measures
of value emphasise short-term economic accom-
plishments, such as the excess of ‘revenues’ over
‘costs’, without recognising fully the contributions
of labour or the externalities of those endeavours
for which it accounts. Hopper and Armstrong
(1991) point to the ways in which cost accounting
techniques have intensi?ed control over labour
and subordinated labour’s interests to those of the
agents of capital. Arnold (1998) argues, in a more
contemporary context, that modern manufactur-
ing and the new calculative practices that it sus-
tains are just more of the same. Measures of
?exibility, timeliness and interdependency are
merely modern ways of controlling labour in
pursuit of the interests of a globalised form of
capitalism.
Foucauldian researchers concentrate on the
institutionalised webs of power that are embedded
in management accounting practice. Miller and
O’Leary’s (1987) study of standard costing char-
acterises the disciplinary or coercive impact of
this. According to Miller and O’Leary, standard
costs enabled administrative discourses about
‘‘waste’’ and ‘‘e?ciency’’ to govern the activities of
organisational participants. The research by
Knights and Collinson (1987) demonstrates the
extent to which these institutionalised webs of
power may become entrenched within organi-
sations and our society. When faced with the pos-
sible loss of their jobs, male manual workers failed
to contest the legitimacy of ?nancial measures and
controls. There was little or no recognition by
these highly unionised workers of the extent to
which their core values had become aligned to
those of management.
As such, management accounting technologies
emerge as a potent and, in some cases, almost
hegemonic aspect of organisational functioning.
These technologies are not innocent. They may
contribute to the overt opposition of interests in
organisations and society, in addition to the sup-
pression of others. Alternative management
accounting research is both politically informed
and informing as a consequence.
2.12. A critique of accounting change
Alternative management accounting research
has augmented our understanding of accounting
change. It attests to the improbability of purpose-
ful and predictable change: there is little empirical
evidence that a self-enlightened, well-engineered
and progressive path characterises the develop-
ment of management accounting technologies.
Studies of clinical budgeting (Chua, 1995; Pinch et
al., 1989; Preston et al., 1992), for example, indi-
cate that the introduction of DRGs-based costing
in hospitals assumed a slow and contested path
towards implementation. The research by Ezzamel
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 105
and Bourn (1990), Czarniawska-Joerges (1988),
Jo¨ nsson (1982) and Boland and Pondy (1983,
1986) illustrates the di?culties that particular
organisations experienced in attaining a ‘?t’
between management accounting control systems
and changing environmental contexts. In compar-
ison, research by Vaivio (1999) on a recently
established system of customer-related reporting,
a new management accounting practice that was
sympathetic to the changing requirements of a
business, describes the opposition that arose to a
needed change. Preston’s (1986) study (ironically)
demonstrates that changed management account-
ing systems can be implemented relatively swiftly
but then happily ignored by organisational parti-
cipants who rely on other informal information
systems. In addition, Dent’s (1991) research into
a public sector railway company demonstrates
that what may pass as accounting change may
not involve any great level of technical sophisti-
cation, transformation or re?nement. The study
by Burchell et al. (1985), dealing with the emer-
gence of value-added accounting in the UK,
describes a change that could not be aligned
clearly with the intentions of those identi?ed in
the research.
In fact, some alternative researchers go so far as
to suggest that accounting and change are
uncomfortable bed-fellows in practice. Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson (1978) and Cooper et al. (1981) argue
that accounting practices are part of the stabilising
repertoire of organisations, building in continuity
rather than change. Roberts and Scapens (1985),
Roberts (1990), Covaleski and Dirsmith (1983,
1988) and Covaleski et al. (1993) suggest that
management accounting routinises organisational
functioning. Other writers (Banbury & Nahapiet,
1979; Boland, 1979; Dent, 1991) outline and illus-
trate the beliefs and meanings that practice perpe-
tuates, thereby facilitating stability.
Yet management accounting change does occur,
despite these factors that seem to stand in oppo-
sition to it. And alternative management account-
ing research conveys distinctive insights into
accounting change. Changing networks of socio-
cultural, political and economic conditions have
been related to a variety of changes in manage-
ment accounting practice in the twentieth century,
such as the emergence of standard costing (Loft,
1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987), DRGs (Preston,
1992), capital budgeting (Miller, 1991), customer
performance measures (Ogden, 1997) and value-
added accounting (Burchell et al., 1985). Such
studies indicate that accounting change may be a
fortuitous (Burchell et al., 1985), expedient
(Miller, 1991; Ogden, 1997) or compromised (Pre-
ston, 1992) organisational outcome. The work of
Cooper (1983) further reinforces the unpredictable
course of management accounting change by
highlighting its foundations in institutional
instabilities and con?icts.
‘Micro’ studies provide a sense of the unpre-
dictable and local nature of accounting change
(Hopwood, 1987). A ?eld study of local govern-
ment organisations by Rosenberg et al. (1982)
relates change to the careers paths and aspirations
of particular management accounting practi-
tioners. Empirical studies by Ahrens (1997) and
Vaivio (1999) highlight the contribution of spon-
taneous forms of local discourse on the trajectory
of accounting change. The path of management
accounting technologies in particular organi-
sational contexts is being continually re-laid and
re-directed by various forms of talk that challenge
and modify extant practices. Other research indi-
cates that management accounting change is slow
and arduous because its technologies are insepar-
able from the social fabric of an organisation
(Dent, 1991; Laughlin, 1987; Llewellyn, 1998).
Accounting change becomes a form of cultural
change. Dent’s research, in particular, indicates
that accounting change can be unremarkable
from a technical point of view. Rather the orga-
nisation that Dent studied was remarkable in the
way that culture changed to enable a re-position-
ing of management accounting practice. Manage-
ment accounting moved from the periphery to a
position of in?uence over core organisational
values. Llewellyn (1998) reported a similar situa-
tion of cultural transition within the Scottish
social service.
Alternative management accounting research
illustrates that there is little or no sense of any
technical elegance or excellence propelling man-
agement accounting change. As such, we are left
with a sense of what accounting change is not.
106 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
Accounting change is not linear, predictable, con-
trollable, exclusively technical or well-behaved.
2.13. Critique of bodiless forms of management
accounting practice
Alternative management accounting research is
further distinguished by its corporeal dimension.
It imparts a sense of the bodily positioning of
organisational participants. Yet this corporeal
accomplishment comes as no surprise. Such
research has demonstrated a commitment to using
qualitative research methods and these methods
enable the behaviours of organisational partici-
pants to come into view. As a result, we begin to
appreciate the roles of particular organisational
participants in constituting and conveying the
technologies of the craft.
For instance, in the opening vignette of Dent’s
(1991) study we are confronted with images of
organisational participants moving through time
and space, engaging in activities such as driving
trucks, replenishing water supplies, checking tick-
ets, answering questions, pushing buttons and
greeting people. Dent describes organisational
activities in such a way that the economic objec-
tives and consequences of this railway enterprise
are connected to individual bodily habitudes—
such activities are accompanied by smiles, grum-
piness, deftness, busyness and messiness, for
instance. Preston’s (1986) study of an informal
management information system provides a simi-
lar sense of the embodiment of management
accounting practice. Ample dialogical inclusions
in Preston’s research create an anchor between
organisational processes and individuals’ involve-
ment in them. Preston gives voice to the interac-
tions between ?ve managers in the organisation
that he studied. However, we do not only hear
these individuals speak, we also get a sense of the
way in which they moved throughout the plant—
physically inspecting output in the production
department and visiting each others’ o?ces to ?nd
out what was going on. Rosenberg et al.’s (1982)
study, again, conveys a sense of the importance of
bodily positioning. These researchers depict man-
agement accounting change in local government
as a consequence of the physical ‘‘movement’’
(p. 125) of innovative practitioners (‘‘segment
movers’’) from one part of a local authority to
another.
Ahrens’ (1997) ?eld study, in comparison,
depicts the constraining imprint that management
accounting leaves on the body. The activities of
the management accountants that he studied were
strongly informed by their national cultural con-
text. Czarniawska-Joerges and Jacobsson (1989)
describe a similar situation in which bodily habi-
tudes re?ected cultural expectations. This shaping
of the body is further illuminated by Miller and
O’Leary (1987, 1993). Miller and O’Leary (1987)
explored the ‘conditions of possibility’ that
enabled organisational participants’ activities to
be ‘‘rendered knowable’’ (p. 242) by standard
costing. Standard costing enables the bodies (if
not the minds) of organisational participants to be
used for the greater economic and societal good.
Miller and O’Leary’s (1993) study of Caterpillar
describes the bodily containment that occurs in a
context of ‘cellular’ manufacturing. Miller and
O’Leary outline the ways in which a change to
world class manufacturing resulted in the ‘‘spatial
reordering’’ (p. 15) of Caterpillar’s Decatur plant.
This ‘‘spatial reordering’’ is signi?cant because it
created a new trajectory for the movement of
products and organisational participants within
the plant. Organisational participants were
required to interact with each other, and the pro-
ducts that they were assembling, in accordance
with the lay-out and metrics of the ‘‘Assembly
Highway’’. There was an increasing need for syn-
chronisation and new management accounting
measures were implemented for this purpose.
(And the Foucauldian circle has come the full
turn: the monastic cell has been replaced by the
production cell; God’s gaze has given way to the
unforgiving gaze of management accounting per-
formance measures.)
Alternative management accounting research
highlights how the bodily and the technical inter-
sect; be they passive bodies subject to the dis-
ciplinary impact of various management
accounting techniques (Miller & O’Leary, 1987,
1993) or pro-active bodies regenerating manage-
ment accounting practice (Rosenberg et al.,
1982).
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 107
3. Whence alternative management accounting
research
How do you sum up this legacy of alternative
management accounting research? If it is possible
to proceed with such a presumptuous task, we
would contend that its enduring legacy is a sense
of the limitedness of management accounting
technologies. Management accounting practice
emerges as a highly situated phenomena—limited
by historical conditions that are speci?c to given
times and places; limited by local meanings and
values; limited by the local rationalities found in
particular organisational settings; and limited by
the individual habitudes of organisational partici-
pants who are connected to the conduct of man-
agement accounting work. Yet it is this very
recognition of the limitedness of management
accounting practice that enables alternative
researchers to engage with practice and generate
multiple interpretations of it; partly because of the
generous pluralism of such research. As such, the
limits of alternative management accounting
research remain to be discovered, constrained only
by the ‘‘sociological imaginations’’ (Mills, 1959) of
those that attempt it and the credibility of their
accounts.
4. Whither alternative management accounting
research
But how might this sociological imagination
continue to nourish alternative management
accounting research? And how may engagement
with broader debates within the social sciences,
which has constituted the hallmark of alternative
management accounting research to date, provide
interesting, novel and contemporary approaches
to characterise and understand emerging manage-
ment accounting practice? Consequently, it is the
ongoing contribution of alternative management
accounting research which concerns us in this sec-
tion of the paper. In the remainder of the paper we
outline brie?y how the social sciences may provide
theoretically interesting and fecund ideas for
alternative management accounting researchers to
pursue.
4.1. Engaging with the future
In our opinion, debates about the nature of
individual and organisational functioning within a
technologically-mediated and inter-connected
society have the capability to generate new
streams of alternative management accounting
research, and refresh the agenda of extant research
streams. Such debate within the social sciences is
generally subsumed by monikers such as ‘post-
modernism’, ‘disorganized capitalism’ (see Har-
vey, 1989) or ‘re?exive modernism’ (see Beck,
2000; Giddens, 1991; Lash, 1999). This body of
thought—referred to as postmodernism/dis-
organised capitalism/re?exive modernism—has
emerged from extensive argument within a num-
ber of disciplines, such as aesthetics, art, archi-
tecture, music, geography, literary criticism and
sociology (see Harvey, 1989; Wood, 1999). As an
intellectual project, such debate addresses the ced-
ing of modernity to a new era of national, organi-
sational and individual identity. In con?guring
this passing and change, debate has focused on
issues such as: the fragmentation of life; the
ascension of signs; the ?uidity and inter-penetra-
tion of practices; power and discourse; and the
textuality/inter-textuality of everyday life, for
instance.
These issues assume signi?cance for the conduct
of alternative management accounting research
because of their conceptual innovativeness; creat-
ing ‘white spaces’ for future research.
3
In order to
illustrate these possibilities, we outline brie?y how
the social sciences may direct and rejuvenate
alternative management accounting research.
Being guided by these literatures in relation to the
changing nature of society and organisational
functioning, we nominate three important con-
cepts—‘globalisation’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘network
society’—to (re-)mobilise alternative management
3
It is acknowledged that postmodern writings, such as the
work of Foucault and Latour, have been adopted in the extant
alternative management accounting research. However, these
postmodern theoretical perspectives have been mobilised, in the
main, to study modernity and issues from this era, such as the
emergence of cost accounting in the early years of the twentieth
century (e.g. Loft, 1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987).
108 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
accounting research.
4
These concepts are outlined
below and, arguably, motivate substantive inter-
rogations of management accounting practice in a
contemporary context.
4.2. Globalisation
The literature on globalisation outlines the
increasing impossibility of the containment of
everyday life, be it at the individual, organi-
sational or societal/national levels of analysis,
because of the international di?usion of techno-
logies, popular culture, workers, ?nancial capital,
knowledge, and goods and services (see Beck,
2000). Correspondingly, at a very basic level, the
term globalisation is used to convey the ‘‘complex
connectivity’’ of contemporary being (Jervis, 1999,
p. 3). The various literatures on globalisation pro-
vide a relevant point of engagement for alternative
researchers because it encourages us to see man-
agement accounting as a set of practices that is
implicated in complex processes of societal/orga-
nisational interpenetration.
A fertile avenue for research into globalisation
may borrow, for example, from Giddens’ work on
expert systems and their disembedding potential
(see Giddens, 1991). Management accounting sys-
tems, such as costing systems, quality systems,
planning systems and so-on, are forms of expert
systems. They are technologies which enable de-
contextualised ways of knowing—that is, they
may be operated independently of their temporal
and spatial origins. As such, management
accounting systems may be disembedded or
removed from their local origins and di?used to
other times and places in standardised formats,
through the purchase of computerised information
systems, consulting solutions, the pronouncements
of international professional bodies, such as
IFAC, and so-on. What we do not know, how-
ever, is why and how such systems of accounting
inscriptions travel across these inter-connected
times and spaces in our contemporary world. What
circuitous relays, networks and power relations
enable management accounting inscriptions to
travel or inhibit their journeys? What are the con-
sequences—professional, cultural, and organi-
sational—of a widespread disembedding of
management accounting practices? Will this lead
to the homogenisation of practice and the ameli-
oration of signi?cant forms of di?erence and
identity in our everyday and working lives? Is the
local capable of o?ering resistance and mediating
change in a postmodern world? What forms will
this change assume and what will be its a?ects/
e?ects? In short, we need to examine how man-
agement accounting systems rewrite the local and,
in turn, are rewritten by it. Moreover, attention to
this local-global connectivity facilitates the possi-
bility of new alternative accounts of management
accounting practice which are no longer bounded
by organisations and society, but accommodate
their fusion and permeability.
Further, as the pursuit of a globalised form of
capitalism comes to characterise practice, there is
arguably much scope for an invigorated critical
project and further radical accounts of manage-
ment accounting practice. Budgen (2000) suggests
that we must work to formulate a ‘‘a new concep-
tion of exploitation’’ to account for ‘‘a new form
of the extortion of surplus value’’ (p. 155) in the
global marketplace. Increasingly, both manual
and professional workers are being asked to
assume greater levels of responsibility (‘empower-
ment’), to work harder and more intelligently
(‘multi-skilling’, ‘?exibility’, ‘customisation’), as
well as contributing to the structural capital of
their organisations (‘knowledge-sharing’). This
provides an interesting and contemporary context
to re?ect on the extraction of ‘surplus value’ and
to comment on new forms of inequality that are
emerging in conjunction with globalisation.
4.3. Hybridity
Hybridity is a related concept which refers to
the new entities produced by connectivity in our
globalised world. Stemming from post-colonial
studies which examine the complex interrelation-
ships between the coloniser and the colonised, the
centre and the periphery, the East and the West
(Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1978, 1993), hybridity
4
Again, a comprehensive review of the postmodern/dis-
organised capitalism/re?exive modernity debate is beyond the
scope of this paper.
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 109
encourages us to recognise and investigate emer-
gent ‘third spaces’ that are a blend of the local and
the global, the old and the new. At a societal level
we have witnessed the emergence of the so-called
‘‘third way’’ (Giddens, 1998) as a blending of lib-
eral and social political systems. At an organi-
sational level we have seen the emergence of
transitional organisational forms, as public sector
organisations seek to become fully or partially
privatised and private enterprises grapple with
their increasing community and environmental
responsibilities (see Elkington, 1997). Such transi-
tions force us to re-examine our presumptions
about the context in which management account-
ing operates. Notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘pri-
vate’, the ‘democratic’ and the ‘socialist’, the
‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ‘other’ implode in this
rapidly changing, ?uid, global context. Corre-
spondingly, it is time for alternative management
accounting researchers to reformulate their con-
textual assumptions and to carefully characterise
new hybrid forms, both theoretically and empiri-
cally, by outlining how accounting is enrolled in
processes of transition.
There is scope, for example, for new projects
which examine how the emergence of hybridised
organisational forms has disrupted our assump-
tions regarding resource management (and
accountabilities for this). Management accounting
practice, perhaps more than ever, is implicated
both in the production of chronic contradictions
and the engineering of new forms of stability in
hybridised contexts. The university in which the
authors work provides a case point. We are
employed by a ‘public’ tertiary institution in which
equitable access to higher education is regarded as
one of its core values. However, diminishing and
non-muni?cent government funding formulae
have led to the admission of fee paying students,
drawn from local and international student
cohorts. The revenue generated by fee paying stu-
dents has continued to grow, as that from gov-
ernment sources declines, and dominates the
budget of the Faculty in which we work.
5
Our uni-
versity is, in a sense, no longer a public institution;
but it is not a private one either. This hybridised
existence is a ‘fact’ of life at the university—a fact
that creates contradictions between the past and
the present/future, and between rhetoric/mission/
values and ‘reality’. And accounting inscriptions
are central to the ongoing functioning of this
hybrid: on the one hand, accounting inscriptions
convey the economic di?erences between the pub-
lic and private identities of our schizoid institution
but, on the other, accounting inscriptions must
traverse these di?erences and enable the Uni-
versity to function despite, and because of these
di?erences. And functionality is not just because
of ‘loose-coupling’; of one ‘half’ not knowing what
the other ‘half’ is doing. Our contradictory life is
quite transparent, we realise the erosion of the
public sphere. At the same time, we know that the
university if not a ‘private’, pro?t-seeking enter-
prise either. How does one conceptualise account-
ing and hybridity? As yet, we do not have a way to
theorise the scope and e?ects of our hybridity or
the ways in which management accounting
becomes connected to change in this form.
Also, our university is not unique—other uni-
versities are confronting similar pressures for
forms of hybridity, as are many government
enterprises (such as water and electricity suppliers
and airlines). How are we to understand hybridity
across a range of di?erent organisational settings?
These more broad-scale patterns of change pro-
mise to reinvigorate the research agenda of scho-
lars working within the parameters of institutional
theory too. For one of the oft-heard rationali-
sations for the sustainability of hybrid/schizoid
forms is ‘‘we are all in the same boat’’! (If others
can live with these contradictions, so must we.)
But can this form of mimetic isomorphism con-
tinue to accommodate manifest contradictions
and fragmentation in hybrid spaces? Correspond-
ingly, there is a need to understand the institu-
tionalised context of hybridity, as well as it
enactment at a micro-level.
4.4. Network society
Finally, network society is a metaphor asso-
ciated with the work of Castells (1996). Network
society refers to the increasing role of digitised
5
Fees pay for salary supplements, for example, that are
over and above public sector salaries.
110 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
technologies in mediating interaction in and across
organisations and societies. Such has been the
intensi?cation of digitally mediated interaction
that writers refer to the advent of a ‘‘surveillance
society’’ (Lyon, 2001) or the emergence of a
‘‘Superpanoptican’’ (Poster, 1990). The capability
of organisations and governments to capture
information about us through credit card trans-
actions, internet usage, health card/social security
numbers etc, has never been greater. However, the
notion of surveillance is not new to alternative
management accounting researchers, as the extant
Foucauldian research attests. Nevertheless, alter-
native forms of management accounting research
are yet to systematically revisit this enduring issue
in the context of a network society. How is sur-
veillance enacted in highly digitised contexts? How
are the technologies of the craft mobilised in, and
transformed by the digitisation of organisational
functioning? How is submission to the economic
connected to the emergence of the ‘‘Super-
panoptican’’? Does subversion of management
accounting practice accompany this submission?
Relatively recent contexts, such as e-commerce,
loyalty schemes (such as Frequent Flyer initia-
tives), and remote call-centre operations, for
example, provide a contemporary platform for
this research. It is possible that Latourian
researchers are well positioned to undertake such
contemporary alternative research, given the close
attention that this perspective a?ords to the inter-
action between networks of individuals and non-
human artefacts, such as computers.
By undertaking this style of research, alternative
management accounting research becomes aligned
with a broader concern within the social sciences
for examining closely the mutual accommodation
of the body and technology. A broader literature
on ‘‘cyborgs’’—hybrids of ?esh and technology, as
well as the ‘real’ and the ?ctional—provides a way
of apprehending the ‘monsters’ that connect us to
a global world (Jervis, 1999; Price & Shildrick,
1999): enterprise resource planning systems, com-
puterised manufacturing systems, computer
screens, keyboards, modems, and so-on. Within
this context, the postmodern practice of manage-
ment accounting becomes an increasingly dis-
embodied and fragmented experience; rewriting
our sense of corporeality. Will oral management
accounting cultures, such as those outlined by
Ahrens (1997) and Vaivio (1999), continue to
thrive in a network society? And how are man-
agement accounting inscriptions contributing to
virtual and hyper-real constructions of organi-
sational/societal functioning?
In addition to this, the network society debate
also encourages us to think about the unpredict-
able and amorphous webs of inter-relationships
that connect us. The global impacts of ‘September
11’, the outbreak of mad cow disease in the United
Kingdom, and the collapse of Enron in 2002,
illustrate the connectivity embedded in a network
society. The potential fragility of our network
society has led to vigorous discussions both on the
risks that such connectivity creates, as well as the
ways in which trust must be invoked to maintain
the corresponding bene?ts of global networks of
connections (Beck, 1999; Lupton, 1999; Misztal,
1996). And the risk–trust debate has implications
for our characterisations of management account-
ing practice. Most immediately, the risks inherent
in a network society provide a renewed and fur-
ther impetus for alternative management account-
ing’s critique of means-end reasoning. The
indeterminism of actions makes it increasingly
di?cult to identify the costs and bene?ts of parti-
cular policies and practices, rendering many cal-
culable spaces unmanageable and unknowable.
How may accounting technologies maintain their
relevance? Are comprehensive calculations being
replaced by systems of trust (and hope), such as
intangible asset monitors and balanced scorecards,
that provide some ostensible form of assurance
that at least the drivers, rather than the outcomes
of performance are being managed, measured and
controlled? As a result, management accounting is
increasingly being practised within the context of a
system of trust which stands in marked contrast to
the underlying distrust that was embedded in the
context of industrial organisations and society.
5. In conclusion
This review has characterised alternative man-
agement accounting research in AOS from 1976 to
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 111
1999, acknowledging its pluralistic constitution
and the variety of perspectives mobilised by it.
Overall, this research has achieved signi?cant dis-
ciplinary accomplishments. Alternative manage-
ment accounting research has demonstrated: the
many di?erent rationalities of management
accounting practice; the variety of ways in which
management accounting practice is enacted and
given meaning; the potency of management
accounting technologies; the unpredictable, non-
linear and socially-embedded nature of manage-
ment accounting change; and the ways in which
management accounting practice is both con-
strained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its
exponents. It was argued that this legacy enables
us to appreciate the limitedness of management
accounting inscriptions and the technologies that
generate them. Nonetheless, we have argued that
the theoretical revitalisation of alternative man-
agement accounting research is warranted also.
There is a pressing need to engage with current
debates from the social sciences to enable the sub-
stantive contributions of alternative management
accounting research to continue in a con-
temporary context.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anon-
ymous reviewers and participants at the AOS
Conference at Oxford (July 2000), the University
of New South Wales Research Seminar Series and
the University of Wollongong Research Seminar
Series. Special thanks to Anthony Hopwood for
making AOS possible.
112 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
Appendix. Alternative characterisations of management accounting practice (MAP) in AOS (1974–1999)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Non-rational
design school
Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson
(1978)
Organisations
in changing
environments
Examines the need
for ‘‘semi-confusing’’
information systems
that de-stabilise
organisations
Secondary empirical
data o?ered through
a discussion of the
extant research
(experiments etc.)
Argue that traditionally conceived accounting systems
stabilise organisations (through standard operating
procedures, learning repertoires etc) and are unsuitable in
situations of change. Argue that accounting systems
should be designed to foster curiosity and dialectical
decision approaches.
Banbury
and
Nahapiet
(1979)
The need for
new forms of
information
systems in
organisations
Develops a framework
for understanding the
‘‘antecedents’’ and
‘‘consequences’’ of
information systems
No empirical data
included, reliant
on a review of the
literature and a
hypothetical
illustration of
major changes to
a cost control
system
Highlight the importance of beliefs (about rationality,
autonomy, the environment etc) on the design of
information systems. Alternative characterisations of
information system e?ectiveness are proposed also
(intelligibility,utility, impact on job content, distribution
of autonomy).
Boland
(1979)
Framing of
information
requirements
Adopts a critical
perspective on
decision making
and control through
a consideration of
symbolic
interactionism and
the sociology of
knowledge
No empirical
data included
System design becomes part of a constructive process, a
process of building organisational functioning.
Organisational participants require information that will
enable them to make sense of their situation and to e?ect
control through processes of mutual adjustment. (System
design is more than the production of a ‘shopping list’ of
needs and the institution of hierarchical processes of
control.)
Cooper
et al.
(1981)
Organisations
in ‘‘ambiguous’’
situations
Examines the
design of internal
information systems
(budgetary systems,
cost systems etc)
No empirical
data included
Accounting systems institute opportunities for both
‘coercion’ and ‘playfulness’ in organisations. Accounting
systems have a coercive element in directing attention
to particular problems, measures etc. In comparison, by
engaging with accounting technologies (such as
budgeting), organisational participants may also discover
and learn about goals, diverse meanings etc.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Boland
(1981)
Design of
management
accounting
systems
Analyses the design
approaches of
Churchman (emphasises
a commitment to the
future and betterment)
and Argyris (emphasises
individual growth and
actualisation) and
considers the
implications for
management accountants
as system designers
No empirical
data included
Argues that the management accountant as designer
confronts two contradictory design roles: ?rst,
facilitating personal interaction by becoming highly
involved in a situation; and second, facilitating
improvement by positioning themselves ‘‘outside’’ the
system.
Naturalistic
Approach
Rosenberg
et al.
(1982)
Local
government
(UK)
Examines the work role
perspectives of
accountants in local
government service
departments
Qualitative data
from interviews,
documents and
observation
Describe the way in which ‘‘segment movers’’ (accountants
who have moved from the Treasury function to a service
function of a local government authority) create their new
role more broadly than ‘traditional’ accounting work
through negotiations and political skills.
Jo¨ nsson
(1982)
Local
government
(Sweden)
Examines a budgetary
process in a large city,
based on the decisions
of an Executive
Committee, over a three
year period
Public documents
and interviews
Describes the ways in which context (a ?nancial
crisis) had a marked impact on the budgetary process.
This context highlighted the political aspects of the
budgeting process—the ways in which stratagems
were employed to avoid cuts in particular committees’
budgets (co-opt the press, mobilise clients, changing
procedures).
Boland
and
Pondy
(1983)
Public
institutions
(USA)
Examines the ways
in which accounting
involves an
interpenetration of
‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘rational’’
perspectives through a
case study of budgeting
at the University of
Illinois and a case study
of an elementary school
in Chicago facing closure
Qualitative data
presented
The cases illustrate that budgeting, although a
‘rational’ quantitative technique, enables ‘natural’
dialogue about values, priorities, and environmental
sense making. Similarly, the natural context may also
facilitate budgetary calculations within the qualitative
context of a decision.
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Berry
et al.
(1984)
Public
Enterprise
(National Coal
Board, UK)
Examines organisational
participants’
understandings of
accounting and control
systems in one
geographical division
(‘‘Area’’) of the NCB
Qualitative data
from semi-structured
interviews, document
study (internal) and
observation of
?nance personnel
Describe how accounting controls were subordinated
to physical controls and measures—by managing the
physical (output per shift, machinery utilisation,
physical plans), ?nancial control over costs was
assumed to follow. Moreover, the models and
?nancial analyses of the NCB seemed to be decoupled
from the Area activities. Whilst ?nancial control had
only a secondary relationship to the physical process
and outcomes of an Area, accounting practices,
nonetheless, played an important role creating an
image of ‘‘good housekeeping’’ and e?ciency for
external constituencies.
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1986)
Six hospitals
in US
Examines the budgetary
process as an integral
aspect of organisational
political processes,
changing and
maintaining the
distribution of power
Qualitative data from
interviews with 56
nursing managers,
researcher contact
with organisational
participants in their
natural work setting,
and document study
Describe how the budgetary process was implicated in
maintaining and reinforcing the ‘‘powerless position’’
of managers in the nursing services area, a?ecting the
allocation of resources to nursing services and,
thereby, containing the costs of this function within
the hospitals. The incumbents of the newly emerged
position of nursing manager had yet to learn how
to play the budgetary ‘‘game’’.
Boland
and
Pondy
(1986)
Education
system (USA)
Examines the
budgetary process in
terms of decision
model (?scal, clinical,
political, strategic) and
mode of analysis
(instrumental, symbolic)
in two case studies
Based on verbatim
transcripts of
meetings, yielding
both quantitative
and qualitative
data
Argue that ‘rationality’ in decision processes requires
constant shifts between models and modes of analysis
—and that accounting numbers facilitate frame shifts
and emergent understandings of decision processes,
such a budgeting.
Preston
(1986)
Manufacturing
(UK)
Examines the process
of informing that
emerged within a
managerial group
Qualitative data from
one year participant
observation study
Describes how managers develop informal
information systems, that operate in parallel to formal
information systems, through the maintenance of
private records, observation, and interpersonal
networks. Formal information systems were used as a
form of historical memory, con?rmation of informal
communications and to inform those outside the
managerial network.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Czarniawska-
Joerges
(1988)
Chemical
industry
(Sweden)
Examines changes
in organisational
control that were
related to changes
in an organisation’s
economic context
Qualitative data
from open interviews
conducted over a
three and a half year
period, in addition
to the study of private
and public documents
Describes how increasing prices, as a result of the oil
crisis in the mid-1970s, were followed by a period of
decline. During the decline, management reacted by
increasingly tightening control within the
organisation, in part characterised as a symbolic
reaction by managers to the problems in the economic
environment.
Czarniawska-
Joerges and
Jacobsson
(1989)
Swedish public
sector
Examines the connections
between organisational
budgetary processes
and their cultural context
in state agencies and
ministries
Employs extant
cases
Describes how cultural values of consensus and
rationality were expressed in examples of Swedish
budgeting—discussions of numbers were less
confronting than discussions of values and policy,
technical complexities avoided con?ict through lack
of understanding, budgets implicitly communicated
opinions (more funding is required etc).
Ezzamel
and Bourn
(1990)
UK university Examines role of
accounting systems
in a University
facing funding cuts
(‘‘a ?nancial crisis’’)
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
study
Describes how the accounting system provided adequate
forms of information during periods of relatively low
uncertainty (about goals and causation) but became
increasingly dysfunctional—by reinforcing inappropriate
procedures and repertoires—as uncertainty increased,
instead of fostering a recognition of change and
imaginative solutions to the problems of the crisis period.
Dent
(1991)
Large public
sector railway
company
Examines
organisational
change and the ways
that accounting
control systems
contributed to the
emergent
organisational culture
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
?eld study involving
unstructured
interviews and
observation
Describes how the railway organisation was
transformed from a service culture, dominated by
engineering and production issues, to a culture
dominated by economic concerns. Accounting systems
provided the rituals, symbols, language and values
that helped to bring economic issues, such a
‘‘pro?tability’’, to the forefront of a new managerialist
and market-based organisational culture.
Ahrens
(1997)
British and
German
brewing
companies
Examines accounting
talk and its
implication in
organisational
orders
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
?eld study
Describes how accounting talk (in an informal and a
formal setting) enabled accounting information to be
tailored to particular types of decision situations and
intertwined with other forms of organisational and
managerial knowledge. (Accounting talk in the
German setting was more closely intertwined with
administrative knowledge, whilst accounting talk in
the British setting was combined more with local
customer-related forms of knowledge.)
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Llewellyn
(1998)
Scottish social
service
department
Examines the
boundaries of
‘‘costs’’ in a social
work environment
that was traditionally
concerned with ‘‘care’’
Qualitative data
from a two-stage
?eld study involving
interviews and
site visits
Describes how accounting created ‘‘costing conduits’’
(e.g., priorities in spending, budgets, commitment
accounting) through which discourse about caring
needed to pass, thereby eventually coupling (rather
than separating) the work domains of ‘‘costing’’ and
‘‘caring’’, linking social work to notions of public
sector accountability and e?ciency.
Mouritsen
(1999)
Manufacturing
(Denmark)
Examines the meaning
of ‘‘?exibility’’ in a
medium-sized
organisation that
manufactured
‘‘high-tech’’ products
for the printing
industry
Qualitative data
from 30 interviews
with managers and
site visits over a
one year period
Describes the ways ‘‘?exibility’’ was interpreted in the
case organisation. On the one hand, the ‘‘paper’’
construction of ?exibility (advocated by the CEO and
?nance) emphasised that ?exibility was something that
was costly and needed to be contained–customer
expectations needed to be changed, production
processes needed to be sub-contracted to save costs.
On the other hand, the ‘‘hands-on’’ construction
(sustained by the production manager) focused on the
necessity of ?exibility for the customer and, in turn,
the necessity for the workers to be adaptive and to
enact ?exibility in concrete work processes.
Vaivio
(1999)
Consumer
products
company (UK)
Examines the
construction of the
‘‘quanti?ed customer’’
in a division of
Unilever
Qualitative data
from interviews
Describes the emergence of a new calculable space in
Unilever—‘‘the customer’’. Non-?nancial performance
measures (such a number of complaints, resolved
invoice queries and so-on) constructed new knowledge
about ‘‘the customer’’ and created new practices in the
name of ‘‘the customer’’, whilst moving management
accounting work closer to day-to-day organisational
issues.However, local forms of knowledge were also
mobilised (by sales, for example) to construct
competing discourses about ‘‘the customer’’—that is,
the ‘‘speci?cs’’.
Radical
alternative
Tinker
et al.
(1982)
Ideological
context of
theories used
to characterise
practice
Examines the
‘‘conservative’’ bias
in accounts of
(management)
accounting practice
Historical review
of the concept of
‘‘value’’
Illustrate the partisan nature of accounting technologies,
particularly in the ways in which accounting work is
implicated in creating and sustaining ‘‘managerialist’’
conceptions of value.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Cooper
(1983)
Critique of
structural-
functional
conceptions
of order and
stability
Examines the inherent
‘tidiness’ of research
characterisations of
management accounting
practice
in terms of the extant
literature
No empirical data
included
Highlights the ways in which research has failed to
make visible particular dimensions of management
accounting practice: a potential for change and
instability; a potential to create tension and con?ict;
and a potential for alternative possibilities to emerge.
Neimark
and Tinker
(1986)
Neo-classical
economic
context of
management
accounting
practice
Examines the
social construction
of management
control systems,
as opposed to
‘‘orthodox’’ models
of control (in which
control systems
are ‘‘matched’’ with
their environmental
context)
Historical
examination of
General Motors
during a period in
which its practices
became increasingly
‘‘internationalized’’
Illustrate the dualism between organisational control
and its societal context using the case of GM. The case
also illustrates how management control practices can
convey forms of coercive social change, for example,
through decisions to move manufacture to lower cost
countries and suppliers.
Armstrong
(1987)
British
management
hierarchies
Examines the rise of
accounting
controls in capitalist
enterprises
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argues that the importance of accounting controls in
British organisations is connected to three explanations:
?rst, the importance of the audit enabled accounting
controls to assume a primary role in the internal control
of organisations; second, accounting controls enabled
forms of state intervention during the war years (e.g.
price control); and third, accounting controls provided
a way of managing large organisations resulting from
post-war mergers and acquisitions.
Hopper
et al.
(1987)
Accounting
as a social
practice
Develops a
‘‘dialectical view’’
for researching
management
accounting practice
No empirical
data included
Argues that viewing management accounting through
the lens of labour process theory provides new insights
into practice—the institutionalisation of particular
interests and the subordination of others’, the
reinforcement of dominant modes of production by
systems of control, opportunistic emergence of control
systems from crises. Argues that neither ‘conventional’
nor ‘naturalistic’ accounting research can highlight the
interests and biases embedded in management accounting
practice.
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Laughlin
(1987)
Organisational
context of
accounting
systems
Examines how
understanding
and changing
accounting
systems may be
facilitated by the
‘critical’ theory of
Habermas
No empirical
data included
Argues that accounting systems and change can only be
understood in a cultural/social context. Consequently,
accounting change may be implemented using one of
three strategies. First, the cultural elements of an
organisation may be changed to bring about subsequent
changes in accounting system design. Second, the
accounting system can be changed to accommodate the
cultural dimensions of an organisation. Third, an
organisation can be changed to re?ect system changes
and advances.
Hopper and
Armstrong
(1991)
North
American
conglomerate
organisational
forms
Examines the
relationship between
the control of labour
and cost accounting
techniques, providing a
critique of the work of
Johnson and Kaplan
(1987)
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that cost accounting techniques have played an
important role in the intensi?cation of, and control over
the labour process, rather than increasing the e?ciency
of the conversion process per se in various phases of
economic history.
Arnold
(1998)
Caterpillar
Inc., North
America
Examines the factory
modernisation
program in the
Decatur plant
(Illinois)
Interviews with
workers (and the
contested account
of the program
provided by Miller
and O’Leary, 1993)
Argues that the implementation of cellular manufacturing
techniques within the Decatur plant represents a
response to the ‘‘despotic hegemony’’ of globalisation.
A movement towards world class manufacturing is
construed as a new and di?erent form of control over
workers in the plant—rather than any implied form of
optimism expressed as ‘‘new economic citizenship’’.
Institutional
theory
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1983)
Health care
sector (USA)
Examines the use
of budgeting in the
nursing services area
of hospitals
Collected quantitative
data from 41 hospitals
Collected qualitative
data using in-depth
interviews
Argued that budgets were not only being used for the
top-down control of subordinates but were also used as
a way of advocating the needs of the nursing services
area, regardless of the degree of administrative
formalisation. This internal use of budgeting was
characterised as being isomorphic with extra
organisational expectations with respect to information
?ow and use.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1988)
Government
funding of
universities
(USA)
Examines budgetary
negotiations between
a large university
and its respective
state government,
focusing on a decision
by the University not
to adopt traditional
budgetary categories
‘Retrospective’ ?eld
study using in-depth
interviews and
archival data
Demonstrates the political dimensions of budgeting in a
University’s attempt to change the resource allocation
process (from enrolment-based formulae to a new
context-speci?c language—‘‘Decision Item Narratives’’).
Covaleski
et al.
(1993)
US health care
sector
Examines case-mix
accounting to generate
relevant research
questions
No study-speci?c
empirical data,
although some
discussion of
practice is included
Argue that case-mix accounting needs to be understood
as more than a re?ection of assumed societal needs for
rational resource allocation. Case-mix accounting is a
means of exercising surveillance (over doctors, patients,
hospitals) and a dis-embodied form of government
power over health care costs.
Structuration
theory
Roberts
and
Scapens
(1985)
Understanding
accounting in its
organisational
context
Presentation of an
analytical framework
for understanding
accounting (in
divisionalised
companies, in
particular)
No empirical data Argue that accounting systems are a way of binding
organisational participants across time and space, albeit
in partial ways because of a lack of shared context and
meaning that such situations create and sustain.
Roberts
(1990)
Conglomerate
following
strategies of
growth
by acquisition
and product
market
dominance
(UK/Europe)
Examines the
relationship between
strategy and the use
of accounting
information for
performance reporting
in a business unit
producing light bulbs
Qualitative data,
including verbatim
quotes from
organisational
participants
Illustrates the tensions between ?nancial ‘‘success’’(return
on investment) and its strategic consequences (for
example, the sale of operations including potentially
valuable patents), whilst arguing that face-to-face forms
of accountability (such as meetings) may enable a mutual
accommodation of accounting and strategy.
Foucauldian
approach
Burchell
et al.
(1980)
Organisational
and societal
context of
accounting
work
Examines the ways in
which accounting
operates in practice,
in contrast to those
roles that have been
claimed for accounting
No empirical
data included
Argue that there is little in accounting practice that
suggests accounting is linked to the pursuit of economic
e?ciency. Rather, accounting as it is practised is in?uenced
by the ways in which accounting has been institutionalised
within organisations and society (in accounting
departments, professional bodies) and the objecti?cation
of accounting knowledge (books, training and so-on)
Highlight that little is known of accounting in practice.
1
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u
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t
i
n
g
,
O
r
g
a
n
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
s
a
n
d
S
o
c
i
e
t
y
2
8
(
2
0
0
3
)
9
7
–
1
2
6
Burchell
et al.
(1985)
Social context
of accounting
Examines the history
of value-added in
the United Kingdom
during the 1970s
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that value-added emerged in an ‘‘unintended’’
way—through the intersection of industrial relation
reforms, the regulation of corporate reporting, and
economic management and policies.
Loft
(1986)
UK
(1914–1925)
Examines the history
of cost accounting
Historical overview
using literary sources
The practice of cost accounting is not merely a technical
matter but is to be understood within the con?uence of
the social (professionalisation, legislation, economic
conditions, class relations etc).
Hopwood
(1987)
Fluidity of
accounting
practice
Examines the
preconditions of
accounting change
using the ‘‘archaeology’’
metaphor/method
Provides three
examples of
accounting change
Accounting systems are not separate from organisations
but embedded in them constituting particular
con?gurations of the local that create, in turn, the
conditions of accounting system change.
Miller
and
O’Leary
(1987)
First three
decades of the
20th century
(Re-)examines the
history of standard
costing and budgeting
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that the emergence of the calculative practices of
standard costing and budgeting can be understood within
the context of a movement in the administration of the
social that emphasised forms of discourse about
‘‘e?ciency’’ and ‘‘waste’’ (for example, professional
discourse, discourse of national e?ciency, pragmatic
philosophical discourse). Standard costing and budgetary
practices were argued to enable the emergence of the
‘‘governable person’’ within organisations.
Knights
and
Collinson
(1987)
Shop-?oor
level of a
manufacturing
organisation
Examines the
disciplinary power of
human relations
(psychological) and
?nancial forms of
control on male
manual workers
Two year participant
observation study
involving interviews
and the study of
company documents
In this case it was found that ?nancial forms of discipline
were more e?ective than psychological forms. For
example, workers were sceptical about the sincerity of
management in terms of communications conveyed in an
in-house magazine. In comparison, ?nancial accounts
presented as part of a redundancy audit were not
challenged from the shop ?oor because of the apparent
factual nature of the accounts—and the value system of
the manual workers that gave primacy to physical
production and, as a consequence, economic values.
(continued on next page)
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u
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t
i
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g
,
O
r
g
a
n
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
s
a
n
d
S
o
c
i
e
t
y
2
8
(
2
0
0
3
)
9
7
–
1
2
6
1
2
1
Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Preston
(1992)
US hospital
system
Examines the
emergence of,
and changes in
discourses about
costs and accounting
over a hundred year
period
Historical overview
using literary sources
Illustrates how the emergence of DRGs payments to
hospitals through Medicare was in?uenced by a number
of discourses (medical, socio-economic, political) and
their historical conditions (location of treatments within
hospitals, concern about practices of cost reimbursement,
government desire for control and management of health
care costs, for example).
Miller
and
O’Leary
(1993)
Manufacturing
(Caterpillar
Inc., US)
Examines the role
of accounting in
advanced
manufacturing
processes in the
Decatur, Illinois,
plant
Qualitative data
from interviews,
documents and
observation
Describe the ways in which the implementation of
advanced manufacturing practices resulted in new
physical spaces (‘‘manufacturing cells’’), coupling diverse
forms of personnel and expertise. These, in turn, gave rise
to new calculable spaces (‘‘investment bundling’’,
‘‘competitor cost analysis’’, ‘‘manufacturing resource
planning’’) within the Decatur plant. These new
calculable spaces were characterised as enabling the
emergence of a ‘‘governable process’’ —that helped new
forms of ‘‘economic citizenship’’ to be enacted in terms of
the advanced manufacturing practices of the plant.
Latourian
Approach
Pinch
et al.
(1989)
National
Health Service,
UK
Examines the
‘‘success’’ of
clinical
budgeting
‘‘experiments’’
Qualitative data
from verbatim
transcripts,
documents and
?ctional dialogue
attributed to the
researchers (and a
tape recorder)
The ‘‘success’’ of these new resource management
programs was characterised in a ‘‘weak’’ form in practice,
focusing on the local adaptiveness and learning of actors
enabled by the budgetary process (ability to manoeuvre
within the budget, for example), rather than in terms of
‘‘strong’’ economic consequences (reduced morbidity etc).
Miller
(1991)
UK during
the 1960s
Examines the
promotion of
discounted cash
?ow techniques
Historical data
from public sources
The use of DCF analysis, as a form of accounting
innovation, was argued to be related to a government
program of encouraging economic growth through
enterprise investment activities. The DCF technique
provided a generic language to enable the ‘‘translation’’
of government policy into enterprise activities from a
‘‘distance’’.
1
2
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/
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t
i
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g
,
O
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g
a
n
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
s
a
n
d
S
o
c
i
e
t
y
2
8
(
2
0
0
3
)
9
7
–
1
2
6
Preston
et al.
(1992)
National
Health Service,
UK
Examines the
introduction
of a system of
responsibility
accounting
Qualitative data
based on interviews
and observations
conducted in a
particular ‘‘District’’,
plus six speci?c
public documents
Budgeting systems emerge through a process of
‘‘fabrication’’, an accommodation of the shifting and
multiple constructions of budgetary possibilities (enabling
better patient care, e?cient use of resources, control of
doctors, management of treatments etc). Also argue that
the ‘‘weak’’ rhetoric found in the Mulkay et al. study had
been replaced by a ‘‘strong’’ economic rhetoric that was
increasingly embedded in the day-to-day routines of
clinicians.
Chua
(1995)
Australian
public hospital
system
Examines the
experiments of
three hospitals
with DRGs
Qualitative data
collected as a
participant within
a University
project team
Demonstrates the constitutive capability of accounting
systems (DRGs) to recon?gure resource use and
relationships in the hospitals studied and that accounting
numbers became ‘facts’, not because of their
representational ?delity, but because of their ability to
connect diverse interests in the health care sector (Federal
Government, State Government, Hospital
Administration, Clinicians and Academicians) about
resource management.
Ogden
(1997)
Privatised
water industry
(UK)
Examines the
construction of
the ‘‘customer’’
Interviews and
documents
The ‘‘customer’’ was constructed through new forms of
accounting, such as performance indicators, which
enabled the ‘‘customer service’’ of Water plcs to be
calculated. Such measures were argued also to inscribe
customer needs into the daily practices of managers and
to enable ‘action at a distance’ by linking political
objectives and individuals’ (presumed) needs to
organisational functioning.
J
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a
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s
a
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d
S
o
c
i
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t
y
2
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(
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3
)
9
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–
1
2
6
1
2
3
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doc_309740524.pdf
This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven
different research perspectives that have flourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach.
It is contended that these different approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of significant and
interesting disciplinary insights
Alternative management accounting research—
whence and whither
Jane Baxter, Wai Fong Chua*
School of Accounting, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Abstract
This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven
di?erent research perspectives that have ?ourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach.
It is contended that these di?erent approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of signi?cant and
interesting disciplinary insights. As a form of collective non-positivist enterprise, alternative management accounting
research has demonstrated: the many di?erent rationalities of management accounting practice; the variety of ways in
which management accounting practice is enacted and given meaning; the potency of management accounting tech-
nologies; the unpredictable, non-linear and socially-embedded nature of management accounting change; and the ways
in which management accounting practice is both constrained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its exponents. In
conclusion, we consider how alternative management accounting research may sustain its distinct contributions in the
future. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Celebrating alternative management accounting
research
In the 25 years since its inception, Accounting,
Organizations and Society (AOS) has forged a
formidable reputation for disseminating manage-
ment accounting research. In particular, this jour-
nal has developed a loyal readership because it has
created a pluralistic discursive space—a space in
which so-called ‘alternative’ management
accounting research is encouraged (Colville, 1981;
Cooper & Hopper, 1987; Ha¨ gg & Hedlund, 1979;
Hopwood, 1976, 1983; Kaplan, 1986; Tomkins &
Groves, 1983). It is not an exaggeration to state,
as a consequence, that AOS has changed how
management accounting research is taught and
done. This is no small achievement. However, the
passing of signi?cant milestones is not only an
opportunity for celebration; it is also an occasion for
re?ection, to consider the legacies of this research.
What have we learnt that is ‘di?erent’ or ‘new’?
The ?rst purpose of this paper is to consider the
substantive contributions of the main streams of
alternative management accounting research in
AOS from 1976 to 1999. The amount of work that
could be included in the domain of interest—
alternative management accounting research—is
clearly very large and it is not possible to do jus-
tice to this considerable and diverse body of work
in a single short paper. We, therefore, decided to
con?ne our attention to those papers that mobilise
a ‘non-positivist’ language to typify management
accounting practice (see, for example, Burrell &
Morgan, 1979; Chua, 1986; Colville, 1981;
Cooper, 1983). We focus on research that draws
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Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected] (W.F. Chua).
on non-positivistic strands of social theory; thus
choosing to review research that re?ects the inter-
pretive, critical and postmodern turns that have
occurred more widely throughout the social sci-
ences of the period (see Bernstein, 1976; Lyotard,
1984). Accounting is a discipline of the social and
it seemed important to us to understand it in the
context of a broader set of discourses from the
social sciences.
The second purpose of this paper is to re?ect on
selected contemporary developments in social the-
ory and suggest how these pose new and interest-
ing avenues for the interrogation and study of
management accounting practice. We focus on the
key issues of increased global and technological
connectivity, as well as the development of hybrid
social forms. In outlining these issues we indicate
how they may be connected to the enterprise of
alternative management accounting research, rais-
ing general questions that indicate possibilities
resident in these current streams of thought.
2. Characterising alternative management
accounting research
In this section of the paper we review extant
alternative management accounting research. The
papers included in our review are listed in the
Appendix. As can be seen from the Appendix, we
outline seven identi?able streams of this research:
a non-rational design school; naturalistic research;
radical alternative; institutional theory; structu-
ration theory; Foucauldian approach; and a
Latourian approach.
1
Each of these is discussed
brie?y, as a prelude to our consideration of the
more general contributions of alternative man-
agement accounting research.
2.1. Non-rational design school
The non-rational design school was one of the
earliest streams of alternative management
accounting research to appear in AOS. This parti-
cular perspective questions presumptions of
rationality in organisational choice—that is, an
elaboration of clear, consistent and transitive
goals; comprehensive searches for feasible alter-
natives to problems; a consideration of these
alternatives in terms of costs and bene?ts; and
optimised decision strategies (Carley, 1980). The
non-rational design school, in comparison, is
motivated by literatures that suggest: organisa-
tional goals are unclear and unstable (Cohen,
March, & Olsen, 1972); search is limited and local
(Cyert & March, 1963); and that the process of
analysis and choice may be politically motivated
(Pfe?er, 1981), incremental in nature (Lindblom,
1959), routinised by the application of procedures
(Cyert & March, 1963), or more fortuitous than
considered (March & Olsen, 1979).
Researchers a?liated with this network of ideas
have forged innovative connections between man-
agement accounting information systems and
organisational functioning. For example, Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson (1978) and Cooper, Hayes, and Wolf
(1981) argue that management accounting infor-
mation systems unduly constrain organisational
functioning, particularly learning in and about
organisations. Hedberg and Jo¨ nsson (1978) argue
that management accounting practices are ‘‘stabi-
lizers’’ (p. 47) that standardise thinking and
action. Cooper et al. (1981) argue, similarly, that
management accounting systems are ‘‘coercive’’
(p. 182) because they limit choice processes and
legitimate the very conditions that enable such
structuring to occur (for example, organisational
culture and power relations within organisations).
Boland (1979, 1981) and Banbury and Nahapiet
(1979) argue that if such a constitutive role is
ascribed to management accounting practice, then
design processes must be examined critically. They
argue that developing and implementing manage-
ment accounting information systems requires
more than an exhaustive list of users’ needs
(Boland, 1979). It is contended that there must be
a conscious examination of the values embedded
in management accounting information system
design. Banbury and Nahapiet advocate a con-
sideration of the ‘‘source’’ and ‘‘content’’ (pp.
171–173) of these values. Boland (1981) illustrates
1
It should be noted that the seven alternative perspectives
adopted in this paper are illustrative and di?erent papers may
draw more broadly from the literature than our initial categor-
isation suggests.
98 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
the quite di?erent values that may be found
between particular design methodologies—for
example, the enabling of ‘‘personal growth’’ or the
creation of ‘‘future forms’’ (p.116)—by comparing
and contrasting the work of Argyris and Church-
man respectively.
As such, research from the non-rational design
school helps us to appreciate the problematic
construction of management accounting infor-
mation systems and their constitutive/constraining
role in organisational sense-making—a character-
isation that is quite distinct from ideas about the
sensible allocation of resources that underscores
other accounts of management accounting infor-
mation systems and their use.
2.2. Naturalistic approach
‘‘Naturalistic’’ research (Hopper, Storey, &
Willmott, 1987) seeks to investigate management
accounting practice in its ‘‘everyday’’ organi-
sational context (Tomkins & Groves, 1983), that
is, in situ. Whilst this perspective has yielded
intrinsically interesting and ‘landmark’ studies of
management accounting practice (for example,
Berry et al., 1984), the proliferation of research
questions pursued, and practical di?culties sur-
rounding access to theoretically interesting orga-
nisations, has resulted in a highly fragmented
body of research. There is little that is cumulative
within the naturalistic research perspective—each
study addresses a unique aspect of management
accounting practice. Yet some ostensible connec-
tions may be o?ered.
There are studies about budgeting (Boland &
Pondy, 1983, 1986; Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1986;
Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989; Jo¨ nsson,
1982; Llewellyn, 1998) that characterise this tech-
nology in interesting ways. Budgets are depicted as
ways of: helping to express and a?rm national
cultural values (Czarniawska-Joerges & Jacobs-
son, 1989); introducing greater resource con-
sciousness in the process of public sector reform
(Llewellyn, 1998); and reinforcing the ‘‘powerless
position’’ of an occupational group (Covaleski &
Dirsmith, 1986), for example. There are other studies
about organisational decline that illustrate the lack
of a substantive contribution from management
accounting to ?nancial turnarounds (Czar-
niawska-Joerges, 1988; Ezzamel & Bourn, 1990).
Other naturalistic studies demonstrate a common
concern for the importance of talk in accounting
work (Ahrens, 1997; Preston, 1986; Rosenberg,
Tomkins, & Day, 1982), describing how sig-
ni?cant aspects of management accountants’
work—negotiations (Rosenberg et al., 1982),
informing others (Preston, 1986) and providing
customised solutions to problems (Ahrens,
1997)—are achieved by an oral management
accounting culture. Studies by Dent (1991),
Mouritsen (1999) and Vaivio (1999) illustrate,
amongst other things, that the organisational
contexts in which management accounting is
practised are changing, sometimes quite funda-
mentally [becoming more pro?t-oriented (Dent,
1991), more ?exible (Mouritsen, 1999), more cus-
tomer-oriented (Vaivio, 1999), for instance], and
that management accounting both contributes to
these changes, and is changed by them also.
Finally, there is the study by Berry et al. (1984)
that reminds us that management accounting may
not always be as important as we think. Physical
rather than ?nancial controls were dominant in
the National Coal Board. From these studies,
therefore, we learn that management accounting
technologies are enacted quite di?erently from one
organisation to another; conveying local values,
meanings and nuances.
2.3. The radical alternative
The radical alternative has left a distinct imprint
on AOS by linking management accounting prac-
tice to ‘‘the politics of emancipation’’ (Giddens,
1998, p. 41). The radical alternative draws on the
ideas of Marx (see Atkinson, 1972; Keat & Urry,
1982), the Frankfurt school (Habermas, 1968,
1976; Marcuse, 1986), and the labour process lit-
erature (Braverman, 1974) to highlight how the
practice of management accounting is implicated
in the creation and perpetuation of an unequal
society. Such an unequal society concerns writers
from the radical alternative because not all its
members have equal life chances. Resources (such
as justice, education, and health care, for example)
are not distributed evenly or on the basis of need.
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 99
The radical alternative is deeply concerned by
these disparities between resources and needs for
two key reasons. First, it is argued that inequality
undermines social stability by promoting deep-
seated forms of con?ict and repression. Second, it
is argued that members of organisations and
society (unwittingly) internalise and accept values
that reproduce an unequal society.
Alternative researchers working under the aus-
pices of the radical perspective do so in two main
ways. First, they mobilise its critical rhetoric in
discussions about management accounting
(Cooper, 1983; Hopper et al., 1987; Laughlin,
1987). Second, they use its radical theories to
orientate empirical investigations of management
accounting practice (Armstrong, 1987; Arnold,
1998; Hopper & Armstrong, 1991; Neimark &
Tinker, 1986; Tinker, Menno, & Neimark, 1982).
The empirical studies that have been conducted
within the radical alternative are mainly historical
(cf. Arnold, 1998). As a cohort these papers create
a form of antipathetic discourse that highlights the
non-benign nature of management accounting
practice. Management accounting practice is inex-
orably intertwined with ‘‘managerialist’’ systems
of ideology and manifest in, for example, con-
structions of ‘‘value’’ (Tinker et al., 1982), ‘‘new
economic citizenship’’ (Arnold, 1998), the intensi-
?cation of control over labour processes (Hopper
& Armstrong, 1991), and the use of control sys-
tems in multi-national and conglomerate organi-
sations (Armstrong, 1987; Neimark & Tinker,
1986). In short, the radical alternative mobilises
research to provide a platform for critique, change
and improvement within organisations, in parti-
cular, and society, in general.
2.4. Institutional theory
Institutional theory has emerged as a reaction to
epiphenomenal constructions of collective beha-
viour, that is, the characterisation of collective
behaviour as an aggregation of individual actions
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). In comparison, insti-
tutional theory focuses on socially-generated rules
as an explanation of this. Alternative management
accounting research has been in?uenced mostly by
the institutionalism of organisational theory and
sociology. In organisational theory and sociology,
there has been an explicit movement towards cog-
nitive and cultural explanations of institutions,
focusing on the meaning and accomplishment of
various rules that structure behaviour in organi-
sations and society.
Drawing on the arguments of Meyer and
Rowan (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell (1991),
management accounting practices, such as bud-
geting and casemix accounting, are seen as
‘rational myths’ that confer social legitimacy upon
organisational participants and their actions
(Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1983, 1988; Covaleski,
Dirsmith, & Michelman, 1993). The emergence
and prevalence of these forms of management
accounting practices is attributed not only to the
exigencies of technical imperatives, but to the
existence of rationalised norms that ‘‘specify in a
rule-like way the appropriate means to pursue
them’’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 343). As such,
the environments of an organisation now pro-
liferate. There is the ‘technical’ environment and
various ‘institutionalised’ environments—legal,
professional, regulatory, and so-on. Researchers
adopting institutional theory argue that the form
that management accounting practices assume is
in?uenced by the complexities of these multiple
constructions of the environment and the expec-
tations that they convey.
2.5. Structuration theory
Giddens’ theory of structuration has created a
small but distinctive contribution to alternative
management accounting research. Structuration
theory is concerned with conceptualising the inter-
connection between the agency of individuals
(their capability to make choices) and the repro-
duction of social structures (‘‘rules’’ and ‘‘resour-
ces’’). Giddens argues that the routinised nature of
much of human behaviour accounts for the repli-
cation of given structures across space and time.
Correspondingly, rules can maintain their saliency
in structuring behaviour long after the face-to-face
interactions (or ‘‘co-presence’’) necessary to con-
stitute such regularised practices have ceased. Yet
Giddens acknowledges that change is possible.
Human agents can choose to act in ways that are
100 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
di?erent from prevailing norms and rules. Also,
behaviour may have unanticipated consequences.
Giddens’ work (1976, 1979, 1982, 1984), therefore,
highlights the ways in which our behaviour has
an impact on its societal context and, corre-
spondingly, how society leaves its imprint on our
behaviour.
Whilst Giddens’ work has fostered some spirited
meta-theoretical debate within AOS (Boland,
1996; Scapens & Macintosh, 1996), structuration
theory has had only a small impact on character-
isations of management accounting practice.
Roberts and Scapens (1985) draw parallels
between Giddens’ structures and accounting sys-
tems. Accounting systems are seen as ways of reg-
ularising organisational functioning across time
and space. Such organisational routines are parti-
cularly important when face-to-face contact is not
possible between management accountants and
the users of a system (for example, in companies
operating in more than one place). The accounting
system becomes a way of supplementing local
meanings and norms by imposing discipline on the
work of dispersed organisational participants.
Roberts’ (1990) case study of a conglomerate
organisation, in comparison, illustrates how face-
to-face meetings were used to develop an alter-
native form of accountability from divisionalised
systems of measurement and control, allowing
shared meanings and strong systems of reciprocity
to be built both locally and interpersonally.
2.6. Foucauldian approach
Alternative management accounting research
also re?ects the in?uence of the late French
sociologist, Michel Foucault (see, for example,
Foucault, 1972, 1977, 1978).
2
Foucault’s work has
been pivotal in generating so-called ‘new histories’
of management accounting. Following Foucault’s
theme of ‘‘archaeology’’ (1972), new histories out-
line and examine the conditions of possibility—‘‘the
social and organisational practices and bodies of
knowledge’’ (Hopwood, 1987, p. 230)—that
enable particular management accounting tech-
nologies to emerge at given times and places. For
example, Burchell, Clubb, and Hopwood (1985)
discuss the emergence of value-added accounting
in the United Kingdom during the 1970s within a
matrix of various discourses about industrial rela-
tions reform, corporate reporting and economic
management. Other con?gurations and con-
?uences of historically-located forms of social,
economic, and political discourses are shown to be
associated with cost accounting in the United
Kingdom between the two world wars (Loft,
1986), the emergence of standard costing in the
early years of the twentieth century (Miller &
O’Leary, 1987), and the emergence of DRGs pay-
ments in the US hospital system (Preston, 1992).
This research challenges simplistic accounts of
management accounting technologies and their
origins. There is nothing inevitable about man-
agement accounting’s causes and trajectory. There
are, however, complicated and unpredictable
interactions between di?erent forms of discourse
and institutional structures.
In other studies, Foucault’s (1977) work on
‘‘discipline’’ and ‘‘docility’’ has been appropriated
to deliver provocative constructions of manage-
ment accounting control. For example, Miller and
O’Leary (1987) argue that standard costing was
used in the early twentieth century as a form of
‘‘discipline’’, a way of making labour more e?-
cient, focused and compliant. Knights and Col-
linson’s (1987) ?eld study demonstrates how
economic forms of discourse contribute to the
submission of workers. More recently, Miller and
O’Leary’s (1993) case study of cellular manu-
facturing in Caterpillar Inc. examines the role of
management accounting in creating new dis-
ciplinary forms that they describe as ‘‘calculable
spaces’’. New management accounting techniques,
such as ‘‘investment bundling’’ and ‘‘manufactur-
ing resource planning’’, were nourished by the
environment of Caterpillar which promoted dis-
courses about ‘‘?exibility’’, ‘‘modernity’’, ‘‘world-
class’’, ‘‘quality’’ and the like. Such Foucauldian
research provides a strong contrast to more tradi-
tional characterisations of management account-
ing control. Management accounting control
2
Although an early reference to Foucault may be found in
Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, and Nahapiet (1980),
arguably, it was not until 1987 that this particular research
perspective gathered momentum in AOS (Hopwood, 1987;
Knights & Collinson, 1987; Miller & O’Leary, 1987).
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 101
becomes a re?ection of institutionalised webs of
power—be they from the ‘old’ economy and its
concern for ‘‘e?ciency’’ or the ‘new’ economy and
its concern for ‘‘world-class’’ products and services.
2.7. Latourian approach
Followers of Latour (1987, 1993, 1996) are con-
cerned with understanding accounting techno-
logies in the context of networks of human and
non-human ‘actants’. Correspondingly, it is
argued that management accounting numbers are
‘‘fabrications’’ (Preston, Cooper, & Coombes,
1992, p. 561) or inscriptions ‘built’ to take on the
appearance of ‘facts’. Case studies illustrate how
management accounting numbers are constructed
to accommodate and persuade diverse interests
within organisations. For example, the research of
Pinch, Mulkay, and Ashmore (1989), Preston et
al. (1992) and Chua (1995) argues that the con-
struction of budgeting numbers within British,
North American and Australian hospital systems
respectively, involves co-opting the interests of
medical practitioners, hospital administrators and
policy setters in these arenas. As a result, we begin
to recognise the fragility of management account-
ing numbers. These numbers are built on the
shifting and transient interests of disparate groups
of organisational participants who work inces-
santly to maintain the ‘‘position’’ (Latour, 1987,
p. 50) of (their) numbers and in?uence over orga-
nisational functioning.
This research has also introduced the distinctive
idea of ‘‘translation’’ to characterisations of man-
agement accounting practice. Latour (1987) uses
the term ‘‘translation’’ to re?ect how the interests
of fact-builders, and those that they conscript
within their networks, are converted into ‘facts’
(p. 108). It has been argued that the mundaneness
of management accounting numbers facilitates the
embedding of partisan values into daily routines
and organisational functioning. For example,
Miller (1991) argues that DCF analysis was used
in the United Kingdom during the 1960s to trans-
late the interests of government policy makers,
concerned with issues of economic growth, into
organisational processes and activities. Likewise,
Ogden’s (1997) discussion of privatised water
companies (also in the UK) discusses how new
accounting performance measures established the
political objectives of the Conservative Govern-
ment within these particular enterprises.
2.8. Contributions of alternative management
accounting research
As the foregoing narrative has conveyed,
alternative management accounting research has
sustained a number of diverse perspectives.
Each has its trademark theories, studies and
interpretations of management accounting prac-
tice. But is there more to this research than an
overarching commitment to non-positivism? In
the following sections we explore its disciplinary
accomplishments.
2.9. A critique of means-end reasoning
When considered as a collective enterprise,
alternative management accounting research is
distinguished by its disengagement with means-
end reasoning. It severs closely-coupled connec-
tions between organisational goals and the con-
tribution of accounting technologies. [And the
longitudinal case study by Ezzamel and Bourn
(1990) demonstrates the extent of the dislocation
that may occur in practice between pressing orga-
nisational needs and management accounting
work.] Instead, this research constructs a variety
of rationalities for management accounting prac-
tices that are only loosely-related to the pursuit of
organisational goals.
Researchers, such as Hedberg and Jo¨ nsson
(1978) and Cooper et al. (1981), o?er the notion of
‘playfulness’ as a counterpoint to means-end rea-
soning. In highly ambiguous situations, manage-
ment accounting practices may be invoked to
discover their role within organisations, to test the
limits of their usefulness, and to act as a conduit to
promote organisational learning—both about
‘means’ and ‘ends’ (see Burchell et al., 1980).
Similarly, a theme of ‘‘experimentation’’ is adop-
ted in the work of Pinch et al. (1989) to describe
how purposes are crafted, clari?ed and con?rmed
as a result of the practice of management
accounting.
102 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
The work of Boland and Pondy (1986), Czar-
niawska-Joerges (1988), and Czarniawska-Joerges
and Jacobsson (1989) advocates a symbolic form
of rationality for management accounting prac-
tice. Various management accounting practices
are seen to be sensible because of the values they
sustain (such as a rea?rmation of the importance
of consensus within the Swedish culture), rather
than the material resources that may be managed
as a consequence of using technologies of the
craft. It is further argued that management
accounting practices possess a rationality when
considered from the viewpoint of the localised
goals of particular organisational participants.
Political processes in organisations may link man-
agement accounting to the goals of powerful sub-
groups, rather than the espoused objectives of the
organisation as a whole (Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1986; Jo¨ nsson, 1982).
Studies by alternative researchers also suggest
that reasoned accounts of organisational func-
tioning may be forged if we look beyond organi-
sations for meaning. Studies conducted under the
auspices of structuration and institutional theories
recognise a di?erent form of rationality stemming
from systemic norms and structures. The budget-
ing behaviours studied by Covaleski and Dirsmith
(1983), as a case in point, illustrate how extra-
organisational expectations may be seen as a way
of understanding ?nancial information ?ows in
the nursing services area of US hospitals. In a
similar vein, research by Miller (1991) and Ogden
(1997), mobilising the Latourian notion of ‘‘action
at a distance’’, links the rationality of management
accounting practice to contemporary government
policies (about ‘‘growth’’ or ‘‘privatisation’’ and
‘‘choice’’). Foucauldian studies (such as Burchell
et al., 1985; Loft, 1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987;
Preston, 1992) likewise forge connections between
the purposes of practices and networks of institu-
tionally-located discourses. Hopper and Arm-
strong claim that management accounting
practices are better understood as modes of dom-
ination rather than optimisation—indeed, control
over labour may work against goad-directed
behaviours by encouraging organisational dys-
functions. Finally, Pinch et al. (1989) illustrate
that the valued ends of management accounting
may seem unintended and unrelated to over-
arching organisational goals. Management
accounting may help to attain ‘weak con-
sequences’. A key player in Pinch et al. (1989)
study stated that the implementation of clinical
budgeting had been ‘successful’ because it enabled
organisational participants to ‘‘become better
social actors’’ (p. 293)! ‘Success’ was not judged in
terms of cost containment or medically-signi?cant
outcomes in this instance. As such, there is no
privileging of economic and calculative reasoning
within alternative management accounting
research.
2.10. A critique of the ‘real’
Alternative management accounting research
problematises the constitution of ‘reality’ by
characterising it as a product of ongoing con-
structive or interpretive acts. As such, organisa-
tional participants are seen as continuously
ascribing meanings to sets of practices that become
known as management accounting. Correspond-
ingly, there are many possible constructions of
practice over time and space; some similar, some
quite di?erent.
The ?eld studies by Mouritsen (1999) and
Ahrens (1997), for example, bring this position
into clear view. In Mouritsen’s study of a Danish
manufacturing organisation, he outlines the com-
peting interpretations that organisational partici-
pants attribute to the practice of ‘?exibility’. The
CFO of this particular organisation characterised
?exibility as a cost-increasing practice, as well as a
practice that made it increasingly di?cult to man-
age using established plans and budgets. In com-
parison, the production manager constructed
?exibility as a set of practices that would enable
co-operative relationships to be established
between product-developers, production teams,
workers and management. Ahrens’ (1997) research
casts these interpretive di?erences more broadly.
He examines the contrasts, or ‘‘tensions’’ (p. 619),
in management accounting practice between the
UK and German divisions of an organisation.
According to Ahrens’ ?eld study, Germanic con-
structions of management accounting were more
heavily in?uenced by bureaucratic concepts,
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 103
whereas in the UK division that he observed
management accounting practice was made
meaningful by adopting a customer focus. Neither
of these studies smoothes over the interpretive
tensions that they raise. Instead they are used to
illustrate the variety of ways in which manage-
ment accounting is constructed and constituted.
The dialogical material included in Ahrens’
(1997) study further illustrates the ‘‘?exibility’’
and ‘‘fragility’’ (p. 167) of the meanings that
management accounting practice may assume. It
is through conversational interplays that the ‘real’
is negotiated, amended and perpetuated. But as
Mouritsen’s study also indicates, non-human
actants (such as computer-based technologies and
paper-based plans) may be in?uential also in
shaping interpretations of management account-
ing practice.
In addition, alternative research avoids unitary
constructions of practice because of its varied the-
orisations of a particular phenomenon. Take bud-
geting as a case in point. Budgeting is portrayed a
political process (Covaleski & Dirsmith, 1986;
Jo¨ nsson, 1982), a union of ‘‘natural’’ and
‘‘rational’’ processes (Boland & Pondy, 1983), a
process of cultural reinforcement (Czarniawska-
Joerges & Jacobsson, 1989), an opportunity for
playfulness (Cooper et al., 1981), a form of insti-
tutional isomorphism (Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1983), and experimentation (Pinch et al., 1989).
These varied constructions of budgeting illustrate
how this critique of the ‘real’ is, in part, accom-
plished by the theoretical pluralism that alter-
native research welcomes.
2.11. A critique of accounting’s impotence
Alternative management accounting research
enables us to comprehend the potency of manage-
ment accounting practice. It is more than ‘‘a mere
collection of techniques’’ (Burchell et al., 1980,
p. 6). Rather management accounting technolo-
gies cannot be separated from the formation and
exercise of power in organisations and society.
Consequently, the technologies of the craft favour
some organisational participants and disadvantage
others; sometimes with transparent partiality and,
at other times, in less apparent ways.
The apolitical imagery of practice is challenged
by alternative research that illustrates the manifest
couplings that can occur between management
accounting and power in and around organi-
sations. A ?eld study by Jo¨ nsson (1982), for
instance, relates how the budgetary process in a
Swedish local government organisation became
highly politicised. Faced with the prospect of a
reduction in their budget, one of the budgetary
committees engaged the support of its clients to
stage demonstrations against possible funding
cuts, capturing the attention of the press and
exerting pressure on the Executive Committee. A
seemingly innocuous exercise in rational resource
allocation, given a context of increasing economic
stringency, resulted in a minor form of civil unrest!
Similarly, Boland and Pondy’s (1986) transcript of
a budget-cutting meeting in a US high-school
demonstrates the interconnectedness of manage-
ment accounting and the political in practice.
Budget cuts are discussed by organisational parti-
cipants in such a way that indicates a very keen
sense of their political consequences—participants
at the meeting agree that a supply dollar saved
does not have nearly the same ‘‘impact’’ as a
teaching dollar saved (p. 413). Moreover, as the
budget meeting progresses and potential cost
reductions are related to particular teachers’ posi-
tions and individual teachers’ life histories, the
budgetary process becomes incapable of sustain-
ing any fac¸ ade of an unimpassioned, technical
process. Likewise, the research of Preston et al.
(1992) and Chua (1995) further reinforces the
overtly political nature of management accounting
practice. The clinical budgeting cases that they
describe convey a sense of the machinations that
were occurring within organisational and inter-
organisational networks of clinicians and admin-
istrators. They may choose to describe this as
‘accounting in action’, however, it looks remark-
ably like politics in action too.
Nonetheless, the partnership between manage-
ment accounting practice and power is not always
so obvious. The connection may be much more
surreptitious. And a hallmark of alternative
research is its preparedness to consider these less
obvious connections. The Latourian research, for
example, outlines the very long networks that
104 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
translate values of external policy makers into
organisationally located management accounting
practices—reproducing and fortifying these sour-
ces of power anew. The research of Miller (1991)
and Ogden (1997), outlined previously, illustrates
the connections that can be forged between the
interests of government policy makers and parti-
cular management accounting practices. The few
studies informed by institutionalism (Covaleski &
Dirsmith, 1983) and structuration theory
(Roberts & Scapens, 1985) further illustrate this.
For example, Covaleski and Dirsmith discuss
budgeting in the nursing services area in terms of
its compliance with extra-organisational expecta-
tions about information ?ow and use. These
extra-organisational expectations were not traced
to an identi?able government program or policy,
as in Miller’s (1991) and Ogden’s (1997) research.
In comparison, the institutional expectations that
Covaleski and Dirsmith invoke convey the values
and interests of those who can no longer be
nominated and identi?ed—the moment of co-
presence has passed but its in?uence endures in
other times and places, such as the 41 North Amer-
ican hospitals that these researchers examined.
Less benign constructions of the latent potency
of management accounting are contained in the
radical and Foucauldian research. Radical
research seeks to expose the values embedded in
management accounting practice. And radical
research aligns management accounting practice
with ‘‘managerialist’’ interests (Hopper et al.,
1987). The historical study of Tinker et al. (1982)
argues that it is the conceptualisation and
measurement of ‘‘value’’ that consolidates this
linkage between the practice of the craft and its
partisanship. Management accounting measures
of value emphasise short-term economic accom-
plishments, such as the excess of ‘revenues’ over
‘costs’, without recognising fully the contributions
of labour or the externalities of those endeavours
for which it accounts. Hopper and Armstrong
(1991) point to the ways in which cost accounting
techniques have intensi?ed control over labour
and subordinated labour’s interests to those of the
agents of capital. Arnold (1998) argues, in a more
contemporary context, that modern manufactur-
ing and the new calculative practices that it sus-
tains are just more of the same. Measures of
?exibility, timeliness and interdependency are
merely modern ways of controlling labour in
pursuit of the interests of a globalised form of
capitalism.
Foucauldian researchers concentrate on the
institutionalised webs of power that are embedded
in management accounting practice. Miller and
O’Leary’s (1987) study of standard costing char-
acterises the disciplinary or coercive impact of
this. According to Miller and O’Leary, standard
costs enabled administrative discourses about
‘‘waste’’ and ‘‘e?ciency’’ to govern the activities of
organisational participants. The research by
Knights and Collinson (1987) demonstrates the
extent to which these institutionalised webs of
power may become entrenched within organi-
sations and our society. When faced with the pos-
sible loss of their jobs, male manual workers failed
to contest the legitimacy of ?nancial measures and
controls. There was little or no recognition by
these highly unionised workers of the extent to
which their core values had become aligned to
those of management.
As such, management accounting technologies
emerge as a potent and, in some cases, almost
hegemonic aspect of organisational functioning.
These technologies are not innocent. They may
contribute to the overt opposition of interests in
organisations and society, in addition to the sup-
pression of others. Alternative management
accounting research is both politically informed
and informing as a consequence.
2.12. A critique of accounting change
Alternative management accounting research
has augmented our understanding of accounting
change. It attests to the improbability of purpose-
ful and predictable change: there is little empirical
evidence that a self-enlightened, well-engineered
and progressive path characterises the develop-
ment of management accounting technologies.
Studies of clinical budgeting (Chua, 1995; Pinch et
al., 1989; Preston et al., 1992), for example, indi-
cate that the introduction of DRGs-based costing
in hospitals assumed a slow and contested path
towards implementation. The research by Ezzamel
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 105
and Bourn (1990), Czarniawska-Joerges (1988),
Jo¨ nsson (1982) and Boland and Pondy (1983,
1986) illustrates the di?culties that particular
organisations experienced in attaining a ‘?t’
between management accounting control systems
and changing environmental contexts. In compar-
ison, research by Vaivio (1999) on a recently
established system of customer-related reporting,
a new management accounting practice that was
sympathetic to the changing requirements of a
business, describes the opposition that arose to a
needed change. Preston’s (1986) study (ironically)
demonstrates that changed management account-
ing systems can be implemented relatively swiftly
but then happily ignored by organisational parti-
cipants who rely on other informal information
systems. In addition, Dent’s (1991) research into
a public sector railway company demonstrates
that what may pass as accounting change may
not involve any great level of technical sophisti-
cation, transformation or re?nement. The study
by Burchell et al. (1985), dealing with the emer-
gence of value-added accounting in the UK,
describes a change that could not be aligned
clearly with the intentions of those identi?ed in
the research.
In fact, some alternative researchers go so far as
to suggest that accounting and change are
uncomfortable bed-fellows in practice. Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson (1978) and Cooper et al. (1981) argue
that accounting practices are part of the stabilising
repertoire of organisations, building in continuity
rather than change. Roberts and Scapens (1985),
Roberts (1990), Covaleski and Dirsmith (1983,
1988) and Covaleski et al. (1993) suggest that
management accounting routinises organisational
functioning. Other writers (Banbury & Nahapiet,
1979; Boland, 1979; Dent, 1991) outline and illus-
trate the beliefs and meanings that practice perpe-
tuates, thereby facilitating stability.
Yet management accounting change does occur,
despite these factors that seem to stand in oppo-
sition to it. And alternative management account-
ing research conveys distinctive insights into
accounting change. Changing networks of socio-
cultural, political and economic conditions have
been related to a variety of changes in manage-
ment accounting practice in the twentieth century,
such as the emergence of standard costing (Loft,
1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987), DRGs (Preston,
1992), capital budgeting (Miller, 1991), customer
performance measures (Ogden, 1997) and value-
added accounting (Burchell et al., 1985). Such
studies indicate that accounting change may be a
fortuitous (Burchell et al., 1985), expedient
(Miller, 1991; Ogden, 1997) or compromised (Pre-
ston, 1992) organisational outcome. The work of
Cooper (1983) further reinforces the unpredictable
course of management accounting change by
highlighting its foundations in institutional
instabilities and con?icts.
‘Micro’ studies provide a sense of the unpre-
dictable and local nature of accounting change
(Hopwood, 1987). A ?eld study of local govern-
ment organisations by Rosenberg et al. (1982)
relates change to the careers paths and aspirations
of particular management accounting practi-
tioners. Empirical studies by Ahrens (1997) and
Vaivio (1999) highlight the contribution of spon-
taneous forms of local discourse on the trajectory
of accounting change. The path of management
accounting technologies in particular organi-
sational contexts is being continually re-laid and
re-directed by various forms of talk that challenge
and modify extant practices. Other research indi-
cates that management accounting change is slow
and arduous because its technologies are insepar-
able from the social fabric of an organisation
(Dent, 1991; Laughlin, 1987; Llewellyn, 1998).
Accounting change becomes a form of cultural
change. Dent’s research, in particular, indicates
that accounting change can be unremarkable
from a technical point of view. Rather the orga-
nisation that Dent studied was remarkable in the
way that culture changed to enable a re-position-
ing of management accounting practice. Manage-
ment accounting moved from the periphery to a
position of in?uence over core organisational
values. Llewellyn (1998) reported a similar situa-
tion of cultural transition within the Scottish
social service.
Alternative management accounting research
illustrates that there is little or no sense of any
technical elegance or excellence propelling man-
agement accounting change. As such, we are left
with a sense of what accounting change is not.
106 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
Accounting change is not linear, predictable, con-
trollable, exclusively technical or well-behaved.
2.13. Critique of bodiless forms of management
accounting practice
Alternative management accounting research is
further distinguished by its corporeal dimension.
It imparts a sense of the bodily positioning of
organisational participants. Yet this corporeal
accomplishment comes as no surprise. Such
research has demonstrated a commitment to using
qualitative research methods and these methods
enable the behaviours of organisational partici-
pants to come into view. As a result, we begin to
appreciate the roles of particular organisational
participants in constituting and conveying the
technologies of the craft.
For instance, in the opening vignette of Dent’s
(1991) study we are confronted with images of
organisational participants moving through time
and space, engaging in activities such as driving
trucks, replenishing water supplies, checking tick-
ets, answering questions, pushing buttons and
greeting people. Dent describes organisational
activities in such a way that the economic objec-
tives and consequences of this railway enterprise
are connected to individual bodily habitudes—
such activities are accompanied by smiles, grum-
piness, deftness, busyness and messiness, for
instance. Preston’s (1986) study of an informal
management information system provides a simi-
lar sense of the embodiment of management
accounting practice. Ample dialogical inclusions
in Preston’s research create an anchor between
organisational processes and individuals’ involve-
ment in them. Preston gives voice to the interac-
tions between ?ve managers in the organisation
that he studied. However, we do not only hear
these individuals speak, we also get a sense of the
way in which they moved throughout the plant—
physically inspecting output in the production
department and visiting each others’ o?ces to ?nd
out what was going on. Rosenberg et al.’s (1982)
study, again, conveys a sense of the importance of
bodily positioning. These researchers depict man-
agement accounting change in local government
as a consequence of the physical ‘‘movement’’
(p. 125) of innovative practitioners (‘‘segment
movers’’) from one part of a local authority to
another.
Ahrens’ (1997) ?eld study, in comparison,
depicts the constraining imprint that management
accounting leaves on the body. The activities of
the management accountants that he studied were
strongly informed by their national cultural con-
text. Czarniawska-Joerges and Jacobsson (1989)
describe a similar situation in which bodily habi-
tudes re?ected cultural expectations. This shaping
of the body is further illuminated by Miller and
O’Leary (1987, 1993). Miller and O’Leary (1987)
explored the ‘conditions of possibility’ that
enabled organisational participants’ activities to
be ‘‘rendered knowable’’ (p. 242) by standard
costing. Standard costing enables the bodies (if
not the minds) of organisational participants to be
used for the greater economic and societal good.
Miller and O’Leary’s (1993) study of Caterpillar
describes the bodily containment that occurs in a
context of ‘cellular’ manufacturing. Miller and
O’Leary outline the ways in which a change to
world class manufacturing resulted in the ‘‘spatial
reordering’’ (p. 15) of Caterpillar’s Decatur plant.
This ‘‘spatial reordering’’ is signi?cant because it
created a new trajectory for the movement of
products and organisational participants within
the plant. Organisational participants were
required to interact with each other, and the pro-
ducts that they were assembling, in accordance
with the lay-out and metrics of the ‘‘Assembly
Highway’’. There was an increasing need for syn-
chronisation and new management accounting
measures were implemented for this purpose.
(And the Foucauldian circle has come the full
turn: the monastic cell has been replaced by the
production cell; God’s gaze has given way to the
unforgiving gaze of management accounting per-
formance measures.)
Alternative management accounting research
highlights how the bodily and the technical inter-
sect; be they passive bodies subject to the dis-
ciplinary impact of various management
accounting techniques (Miller & O’Leary, 1987,
1993) or pro-active bodies regenerating manage-
ment accounting practice (Rosenberg et al.,
1982).
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 107
3. Whence alternative management accounting
research
How do you sum up this legacy of alternative
management accounting research? If it is possible
to proceed with such a presumptuous task, we
would contend that its enduring legacy is a sense
of the limitedness of management accounting
technologies. Management accounting practice
emerges as a highly situated phenomena—limited
by historical conditions that are speci?c to given
times and places; limited by local meanings and
values; limited by the local rationalities found in
particular organisational settings; and limited by
the individual habitudes of organisational partici-
pants who are connected to the conduct of man-
agement accounting work. Yet it is this very
recognition of the limitedness of management
accounting practice that enables alternative
researchers to engage with practice and generate
multiple interpretations of it; partly because of the
generous pluralism of such research. As such, the
limits of alternative management accounting
research remain to be discovered, constrained only
by the ‘‘sociological imaginations’’ (Mills, 1959) of
those that attempt it and the credibility of their
accounts.
4. Whither alternative management accounting
research
But how might this sociological imagination
continue to nourish alternative management
accounting research? And how may engagement
with broader debates within the social sciences,
which has constituted the hallmark of alternative
management accounting research to date, provide
interesting, novel and contemporary approaches
to characterise and understand emerging manage-
ment accounting practice? Consequently, it is the
ongoing contribution of alternative management
accounting research which concerns us in this sec-
tion of the paper. In the remainder of the paper we
outline brie?y how the social sciences may provide
theoretically interesting and fecund ideas for
alternative management accounting researchers to
pursue.
4.1. Engaging with the future
In our opinion, debates about the nature of
individual and organisational functioning within a
technologically-mediated and inter-connected
society have the capability to generate new
streams of alternative management accounting
research, and refresh the agenda of extant research
streams. Such debate within the social sciences is
generally subsumed by monikers such as ‘post-
modernism’, ‘disorganized capitalism’ (see Har-
vey, 1989) or ‘re?exive modernism’ (see Beck,
2000; Giddens, 1991; Lash, 1999). This body of
thought—referred to as postmodernism/dis-
organised capitalism/re?exive modernism—has
emerged from extensive argument within a num-
ber of disciplines, such as aesthetics, art, archi-
tecture, music, geography, literary criticism and
sociology (see Harvey, 1989; Wood, 1999). As an
intellectual project, such debate addresses the ced-
ing of modernity to a new era of national, organi-
sational and individual identity. In con?guring
this passing and change, debate has focused on
issues such as: the fragmentation of life; the
ascension of signs; the ?uidity and inter-penetra-
tion of practices; power and discourse; and the
textuality/inter-textuality of everyday life, for
instance.
These issues assume signi?cance for the conduct
of alternative management accounting research
because of their conceptual innovativeness; creat-
ing ‘white spaces’ for future research.
3
In order to
illustrate these possibilities, we outline brie?y how
the social sciences may direct and rejuvenate
alternative management accounting research.
Being guided by these literatures in relation to the
changing nature of society and organisational
functioning, we nominate three important con-
cepts—‘globalisation’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘network
society’—to (re-)mobilise alternative management
3
It is acknowledged that postmodern writings, such as the
work of Foucault and Latour, have been adopted in the extant
alternative management accounting research. However, these
postmodern theoretical perspectives have been mobilised, in the
main, to study modernity and issues from this era, such as the
emergence of cost accounting in the early years of the twentieth
century (e.g. Loft, 1986; Miller & O’Leary, 1987).
108 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
accounting research.
4
These concepts are outlined
below and, arguably, motivate substantive inter-
rogations of management accounting practice in a
contemporary context.
4.2. Globalisation
The literature on globalisation outlines the
increasing impossibility of the containment of
everyday life, be it at the individual, organi-
sational or societal/national levels of analysis,
because of the international di?usion of techno-
logies, popular culture, workers, ?nancial capital,
knowledge, and goods and services (see Beck,
2000). Correspondingly, at a very basic level, the
term globalisation is used to convey the ‘‘complex
connectivity’’ of contemporary being (Jervis, 1999,
p. 3). The various literatures on globalisation pro-
vide a relevant point of engagement for alternative
researchers because it encourages us to see man-
agement accounting as a set of practices that is
implicated in complex processes of societal/orga-
nisational interpenetration.
A fertile avenue for research into globalisation
may borrow, for example, from Giddens’ work on
expert systems and their disembedding potential
(see Giddens, 1991). Management accounting sys-
tems, such as costing systems, quality systems,
planning systems and so-on, are forms of expert
systems. They are technologies which enable de-
contextualised ways of knowing—that is, they
may be operated independently of their temporal
and spatial origins. As such, management
accounting systems may be disembedded or
removed from their local origins and di?used to
other times and places in standardised formats,
through the purchase of computerised information
systems, consulting solutions, the pronouncements
of international professional bodies, such as
IFAC, and so-on. What we do not know, how-
ever, is why and how such systems of accounting
inscriptions travel across these inter-connected
times and spaces in our contemporary world. What
circuitous relays, networks and power relations
enable management accounting inscriptions to
travel or inhibit their journeys? What are the con-
sequences—professional, cultural, and organi-
sational—of a widespread disembedding of
management accounting practices? Will this lead
to the homogenisation of practice and the ameli-
oration of signi?cant forms of di?erence and
identity in our everyday and working lives? Is the
local capable of o?ering resistance and mediating
change in a postmodern world? What forms will
this change assume and what will be its a?ects/
e?ects? In short, we need to examine how man-
agement accounting systems rewrite the local and,
in turn, are rewritten by it. Moreover, attention to
this local-global connectivity facilitates the possi-
bility of new alternative accounts of management
accounting practice which are no longer bounded
by organisations and society, but accommodate
their fusion and permeability.
Further, as the pursuit of a globalised form of
capitalism comes to characterise practice, there is
arguably much scope for an invigorated critical
project and further radical accounts of manage-
ment accounting practice. Budgen (2000) suggests
that we must work to formulate a ‘‘a new concep-
tion of exploitation’’ to account for ‘‘a new form
of the extortion of surplus value’’ (p. 155) in the
global marketplace. Increasingly, both manual
and professional workers are being asked to
assume greater levels of responsibility (‘empower-
ment’), to work harder and more intelligently
(‘multi-skilling’, ‘?exibility’, ‘customisation’), as
well as contributing to the structural capital of
their organisations (‘knowledge-sharing’). This
provides an interesting and contemporary context
to re?ect on the extraction of ‘surplus value’ and
to comment on new forms of inequality that are
emerging in conjunction with globalisation.
4.3. Hybridity
Hybridity is a related concept which refers to
the new entities produced by connectivity in our
globalised world. Stemming from post-colonial
studies which examine the complex interrelation-
ships between the coloniser and the colonised, the
centre and the periphery, the East and the West
(Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1978, 1993), hybridity
4
Again, a comprehensive review of the postmodern/dis-
organised capitalism/re?exive modernity debate is beyond the
scope of this paper.
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 109
encourages us to recognise and investigate emer-
gent ‘third spaces’ that are a blend of the local and
the global, the old and the new. At a societal level
we have witnessed the emergence of the so-called
‘‘third way’’ (Giddens, 1998) as a blending of lib-
eral and social political systems. At an organi-
sational level we have seen the emergence of
transitional organisational forms, as public sector
organisations seek to become fully or partially
privatised and private enterprises grapple with
their increasing community and environmental
responsibilities (see Elkington, 1997). Such transi-
tions force us to re-examine our presumptions
about the context in which management account-
ing operates. Notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘pri-
vate’, the ‘democratic’ and the ‘socialist’, the
‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ‘other’ implode in this
rapidly changing, ?uid, global context. Corre-
spondingly, it is time for alternative management
accounting researchers to reformulate their con-
textual assumptions and to carefully characterise
new hybrid forms, both theoretically and empiri-
cally, by outlining how accounting is enrolled in
processes of transition.
There is scope, for example, for new projects
which examine how the emergence of hybridised
organisational forms has disrupted our assump-
tions regarding resource management (and
accountabilities for this). Management accounting
practice, perhaps more than ever, is implicated
both in the production of chronic contradictions
and the engineering of new forms of stability in
hybridised contexts. The university in which the
authors work provides a case point. We are
employed by a ‘public’ tertiary institution in which
equitable access to higher education is regarded as
one of its core values. However, diminishing and
non-muni?cent government funding formulae
have led to the admission of fee paying students,
drawn from local and international student
cohorts. The revenue generated by fee paying stu-
dents has continued to grow, as that from gov-
ernment sources declines, and dominates the
budget of the Faculty in which we work.
5
Our uni-
versity is, in a sense, no longer a public institution;
but it is not a private one either. This hybridised
existence is a ‘fact’ of life at the university—a fact
that creates contradictions between the past and
the present/future, and between rhetoric/mission/
values and ‘reality’. And accounting inscriptions
are central to the ongoing functioning of this
hybrid: on the one hand, accounting inscriptions
convey the economic di?erences between the pub-
lic and private identities of our schizoid institution
but, on the other, accounting inscriptions must
traverse these di?erences and enable the Uni-
versity to function despite, and because of these
di?erences. And functionality is not just because
of ‘loose-coupling’; of one ‘half’ not knowing what
the other ‘half’ is doing. Our contradictory life is
quite transparent, we realise the erosion of the
public sphere. At the same time, we know that the
university if not a ‘private’, pro?t-seeking enter-
prise either. How does one conceptualise account-
ing and hybridity? As yet, we do not have a way to
theorise the scope and e?ects of our hybridity or
the ways in which management accounting
becomes connected to change in this form.
Also, our university is not unique—other uni-
versities are confronting similar pressures for
forms of hybridity, as are many government
enterprises (such as water and electricity suppliers
and airlines). How are we to understand hybridity
across a range of di?erent organisational settings?
These more broad-scale patterns of change pro-
mise to reinvigorate the research agenda of scho-
lars working within the parameters of institutional
theory too. For one of the oft-heard rationali-
sations for the sustainability of hybrid/schizoid
forms is ‘‘we are all in the same boat’’! (If others
can live with these contradictions, so must we.)
But can this form of mimetic isomorphism con-
tinue to accommodate manifest contradictions
and fragmentation in hybrid spaces? Correspond-
ingly, there is a need to understand the institu-
tionalised context of hybridity, as well as it
enactment at a micro-level.
4.4. Network society
Finally, network society is a metaphor asso-
ciated with the work of Castells (1996). Network
society refers to the increasing role of digitised
5
Fees pay for salary supplements, for example, that are
over and above public sector salaries.
110 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
technologies in mediating interaction in and across
organisations and societies. Such has been the
intensi?cation of digitally mediated interaction
that writers refer to the advent of a ‘‘surveillance
society’’ (Lyon, 2001) or the emergence of a
‘‘Superpanoptican’’ (Poster, 1990). The capability
of organisations and governments to capture
information about us through credit card trans-
actions, internet usage, health card/social security
numbers etc, has never been greater. However, the
notion of surveillance is not new to alternative
management accounting researchers, as the extant
Foucauldian research attests. Nevertheless, alter-
native forms of management accounting research
are yet to systematically revisit this enduring issue
in the context of a network society. How is sur-
veillance enacted in highly digitised contexts? How
are the technologies of the craft mobilised in, and
transformed by the digitisation of organisational
functioning? How is submission to the economic
connected to the emergence of the ‘‘Super-
panoptican’’? Does subversion of management
accounting practice accompany this submission?
Relatively recent contexts, such as e-commerce,
loyalty schemes (such as Frequent Flyer initia-
tives), and remote call-centre operations, for
example, provide a contemporary platform for
this research. It is possible that Latourian
researchers are well positioned to undertake such
contemporary alternative research, given the close
attention that this perspective a?ords to the inter-
action between networks of individuals and non-
human artefacts, such as computers.
By undertaking this style of research, alternative
management accounting research becomes aligned
with a broader concern within the social sciences
for examining closely the mutual accommodation
of the body and technology. A broader literature
on ‘‘cyborgs’’—hybrids of ?esh and technology, as
well as the ‘real’ and the ?ctional—provides a way
of apprehending the ‘monsters’ that connect us to
a global world (Jervis, 1999; Price & Shildrick,
1999): enterprise resource planning systems, com-
puterised manufacturing systems, computer
screens, keyboards, modems, and so-on. Within
this context, the postmodern practice of manage-
ment accounting becomes an increasingly dis-
embodied and fragmented experience; rewriting
our sense of corporeality. Will oral management
accounting cultures, such as those outlined by
Ahrens (1997) and Vaivio (1999), continue to
thrive in a network society? And how are man-
agement accounting inscriptions contributing to
virtual and hyper-real constructions of organi-
sational/societal functioning?
In addition to this, the network society debate
also encourages us to think about the unpredict-
able and amorphous webs of inter-relationships
that connect us. The global impacts of ‘September
11’, the outbreak of mad cow disease in the United
Kingdom, and the collapse of Enron in 2002,
illustrate the connectivity embedded in a network
society. The potential fragility of our network
society has led to vigorous discussions both on the
risks that such connectivity creates, as well as the
ways in which trust must be invoked to maintain
the corresponding bene?ts of global networks of
connections (Beck, 1999; Lupton, 1999; Misztal,
1996). And the risk–trust debate has implications
for our characterisations of management account-
ing practice. Most immediately, the risks inherent
in a network society provide a renewed and fur-
ther impetus for alternative management account-
ing’s critique of means-end reasoning. The
indeterminism of actions makes it increasingly
di?cult to identify the costs and bene?ts of parti-
cular policies and practices, rendering many cal-
culable spaces unmanageable and unknowable.
How may accounting technologies maintain their
relevance? Are comprehensive calculations being
replaced by systems of trust (and hope), such as
intangible asset monitors and balanced scorecards,
that provide some ostensible form of assurance
that at least the drivers, rather than the outcomes
of performance are being managed, measured and
controlled? As a result, management accounting is
increasingly being practised within the context of a
system of trust which stands in marked contrast to
the underlying distrust that was embedded in the
context of industrial organisations and society.
5. In conclusion
This review has characterised alternative man-
agement accounting research in AOS from 1976 to
J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126 111
1999, acknowledging its pluralistic constitution
and the variety of perspectives mobilised by it.
Overall, this research has achieved signi?cant dis-
ciplinary accomplishments. Alternative manage-
ment accounting research has demonstrated: the
many di?erent rationalities of management
accounting practice; the variety of ways in which
management accounting practice is enacted and
given meaning; the potency of management
accounting technologies; the unpredictable, non-
linear and socially-embedded nature of manage-
ment accounting change; and the ways in which
management accounting practice is both con-
strained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its
exponents. It was argued that this legacy enables
us to appreciate the limitedness of management
accounting inscriptions and the technologies that
generate them. Nonetheless, we have argued that
the theoretical revitalisation of alternative man-
agement accounting research is warranted also.
There is a pressing need to engage with current
debates from the social sciences to enable the sub-
stantive contributions of alternative management
accounting research to continue in a con-
temporary context.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anon-
ymous reviewers and participants at the AOS
Conference at Oxford (July 2000), the University
of New South Wales Research Seminar Series and
the University of Wollongong Research Seminar
Series. Special thanks to Anthony Hopwood for
making AOS possible.
112 J. Baxter, W.F. Chua / Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 97–126
Appendix. Alternative characterisations of management accounting practice (MAP) in AOS (1974–1999)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Non-rational
design school
Hedberg
and Jo¨ nsson
(1978)
Organisations
in changing
environments
Examines the need
for ‘‘semi-confusing’’
information systems
that de-stabilise
organisations
Secondary empirical
data o?ered through
a discussion of the
extant research
(experiments etc.)
Argue that traditionally conceived accounting systems
stabilise organisations (through standard operating
procedures, learning repertoires etc) and are unsuitable in
situations of change. Argue that accounting systems
should be designed to foster curiosity and dialectical
decision approaches.
Banbury
and
Nahapiet
(1979)
The need for
new forms of
information
systems in
organisations
Develops a framework
for understanding the
‘‘antecedents’’ and
‘‘consequences’’ of
information systems
No empirical data
included, reliant
on a review of the
literature and a
hypothetical
illustration of
major changes to
a cost control
system
Highlight the importance of beliefs (about rationality,
autonomy, the environment etc) on the design of
information systems. Alternative characterisations of
information system e?ectiveness are proposed also
(intelligibility,utility, impact on job content, distribution
of autonomy).
Boland
(1979)
Framing of
information
requirements
Adopts a critical
perspective on
decision making
and control through
a consideration of
symbolic
interactionism and
the sociology of
knowledge
No empirical
data included
System design becomes part of a constructive process, a
process of building organisational functioning.
Organisational participants require information that will
enable them to make sense of their situation and to e?ect
control through processes of mutual adjustment. (System
design is more than the production of a ‘shopping list’ of
needs and the institution of hierarchical processes of
control.)
Cooper
et al.
(1981)
Organisations
in ‘‘ambiguous’’
situations
Examines the
design of internal
information systems
(budgetary systems,
cost systems etc)
No empirical
data included
Accounting systems institute opportunities for both
‘coercion’ and ‘playfulness’ in organisations. Accounting
systems have a coercive element in directing attention
to particular problems, measures etc. In comparison, by
engaging with accounting technologies (such as
budgeting), organisational participants may also discover
and learn about goals, diverse meanings etc.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Boland
(1981)
Design of
management
accounting
systems
Analyses the design
approaches of
Churchman (emphasises
a commitment to the
future and betterment)
and Argyris (emphasises
individual growth and
actualisation) and
considers the
implications for
management accountants
as system designers
No empirical
data included
Argues that the management accountant as designer
confronts two contradictory design roles: ?rst,
facilitating personal interaction by becoming highly
involved in a situation; and second, facilitating
improvement by positioning themselves ‘‘outside’’ the
system.
Naturalistic
Approach
Rosenberg
et al.
(1982)
Local
government
(UK)
Examines the work role
perspectives of
accountants in local
government service
departments
Qualitative data
from interviews,
documents and
observation
Describe the way in which ‘‘segment movers’’ (accountants
who have moved from the Treasury function to a service
function of a local government authority) create their new
role more broadly than ‘traditional’ accounting work
through negotiations and political skills.
Jo¨ nsson
(1982)
Local
government
(Sweden)
Examines a budgetary
process in a large city,
based on the decisions
of an Executive
Committee, over a three
year period
Public documents
and interviews
Describes the ways in which context (a ?nancial
crisis) had a marked impact on the budgetary process.
This context highlighted the political aspects of the
budgeting process—the ways in which stratagems
were employed to avoid cuts in particular committees’
budgets (co-opt the press, mobilise clients, changing
procedures).
Boland
and
Pondy
(1983)
Public
institutions
(USA)
Examines the ways
in which accounting
involves an
interpenetration of
‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘rational’’
perspectives through a
case study of budgeting
at the University of
Illinois and a case study
of an elementary school
in Chicago facing closure
Qualitative data
presented
The cases illustrate that budgeting, although a
‘rational’ quantitative technique, enables ‘natural’
dialogue about values, priorities, and environmental
sense making. Similarly, the natural context may also
facilitate budgetary calculations within the qualitative
context of a decision.
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Berry
et al.
(1984)
Public
Enterprise
(National Coal
Board, UK)
Examines organisational
participants’
understandings of
accounting and control
systems in one
geographical division
(‘‘Area’’) of the NCB
Qualitative data
from semi-structured
interviews, document
study (internal) and
observation of
?nance personnel
Describe how accounting controls were subordinated
to physical controls and measures—by managing the
physical (output per shift, machinery utilisation,
physical plans), ?nancial control over costs was
assumed to follow. Moreover, the models and
?nancial analyses of the NCB seemed to be decoupled
from the Area activities. Whilst ?nancial control had
only a secondary relationship to the physical process
and outcomes of an Area, accounting practices,
nonetheless, played an important role creating an
image of ‘‘good housekeeping’’ and e?ciency for
external constituencies.
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1986)
Six hospitals
in US
Examines the budgetary
process as an integral
aspect of organisational
political processes,
changing and
maintaining the
distribution of power
Qualitative data from
interviews with 56
nursing managers,
researcher contact
with organisational
participants in their
natural work setting,
and document study
Describe how the budgetary process was implicated in
maintaining and reinforcing the ‘‘powerless position’’
of managers in the nursing services area, a?ecting the
allocation of resources to nursing services and,
thereby, containing the costs of this function within
the hospitals. The incumbents of the newly emerged
position of nursing manager had yet to learn how
to play the budgetary ‘‘game’’.
Boland
and
Pondy
(1986)
Education
system (USA)
Examines the
budgetary process in
terms of decision
model (?scal, clinical,
political, strategic) and
mode of analysis
(instrumental, symbolic)
in two case studies
Based on verbatim
transcripts of
meetings, yielding
both quantitative
and qualitative
data
Argue that ‘rationality’ in decision processes requires
constant shifts between models and modes of analysis
—and that accounting numbers facilitate frame shifts
and emergent understandings of decision processes,
such a budgeting.
Preston
(1986)
Manufacturing
(UK)
Examines the process
of informing that
emerged within a
managerial group
Qualitative data from
one year participant
observation study
Describes how managers develop informal
information systems, that operate in parallel to formal
information systems, through the maintenance of
private records, observation, and interpersonal
networks. Formal information systems were used as a
form of historical memory, con?rmation of informal
communications and to inform those outside the
managerial network.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Czarniawska-
Joerges
(1988)
Chemical
industry
(Sweden)
Examines changes
in organisational
control that were
related to changes
in an organisation’s
economic context
Qualitative data
from open interviews
conducted over a
three and a half year
period, in addition
to the study of private
and public documents
Describes how increasing prices, as a result of the oil
crisis in the mid-1970s, were followed by a period of
decline. During the decline, management reacted by
increasingly tightening control within the
organisation, in part characterised as a symbolic
reaction by managers to the problems in the economic
environment.
Czarniawska-
Joerges and
Jacobsson
(1989)
Swedish public
sector
Examines the connections
between organisational
budgetary processes
and their cultural context
in state agencies and
ministries
Employs extant
cases
Describes how cultural values of consensus and
rationality were expressed in examples of Swedish
budgeting—discussions of numbers were less
confronting than discussions of values and policy,
technical complexities avoided con?ict through lack
of understanding, budgets implicitly communicated
opinions (more funding is required etc).
Ezzamel
and Bourn
(1990)
UK university Examines role of
accounting systems
in a University
facing funding cuts
(‘‘a ?nancial crisis’’)
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
study
Describes how the accounting system provided adequate
forms of information during periods of relatively low
uncertainty (about goals and causation) but became
increasingly dysfunctional—by reinforcing inappropriate
procedures and repertoires—as uncertainty increased,
instead of fostering a recognition of change and
imaginative solutions to the problems of the crisis period.
Dent
(1991)
Large public
sector railway
company
Examines
organisational
change and the ways
that accounting
control systems
contributed to the
emergent
organisational culture
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
?eld study involving
unstructured
interviews and
observation
Describes how the railway organisation was
transformed from a service culture, dominated by
engineering and production issues, to a culture
dominated by economic concerns. Accounting systems
provided the rituals, symbols, language and values
that helped to bring economic issues, such a
‘‘pro?tability’’, to the forefront of a new managerialist
and market-based organisational culture.
Ahrens
(1997)
British and
German
brewing
companies
Examines accounting
talk and its
implication in
organisational
orders
Qualitative data
from a longitudinal
?eld study
Describes how accounting talk (in an informal and a
formal setting) enabled accounting information to be
tailored to particular types of decision situations and
intertwined with other forms of organisational and
managerial knowledge. (Accounting talk in the
German setting was more closely intertwined with
administrative knowledge, whilst accounting talk in
the British setting was combined more with local
customer-related forms of knowledge.)
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Llewellyn
(1998)
Scottish social
service
department
Examines the
boundaries of
‘‘costs’’ in a social
work environment
that was traditionally
concerned with ‘‘care’’
Qualitative data
from a two-stage
?eld study involving
interviews and
site visits
Describes how accounting created ‘‘costing conduits’’
(e.g., priorities in spending, budgets, commitment
accounting) through which discourse about caring
needed to pass, thereby eventually coupling (rather
than separating) the work domains of ‘‘costing’’ and
‘‘caring’’, linking social work to notions of public
sector accountability and e?ciency.
Mouritsen
(1999)
Manufacturing
(Denmark)
Examines the meaning
of ‘‘?exibility’’ in a
medium-sized
organisation that
manufactured
‘‘high-tech’’ products
for the printing
industry
Qualitative data
from 30 interviews
with managers and
site visits over a
one year period
Describes the ways ‘‘?exibility’’ was interpreted in the
case organisation. On the one hand, the ‘‘paper’’
construction of ?exibility (advocated by the CEO and
?nance) emphasised that ?exibility was something that
was costly and needed to be contained–customer
expectations needed to be changed, production
processes needed to be sub-contracted to save costs.
On the other hand, the ‘‘hands-on’’ construction
(sustained by the production manager) focused on the
necessity of ?exibility for the customer and, in turn,
the necessity for the workers to be adaptive and to
enact ?exibility in concrete work processes.
Vaivio
(1999)
Consumer
products
company (UK)
Examines the
construction of the
‘‘quanti?ed customer’’
in a division of
Unilever
Qualitative data
from interviews
Describes the emergence of a new calculable space in
Unilever—‘‘the customer’’. Non-?nancial performance
measures (such a number of complaints, resolved
invoice queries and so-on) constructed new knowledge
about ‘‘the customer’’ and created new practices in the
name of ‘‘the customer’’, whilst moving management
accounting work closer to day-to-day organisational
issues.However, local forms of knowledge were also
mobilised (by sales, for example) to construct
competing discourses about ‘‘the customer’’—that is,
the ‘‘speci?cs’’.
Radical
alternative
Tinker
et al.
(1982)
Ideological
context of
theories used
to characterise
practice
Examines the
‘‘conservative’’ bias
in accounts of
(management)
accounting practice
Historical review
of the concept of
‘‘value’’
Illustrate the partisan nature of accounting technologies,
particularly in the ways in which accounting work is
implicated in creating and sustaining ‘‘managerialist’’
conceptions of value.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Cooper
(1983)
Critique of
structural-
functional
conceptions
of order and
stability
Examines the inherent
‘tidiness’ of research
characterisations of
management accounting
practice
in terms of the extant
literature
No empirical data
included
Highlights the ways in which research has failed to
make visible particular dimensions of management
accounting practice: a potential for change and
instability; a potential to create tension and con?ict;
and a potential for alternative possibilities to emerge.
Neimark
and Tinker
(1986)
Neo-classical
economic
context of
management
accounting
practice
Examines the
social construction
of management
control systems,
as opposed to
‘‘orthodox’’ models
of control (in which
control systems
are ‘‘matched’’ with
their environmental
context)
Historical
examination of
General Motors
during a period in
which its practices
became increasingly
‘‘internationalized’’
Illustrate the dualism between organisational control
and its societal context using the case of GM. The case
also illustrates how management control practices can
convey forms of coercive social change, for example,
through decisions to move manufacture to lower cost
countries and suppliers.
Armstrong
(1987)
British
management
hierarchies
Examines the rise of
accounting
controls in capitalist
enterprises
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argues that the importance of accounting controls in
British organisations is connected to three explanations:
?rst, the importance of the audit enabled accounting
controls to assume a primary role in the internal control
of organisations; second, accounting controls enabled
forms of state intervention during the war years (e.g.
price control); and third, accounting controls provided
a way of managing large organisations resulting from
post-war mergers and acquisitions.
Hopper
et al.
(1987)
Accounting
as a social
practice
Develops a
‘‘dialectical view’’
for researching
management
accounting practice
No empirical
data included
Argues that viewing management accounting through
the lens of labour process theory provides new insights
into practice—the institutionalisation of particular
interests and the subordination of others’, the
reinforcement of dominant modes of production by
systems of control, opportunistic emergence of control
systems from crises. Argues that neither ‘conventional’
nor ‘naturalistic’ accounting research can highlight the
interests and biases embedded in management accounting
practice.
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Laughlin
(1987)
Organisational
context of
accounting
systems
Examines how
understanding
and changing
accounting
systems may be
facilitated by the
‘critical’ theory of
Habermas
No empirical
data included
Argues that accounting systems and change can only be
understood in a cultural/social context. Consequently,
accounting change may be implemented using one of
three strategies. First, the cultural elements of an
organisation may be changed to bring about subsequent
changes in accounting system design. Second, the
accounting system can be changed to accommodate the
cultural dimensions of an organisation. Third, an
organisation can be changed to re?ect system changes
and advances.
Hopper and
Armstrong
(1991)
North
American
conglomerate
organisational
forms
Examines the
relationship between
the control of labour
and cost accounting
techniques, providing a
critique of the work of
Johnson and Kaplan
(1987)
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that cost accounting techniques have played an
important role in the intensi?cation of, and control over
the labour process, rather than increasing the e?ciency
of the conversion process per se in various phases of
economic history.
Arnold
(1998)
Caterpillar
Inc., North
America
Examines the factory
modernisation
program in the
Decatur plant
(Illinois)
Interviews with
workers (and the
contested account
of the program
provided by Miller
and O’Leary, 1993)
Argues that the implementation of cellular manufacturing
techniques within the Decatur plant represents a
response to the ‘‘despotic hegemony’’ of globalisation.
A movement towards world class manufacturing is
construed as a new and di?erent form of control over
workers in the plant—rather than any implied form of
optimism expressed as ‘‘new economic citizenship’’.
Institutional
theory
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1983)
Health care
sector (USA)
Examines the use
of budgeting in the
nursing services area
of hospitals
Collected quantitative
data from 41 hospitals
Collected qualitative
data using in-depth
interviews
Argued that budgets were not only being used for the
top-down control of subordinates but were also used as
a way of advocating the needs of the nursing services
area, regardless of the degree of administrative
formalisation. This internal use of budgeting was
characterised as being isomorphic with extra
organisational expectations with respect to information
?ow and use.
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Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Covaleski
and
Dirsmith
(1988)
Government
funding of
universities
(USA)
Examines budgetary
negotiations between
a large university
and its respective
state government,
focusing on a decision
by the University not
to adopt traditional
budgetary categories
‘Retrospective’ ?eld
study using in-depth
interviews and
archival data
Demonstrates the political dimensions of budgeting in a
University’s attempt to change the resource allocation
process (from enrolment-based formulae to a new
context-speci?c language—‘‘Decision Item Narratives’’).
Covaleski
et al.
(1993)
US health care
sector
Examines case-mix
accounting to generate
relevant research
questions
No study-speci?c
empirical data,
although some
discussion of
practice is included
Argue that case-mix accounting needs to be understood
as more than a re?ection of assumed societal needs for
rational resource allocation. Case-mix accounting is a
means of exercising surveillance (over doctors, patients,
hospitals) and a dis-embodied form of government
power over health care costs.
Structuration
theory
Roberts
and
Scapens
(1985)
Understanding
accounting in its
organisational
context
Presentation of an
analytical framework
for understanding
accounting (in
divisionalised
companies, in
particular)
No empirical data Argue that accounting systems are a way of binding
organisational participants across time and space, albeit
in partial ways because of a lack of shared context and
meaning that such situations create and sustain.
Roberts
(1990)
Conglomerate
following
strategies of
growth
by acquisition
and product
market
dominance
(UK/Europe)
Examines the
relationship between
strategy and the use
of accounting
information for
performance reporting
in a business unit
producing light bulbs
Qualitative data,
including verbatim
quotes from
organisational
participants
Illustrates the tensions between ?nancial ‘‘success’’(return
on investment) and its strategic consequences (for
example, the sale of operations including potentially
valuable patents), whilst arguing that face-to-face forms
of accountability (such as meetings) may enable a mutual
accommodation of accounting and strategy.
Foucauldian
approach
Burchell
et al.
(1980)
Organisational
and societal
context of
accounting
work
Examines the ways in
which accounting
operates in practice,
in contrast to those
roles that have been
claimed for accounting
No empirical
data included
Argue that there is little in accounting practice that
suggests accounting is linked to the pursuit of economic
e?ciency. Rather, accounting as it is practised is in?uenced
by the ways in which accounting has been institutionalised
within organisations and society (in accounting
departments, professional bodies) and the objecti?cation
of accounting knowledge (books, training and so-on)
Highlight that little is known of accounting in practice.
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a
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S
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t
y
2
8
(
2
0
0
3
)
9
7
–
1
2
6
Burchell
et al.
(1985)
Social context
of accounting
Examines the history
of value-added in
the United Kingdom
during the 1970s
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that value-added emerged in an ‘‘unintended’’
way—through the intersection of industrial relation
reforms, the regulation of corporate reporting, and
economic management and policies.
Loft
(1986)
UK
(1914–1925)
Examines the history
of cost accounting
Historical overview
using literary sources
The practice of cost accounting is not merely a technical
matter but is to be understood within the con?uence of
the social (professionalisation, legislation, economic
conditions, class relations etc).
Hopwood
(1987)
Fluidity of
accounting
practice
Examines the
preconditions of
accounting change
using the ‘‘archaeology’’
metaphor/method
Provides three
examples of
accounting change
Accounting systems are not separate from organisations
but embedded in them constituting particular
con?gurations of the local that create, in turn, the
conditions of accounting system change.
Miller
and
O’Leary
(1987)
First three
decades of the
20th century
(Re-)examines the
history of standard
costing and budgeting
Historical overview
using literary sources
Argue that the emergence of the calculative practices of
standard costing and budgeting can be understood within
the context of a movement in the administration of the
social that emphasised forms of discourse about
‘‘e?ciency’’ and ‘‘waste’’ (for example, professional
discourse, discourse of national e?ciency, pragmatic
philosophical discourse). Standard costing and budgetary
practices were argued to enable the emergence of the
‘‘governable person’’ within organisations.
Knights
and
Collinson
(1987)
Shop-?oor
level of a
manufacturing
organisation
Examines the
disciplinary power of
human relations
(psychological) and
?nancial forms of
control on male
manual workers
Two year participant
observation study
involving interviews
and the study of
company documents
In this case it was found that ?nancial forms of discipline
were more e?ective than psychological forms. For
example, workers were sceptical about the sincerity of
management in terms of communications conveyed in an
in-house magazine. In comparison, ?nancial accounts
presented as part of a redundancy audit were not
challenged from the shop ?oor because of the apparent
factual nature of the accounts—and the value system of
the manual workers that gave primacy to physical
production and, as a consequence, economic values.
(continued on next page)
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s
a
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d
S
o
c
i
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t
y
2
8
(
2
0
0
3
)
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7
–
1
2
6
1
2
1
Appendix (continued)
Research
perspective
Author(s) Research
context
Research
focus/question
Data Substantive insights/
conclusions about MAP
Preston
(1992)
US hospital
system
Examines the
emergence of,
and changes in
discourses about
costs and accounting
over a hundred year
period
Historical overview
using literary sources
Illustrates how the emergence of DRGs payments to
hospitals through Medicare was in?uenced by a number
of discourses (medical, socio-economic, political) and
their historical conditions (location of treatments within
hospitals, concern about practices of cost reimbursement,
government desire for control and management of health
care costs, for example).
Miller
and
O’Leary
(1993)
Manufacturing
(Caterpillar
Inc., US)
Examines the role
of accounting in
advanced
manufacturing
processes in the
Decatur, Illinois,
plant
Qualitative data
from interviews,
documents and
observation
Describe the ways in which the implementation of
advanced manufacturing practices resulted in new
physical spaces (‘‘manufacturing cells’’), coupling diverse
forms of personnel and expertise. These, in turn, gave rise
to new calculable spaces (‘‘investment bundling’’,
‘‘competitor cost analysis’’, ‘‘manufacturing resource
planning’’) within the Decatur plant. These new
calculable spaces were characterised as enabling the
emergence of a ‘‘governable process’’ —that helped new
forms of ‘‘economic citizenship’’ to be enacted in terms of
the advanced manufacturing practices of the plant.
Latourian
Approach
Pinch
et al.
(1989)
National
Health Service,
UK
Examines the
‘‘success’’ of
clinical
budgeting
‘‘experiments’’
Qualitative data
from verbatim
transcripts,
documents and
?ctional dialogue
attributed to the
researchers (and a
tape recorder)
The ‘‘success’’ of these new resource management
programs was characterised in a ‘‘weak’’ form in practice,
focusing on the local adaptiveness and learning of actors
enabled by the budgetary process (ability to manoeuvre
within the budget, for example), rather than in terms of
‘‘strong’’ economic consequences (reduced morbidity etc).
Miller
(1991)
UK during
the 1960s
Examines the
promotion of
discounted cash
?ow techniques
Historical data
from public sources
The use of DCF analysis, as a form of accounting
innovation, was argued to be related to a government
program of encouraging economic growth through
enterprise investment activities. The DCF technique
provided a generic language to enable the ‘‘translation’’
of government policy into enterprise activities from a
‘‘distance’’.
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a
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s
a
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d
S
o
c
i
e
t
y
2
8
(
2
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0
3
)
9
7
–
1
2
6
Preston
et al.
(1992)
National
Health Service,
UK
Examines the
introduction
of a system of
responsibility
accounting
Qualitative data
based on interviews
and observations
conducted in a
particular ‘‘District’’,
plus six speci?c
public documents
Budgeting systems emerge through a process of
‘‘fabrication’’, an accommodation of the shifting and
multiple constructions of budgetary possibilities (enabling
better patient care, e?cient use of resources, control of
doctors, management of treatments etc). Also argue that
the ‘‘weak’’ rhetoric found in the Mulkay et al. study had
been replaced by a ‘‘strong’’ economic rhetoric that was
increasingly embedded in the day-to-day routines of
clinicians.
Chua
(1995)
Australian
public hospital
system
Examines the
experiments of
three hospitals
with DRGs
Qualitative data
collected as a
participant within
a University
project team
Demonstrates the constitutive capability of accounting
systems (DRGs) to recon?gure resource use and
relationships in the hospitals studied and that accounting
numbers became ‘facts’, not because of their
representational ?delity, but because of their ability to
connect diverse interests in the health care sector (Federal
Government, State Government, Hospital
Administration, Clinicians and Academicians) about
resource management.
Ogden
(1997)
Privatised
water industry
(UK)
Examines the
construction of
the ‘‘customer’’
Interviews and
documents
The ‘‘customer’’ was constructed through new forms of
accounting, such as performance indicators, which
enabled the ‘‘customer service’’ of Water plcs to be
calculated. Such measures were argued also to inscribe
customer needs into the daily practices of managers and
to enable ‘action at a distance’ by linking political
objectives and individuals’ (presumed) needs to
organisational functioning.
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