Description
This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the
theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault
analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of
biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late
1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015 e the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains
which were previously thought to be “non-economic”, specifically, and for the purposes of this paper, to
human-beings.
Entrepreneurs of the self: The development of management control
since 1976
Christine Cooper
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G4 0LN, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 7 August 2015
Accepted 20 October 2015
Available online 21 November 2015
a b s t r a c t
This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the
theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault
analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of
biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late
1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015 e the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains
which were previously thought to be “non-economic”, speci?cally, and for the purposes of this paper, to
human-beings.
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Since AOS's inauguration in 1976, accounting, organisations and
society have each undergone signi?cant changes. AOS began at the
tail end of Fordism and the early days of the neo-liberal revolu-
tionary era. During AOS's lifetime, various forms of neo-liberalism
have become ubiquitous, and the economic elites so powerful,
that capitalism has followed a path of increasing economic, politi-
cal, and cultural domination, arguably, to the point that, today, it
controls the most intimate strands of every living body in all cor-
ners of the world (Hardt & Negri, 2001). The injurious effects of
neo-liberalism e intensi?ed inequality (Piketty, 2014), the unethi-
cal commercialization of arenas previously considered inappro-
priate for marketization (for example Cooper &Taylor, 2005; Taylor
& Cooper, 2008), and the economic havoc unleashed on the econ-
omy by the ascendance and liberty of ?nance capital (Brown, 2015;
Cooper, 2015), have been widely analysed. The concern of this pa-
per is with the management control literature in AOS, and more
speci?cally with AOS's re?ection of management control's role as a
portal and/or agent for the globally ubiquitous spread of neo-
liberalism and particularly on its consequent impact on many
employees, which, as will be argued in the paper, have been pro-
found and deleterious.
In a powerful account of work in the neo-liberal era, Cederstrom
and Fleming (2012) argue that, in a wide range of occupations, both
at the top and the bottom of organisational hierarchies, work is
experienced as a “living death”. The majority work for longer hours,
less pay, fewer bene?ts, less security, and less promise of
retirement and upward mobility (Brown, 2015). But there is
something deeper at play. Neo-liberal mentality has recon?gured
humans from being waged/salaried employees to human capital
eentrepreneurs of the self (Foucault, 2010). In a sense, life itself has
been put to work
1
e our sociality, imagination, resourcefulness, and
our desire to learn and share ideas. Corporations increasingly strive
to harness these very human characteristics to drive value but neo-
liberal subjects have a hyper individualised expectation placed
upon them to maximise returns on themselves. In practice, the
majority have both a boss who gives orders, and an overwhelming
management control systemto deal with.
2
It could be that this dual
(and contradictory) pressure, to be entrepreneurial while also be-
ing closely controlled, is at least part of the reason behind the
anguish suffered across all organisational levels described by
Cederstrom and Fleming (2012). This is overlaid by the material
conditions of exploitation (O'Doherty & Willmott, 2002), perfor-
mance related pay, zero-hour contracts, falling real wages, the
removal of state safety nets and so on.
Accounting can serve as a crucial technology of neo-liberalism
(see for example, Arnold, 2009; Arnold, 2012; Covaleski, Dirsmith,
& Weiss, 2013; Jupe, 2012). It enables the rationalities of neo-
liberalism to pass through and thereby transform the
E-mail address: [email protected].
1
This is biopolitics.
2
Under Fordismworkers could mentally tell the boss to “fuck off” as they left the
factory. Turning-off is no longer an available option e 40 years ago weekends and
leisure time were still relatively untouched, now the majority take work home with
them (Cederstrom & Fleming, 2012).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j ournal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aoshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.10.004
0361-3682/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24
organisation and create new organisational practices (Hopwood,
1987) targeted at the workforce. Management control systems
play an important role in controlling and providing individualised
ranking of “entrepreneurs of the self” as well as providing the
technologies which create the growing divisions in wealth and
income.
In the transition from Fordism to neo-liberalism, there are ac-
counting continuities and discontinuities; management control
continues with the roles it played under Fordism (control, indi-
vidualisation, providing costing information and so on); but some
of its technologies are newand importantly constitute subjects in a
very different way. Under neoliberalism people are construed on
the model of the ?rm and are accordingly expected to act in ways
that maximize their (human) capital value, through entrepre-
neurialism, self-investment and/or attracting investors/networking
(Brown, 2015).
The notion of “putting life itself to work” was described by
Michel Foucault as biopower. Foucault was a professor at the
Coll ege de France from 1971 until 1984 when he died. The rules of
the Coll ege are that professors must annually deliver 26 h of public
lectures. The dominant theoretical perspective in this paper comes
from the lectures which Foucault gave for the year 1978/9 on the
birth of biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault begins to painstak-
ingly distinguish biopolitics from disciplinary power (Di Vittorio,
2005, 102e103; Reyes-Zaga, 2014). Foucault set out in the 1970s
what is nowblindingly obvious in 2015. Although it is impossible to
do justice to Foucault's extraordinarily prescient lectures, this pa-
per re-considers some of the key management control articles in
AOS through the theoretical lens of neo-liberalism presented in his
lectures. It is also impossible to do justice to every management
control paper published in AOS. On the premise that academic
research both re?ects and constitutes accounting practice, this re-
viewpaper aims to consider at a micro level the roles and processes
of, and the rhetoric behind, accounting's roles in displacing the
management function onto newly entrepreneurialised workers at
all levels of the organisation. It also considers howwork in AOS has
dealt with the impact of newly con?gured management control
technologies on the individual and the spaces for resistance. The
paper turns ?rst to Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics which
set out the rationalities of neoliberalism. While these rationalities
are important for the argumentation in this paper, the economic
context of neoliberalism (capitalism) cannot be ignored. Capitalism
dominates the human beings and human worlds it organises
(Brown, 2015).
1. Foucault's biopolitics and neo-liberalism
Neoliberalism is not stable or uni?ed. It ranges and changes
temporally and geographically and is still being made and remade.
The problem of de?ning neo-liberalism is not solved by Michel
Foucault's account of it. But Foucault's explanation of neo-
liberalism brackets it in a useful way. Foucault conceives neoliber-
alism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes
ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a
speci?c formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to
every dimension of human life (Brown, 2015). Brown (2015) notes
that this governing rationality involves what Caliskan and Callon
(2009, 2010) term the “economisation” of heretofore noneco-
nomic spheres and practices, a process of remaking the knowledge,
form, content, and conduct appropriate to these spheres and
practices. This economization of arenas previously considered as
inappropriate for marketization has been considered by academic
accounting research (for example Callon, 2009; Muniesa &
Linhardt, 2011; Poon, 2009; Samuel, Dirsmith, & McElroy, 2005)
but while the “market” term “human capital” appears fairly
frequently in AOS, it is analysed here as a very speci?c neo-liberal
concept.
1.1. Humans as human capital
Foucault's biopolitics, set out the neo-liberal mode of thought in
which humans are recon?gured from being waged employees to
entrepreneurs of the self. He states that neo-liberals argue that
although classical economists have always seen production as
depending on land, capital and labour, that labour has been left
either unexplored or dealt with in an abstract way.
3
Foucault dis-
cusses the attempts by Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker and Jacob
Mincer and other Rational Choice theorists to bring labour into the
?eld of economic analysis in a “non-abstract way”. To neo-liberals
work must be studied as economic conduct practiced, imple-
mented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works. The
worker is not present in economic analysis as an objectdthe object
of supply and demanddbut as an active economic subject. Foucault
(2010, pp 223/4) explains that neo-liberal mentality cannot see any
reason to work except to produce an income. In their analysis of
income neo-liberals refer to the (early twentieth century) de?ni-
tion, of Irving Fisher, who said that an income is simply the product
or return on a capital. Under neo-liberalism “Capital” has come to
mean a source of future income (Cooper, 2015). From the side of the
worker, labour is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to the
time which it is used. The neo-liberal understanding of a worker is a
conception of capital-ability which, according to diverse variables
receives a certain income so that the worker appears as an enter-
prise for herself. Neo-liberal human capital includes both genetic
and acquired elements. The genetic elements, akin to social Dar-
winism, are such that individuals achieve advantage over others as
the result of genetic or biological superiority; the acquired ele-
ments include education and other investments in the self.
Importantly, inequality, not equality, is the medium and relation of
competing capitals. When we are con?gured as human capital,
equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one
another (Brown, 2015). Humans lose their standing as being simply
valuable as humans.
Aside from representing humans as “naturally unequal”, the
neo-liberal vision of human capital further serves to distort a class
perspective. One of the social contradictions of neoliberalismis that
the majority are employees enot just human capital for themselves
but also for their employers and/or shareholders. Human capital is
at once in charge of itself, responsible for itself, yet an instru-
mentalizable and potentially dispensable element of the whole.
And when humans are cast as capital, labour disappears as a
category, as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic
basis for alienation, exploitation and association among labourers
(Brown, 2015, p 38). Moreover, the neo-liberal hyper-individualised
rationality serves to efface what Marx described as the forces and
relations of production e the capitalist class own the means of
production, while the majority can only survive by selling their
labour while the owners of the means of production pro?t from
their labour.
The neo-liberal conception of “entrepreneurs of the self” is one
in which human action is animated by rewards or future rewards.
Foucault (2010, p 270), makes the connection between this and the
work of behavioural psychologists like Skinner stating that “…you
can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of
techniques, those called behavioural techniques, which are
currently in fashion in the United States. You ?nd these methods in
3
Foucault argues that although Marx placed labour at the centre of his theo-
retical work, the American neo-liberals would see Marx's analysis as too “abstract”.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 15
their purest, most rigorous, strictest or aberrant forms, as you wish,
in Skinner, and precisely they do not consist in analysing the
meaning of different kinds of conduct, but simply in seeing how,
through mechanisms of reinforcement, a given play of stimuli entail
responses whose systematic nature can be observed and on the
basis of which other variables of behaviour can be introduced.”
1.2. The pursuit of individual wealth maximisation as a moral
practice
The neo-liberal understanding of humans as animated by in-
come is supplemented by the belief that individuals should strive to
maximize their individual wealth. Rather than seeing individual
wealth maximising behaviour as “greedy” e it is moral. This mo-
rality is based upon Adam Smith's invisible hand, which in a neo-
liberal grid means that humans maximise social wealth by max-
imising their own wealth. Foucault states (2010, p 277) that neo-
liberal rationality is that each person is dependent on an uncon-
trollable, unspeci?ed whole of the ?ow of things and the world. At
the same time, an individual's interest, without her knowing,
wishing, or being able to control it, is linked to a series of positive
effects which mean that everything which is to her advantage will
turn out to be to the advantage of others. What is usually stressed in
Smith's famous theory of the invisible hand is the existence of
something like providence which would tie together all the
dispersed threads. To Foucault (2010), invisibility is absolutely
indispensable to neo-liberal argumentation. Invisibility means that
no economic agent should try to pursue the “collective good”. Po-
litical power (the state) must not interfere with this dynamic
naturally inscribed in the heart of man. Under this mentality, the
state is accordingly prohibited from obstructing market mecha-
nisms, though, for example, the payment of unemployment bene-
?ts which would distort the ef?cient functioning of labour markets.
The neo-liberal “market” mentality suggests that the role of
competition as a disciplining device is reduced if the state pursues
social welfare policies.
4
Foucault argues that fromthe point of view
of the problem of power and of the legitimate exercise of power
homo œconomicus is radically new, although, over the last 40 years
this conceptualisation of humanity has gradually become doxic.
1.3. The accounting implications of the “entrepreneurialisation of
people”
The accounting implications of the “entrepreneurialisation of
people” are profound. As Brown (2015, p 36) explains, human
capital's “constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, intern-
ing, working, planning retirement, …, is to entrepreneurialize its
endeavours, appreciate its value, and increase its rating or ranking.
In this it mirrors the mandate for contemporary ?rms, countries,
academic departments or journals, universities, media or websites:
entrepreneurialize, enhance competitive positioning and value,
maximize ratings or rankings.” Neoliberalism transmogri?es hu-
manity according to a speci?c image of the economic. All conduct is
economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed by economic
terms and metrics (even when those spheres are not directly
monetized). Accordingly, accounting's ?nancial and non-?nancial
performance metrics, ratios, balanced-scorecards and other tech-
nologies, play a role in producing an account of the value of our
human capital, its ranking, position and so on. Froma managerialist
perspective accounting metrics hold the promise of an ability to
motivate, monitor and rank the endeavours of employees; under
neo-liberalism the targets of these metrics are not waged em-
ployees but income maximizing entrepreneurial units of human
capital.
How to make agents self-monitor and motivate is an enduring
management accounting concern (Herzberg, 1968). Baiman (1990)
notes that, agency theory states that, it is best if agents self-monitor
in the interests of the principal. It might seem as if accounting
metrics which give entrepreneurial human capital units informa-
tion about their performance rankings so that they can maximize
their current and/or future income may be a “solution” to this
persistent management problem. Indeed, agency theory's dualism
in which the principal is risk-neutral while agents are risk-averse
(and so not naturally entrepreneurial) is in some senses made
redundant by neo-liberal conceptions of agents. A feature of neo-
liberalism is that risk is pushed downwards to the most vulner-
able. However, when neo-liberal rationalities overlay the agency
perspective, risk-averse agents need to be both made to be more
entrepreneurial, and strictly controlled. After all, entrepreneur-
ialism may lead workers to act in ways which are inconsistent with
the needs of their employers. Paradoxically then, the neo-liberal
view of humanity may invoke more managerialism and tighter
management control systems. This would depend upon the power
of the groups involved. Work in AOS has rejected technological
determinism and economic imperatives as a satisfactory basis for
explaining changes in the modes of management control; ac-
counting controls are rooted in struggles as ?rms attempted to
control labour processes in various epochs of capitalistic develop-
ment (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991).
5
In spite of their differences,
neo-liberal rationality shares a similar methodology to work which
adopts the agency perspective.
From a methodological perspective, neo-liberal ideas epitomize
an extreme form of functionalism
6
eobjectivism/behaviourism.
Neo-liberal methodology articulates with functionalist research in
accounting which has an extremely high degree of commitment to
models and methods derived from natural science, have a strong
faith in markets, and adopt a Skinneristic atomised view of the
individual as responding re?exively to incentive and monitoring
schemes (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Hopper & Armstrong, 1991).
The ability to include performance metrics in, for example, per-
formance related pay contracts articulates well to functionalist
work's “Skinneristic” pre-occupation with the in?uence of incen-
tive and monitoring systems and contracts on the behaviour of
agents (Armstrong, 1991; Eisenhardt, 1985, 1988; Kosnick, 1987).
Research which adopted this functionalist methodology grew to
become the mainstream or orthodox during the life of AOS.
From its inception, AOS has published work from very different
methodological paradigms. It established a space in accounting for
non-orthodox (non-functionalist) perspectives to establish them-
selves so that their possibilities could be explored and understood.
AOS was a leader in publishing work (Armstrong, 1985, 1987; Miller
& O'Leary, 1987; Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Loft, 1986; Merino &
Neimark, 1982; Hopwood, 1987; Miller & Napier, 1993) which
differentiated itself from orthodox work which saw accounting
change as a process of technical elaboration and improvement. AOS
4
Baiman (1990) gives the example of “human capital” e a person with skills that
are needed in a particular organisation, who cannot be easily replaced e so can
demand higher wages from their employer. The corrective to this “market imper-
fection” would be unemployment (including unemployment of highly skilled
people) which would enable the market to function better.
5
The notion that searches for ef?ciency under the pressure of competitive
markets were the primary drive behind the development of capitalistic organisa-
tions and scienti?c management is highly contentious and has been strongly
disputed by historians and radical political economists (e.g Montgomery, 1979,
1987; Braverman, 1974; Clawson, 1980; Nelson, 1974).
6
Ontologically realist; epistemologically positivist; extremely deterministic;
methodologically nomothetic.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 16
showed how organisational accounts are actively constructed as a
powerful means for creating a particular economic visibility which
facilitated management control along economic lines (Cooper,
1980, 1981; Hopper, Cooper, Lowe, Capps, & Mouritsen, 1986;
Tinker, 1980; Tinker, Merino, & Neimark, 1982). Further, it
showed how accounting facts could be distanced from yet re?ect
the physical production processes (Cooper and Taylor, 2000; Miller
& Napier, 1993). Thus some of the early AOS work on management
control systems saw that although accounting functions in orga-
nisations, accounting is something which is best understood as in
the domain of the social rather than the narrowly organisational.
AOS discouraged academic sectarianism, and encouraged high-
quality dialogue and debate. There is a stream of management
control research within AOS much of which adopts a neo-
functionalist view that management control systems should
direct and motivate employees to act in accordance with organ-
isational strategy; if they fail to do so then accounting technologies
should be amended. This research is also concerned with the
relationship between management control technologies, organ-
isational performance and management satisfaction. Some of this
research's large data sets, help to enhance wider understandings of
the progressively increased use of and scope of management con-
trol systems under neo-liberalism frequently from a managerial
perspective. It also to some extent re?ects the development of neo-
liberal rationalities in the accounting literature. This more orthodox
stream of research will be considered next.
2. Contingency e linking strategy to control systems and
organisational performance
The contingency approach to the study of organisations came
into prominence during the 1970s. Organisational research on in-
dividual motivation, job satisfaction, leadership style, organisation
structure, technology and many other organisational variables was
interpreted within the context of a managerially oriented set of
propositions, which assert that the effective operation of an en-
terprise is dependent upon there being an appropriate ?t between
its internal organisation and the nature of the demands placed
upon it by its tasks, its environment and the needs of its members.
(Burrell and Morgan, 1979). A stream of work began in the 1970s in
AOS and continues to this day, adopts this approach, and is con-
cerned with whether or not a company's strategy or its value
drivers align with its management control systems (for example,
Chenhall, 2003; Chenhall & Lang?eld-Smith, 1998; Cadez &
Guilding, 2008; Dent, 1990; Dermer, 1990; Gerdin, 2005; Gerdin &
Greve, 2004, 2008; Haka, 1987; Hartmann & Moers, 1999; Henri,
2006; Ho, Wu, & Wu, 2014; Merchant, 1984; Otley, 1980; Perera,
Harrison, &Poole, 1997; Selto, Renner, &Young, 1995; Simons, 1987,
1990; Lang?eld-Smith, 1997). The early focus of this research was
on more senior management controls and their alignment with
strategy (Lang?eld-Smith, 1997; Simons, 1987). But gradually re-
?ected the trickle down of management control systems through
middle management (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991) to increasingly
lower levels of organisational hierarchies (e.g., Abernethy & Lillis,
1995; Abernethy & Brownell, 1997, 1999; Adler & Chen, 2011;
Bisbe & Otley, 2004; Davila, 2000; Davila, Foster, & Li, 2009;
Ditillo, 2004). This work also charts the introduction and imple-
mentation of newer accounting technologies (targeted more at
individuals) and mirrors the qualitative change in management
control which developed substantially during the life of AOS in both
the public and private sector (see for example, Grafton, Lillis, &
Widener, 2010; Habersam, Piber, & Skoog, 2013; Ho et al., 2014)
although, like neo-liberalism itself, there are cultural differences in
the rate of adoption of new management control systems (Jansen,
Merchant, & Van der Stede, 2009).
Research into the “linkages” between management control
systems, strategy and performance is mixed (Adler & Chen, 2011;
Ittner, Larcker, & Randall, 2003)). The work in AOS demonstrates
that while there may be the desire on the part of management to
produce (for example) pro?t maximisation or shareholder value
maximization (Chabrak, 2014), that management control systems
may produce unintended negative consequence (eg Simons, 1987;
Ittner & Larcker, 1997). Negative consequences are frequently
explained in functionalist terms e lack of alignment to strategy and
so on (Ittner & Larcker, 1997). Interestingly, Ittner and Larcker
(1997) speci?cally found that “employee empowerment” which
allows workers to become more entrepreneurial, form teams and
select projects without management approval, may prevent orga-
nizations from identifying and implementing those improvement
projects offering the highest potential contribution to overall
business performance.
2.1. A critical appraisal of the contingency work in AOS
The body of AOS work which adopts a contingency approach to
management control and/or measures the impact on organisational
performance, outlined here, on the whole, could be categorised by
Burrell and Morgan (1979) as belonging to the functionalist para-
digm which assumes continuing order and pattern and is geared
towards providing an explanation of “what is”. Newly introduced
accounting technologies are simply “taken-for-granted.” Research
in this paradigm is virtually silent on the impact of management
control on the well-being of the workforce. Although a variant of
this work built upon Cherns (1978) which was concerned about the
quality of working life. Cherns (1978) adopted the position that that
a more humane working situation is a functional imperative within
the context of the system as a whole. In its depiction of humanity,
the contingency work, while not adopting the language of workers
as entrepreneurs (although it does use “human capital”) does
contain some of neo-liberalisms rationalities. It is Skinneristic in
its treatment of human actors in its concern to ?nd the most ef?-
cient mechanisms to make humans achieve organisational goals.
Whether this is in a “humane” way (akin to Cherns, 1978) or
through the implementation of techniques with virtually no
concern about the impact on workers except in as much as they
ful?l organisational objectives.
Most contingency work adopts a regulative stance which is
concerned to make piecemeal adjustments and accepts the status
quo as given e there are no alternatives to neo-liberalism. Expla-
nation in functional theory is teleological in that functional prob-
lems are assumed to call forth their own solution, with no
explanation of howthis is actually accomplished (Armstrong, 1991).
Research with a very different methodology with respect to
management control, perhaps more associated with Burrell and
Morgan's sociology of radical change, featured heavily early in the
life of AOS. This work was clear that accounting re?ected and
served certain economic and political interests (for example,
Cooper & Sherer, 1984; Covaleski & Aiken, 1986; Hopper and
Armstrong, 1991; Lehman & Tinker, 1987; Neimark & Tinker,
1986; Toms, 2005; Tinker et al., 1982). Tinker et al., (1982) p 192,
stated that the “importance of giving due weight to the social
context of accounting becomes even more apparent if we recognize
that, to date, when accounting has affected the work-lives of em-
ployees, it has done so overwhelmingly on behalf of corporations
and employers. Budgeting, motivating, coordinating and planning
are methods for controlling the behaviour of people within orga-
nizations. The traditional areas of cost and management accounting
(together with more recent approaches based on industrial psy-
chology and organization theory) have escaped virtually Scot-free
from critical social appraisal.” In its insistence that it is important
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 17
to remember that on the whole, large corporations own the means
of production and so the majority work for someone else, this early
work provides a tool for “remembering” the importance of class in
the face of the seeming eradication of class relations by neo-liberal
rationalities.
Unlike the more functionalist work in AOS, it is important to the
labour process theorists that management power isn't simply taken
for granted. Armstrong (1991, p 6) argues that within “the capitalist
social relations of production, the most basic contradiction arises
because employers and managers are faced with the inescapable
problem of achieving co-operative activity by antagonistic means.
Because there is always a necessary element of voluntary activity in
any system of co-operation this contradiction can never be ?nally
overcome within capitalism.” This contradiction applies to man-
agement too, Armstrong (1991, p 7) argues, “individual managers
and “profession” groups may possess short-run interests which are
imperfectly aligned with, although not, of course, independent of,
those of capital ownership.” Nonetheless, it is the role of manage-
ment to continue to attempt to overcome these social
contradictions.
With the development of neo-liberalism, as re?ected in the AOS
contingency literature noted above, accounting has transformed
from cost accounting which was concerned with the calculation of
product costings for pricing policy rather than for example
manufacturing strategy (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991) towards
management accounting and more individualised “human ac-
counting” metrics. In effect there has been a shift towards man-
agement accounts targeted at the conduct of individuals rather
than (for example) pricing strategy, although this is still important.
AOS work which considers the shift in accounting from costing to
management control is considered next.
3. Control and “Normalisation” of entrepreneurial subjects e
the shift from cost to management accounting
AOS research provides some compelling albeit necessarily
incomplete explanations concerning accounting's role and power
in both individualising people and at the same time animating
them to “unwittingly collude with power”. Work in AOS and else-
where has been concerned with howindividuals seemto so readily
accept a reductionist numerical accounting vision of the self
(Collier, 2005; Dixon & Gaf?kin, 2014; Edgley, 2014; Farjaudon &
Morales, 2013; Hammond, Clayton, & Arnold, 2012; Lehman,
2013; Roberts, 2005; 2009; Upton & Arrington, 2012). In a histor-
ical analysis of the transformation of “cost accounting” into
“management accounting”, Miller and Napier (1993),
7
sets man-
agement accounting within a complex set of practices (IQ scores,
BMI indices, and so on) which place individuals within statistical
distributions, and measure and calibrate them according to norms.
Once (for example), a BMI score is taken to represent a very com-
plex human being, it is only a short step to accepting a management
control metric as representing the ranking and/or value of a human.
Numerical (and other) rankings are ubiquitous under neo-
liberalism. Fourcade and Healy (2013) argue that in the neoliberal
era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to
split and sort individuals into classi?cation situations that shape
life-chances. More recent work in AOS attests to the ubiquity of
performance measures (Dambrin & Robson, 2011; Artz, Homburg,
& Rajab, 2012).
In terms of the “power” of numerical metrics more generally,
Knights and Collinson (1987) identify the class-speci?c power of
accounting, by showing the disciplinary power of ?nancial ac-
counts over male manual workers. Financial numbers refer to an
economic reality to which male manual workers are especially
sensitive and vulnerable. Although workers resisted psychological
discipline from human resources managers, workers self-subjected
to the numbers, as they share materialist and unambiguous char-
acteristics with them.
There is an emotional edge to accounting which is seldom
recognised (Boedker & Chua, 2013). Some of the most powerful
work in AOS, which considers the potent impact of performance
metrics on individual angst and emotions, draws from Lacanian
psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1979). Lacan's human subject is an
anxious one with imaginary relations and an empty core, whose
continuing and overwhelming desire is for “con?rmation of
selfhood”. Unfortunately, nothing can ever truly satisfy this
desire because recognition from others is always ?eeting and
temporary. A Lacanian insight into the implications of the
atomised reductionist management accounting ?eld of vision, is
that accounting metrics become mirrors in which individual
humans are re?ected. Management accounting constructs a ?eld
of visibility through which individuals and/or groups can be
made visible and accordingly compared, differentiated, hierar-
chized, homogenized and/or excluded/?red (Roberts, 2005). Ac-
cording to Lacanian theory individuals have a preoccupation with
how they are seen and judged and this preoccupation is intensely
individualising. Numerical metrics can offer the hope of ful?lling
our overwhelming desire for re?ection (I would kill to achieve
the illusive “10” rating). Accounting can set standards and mea-
sures which tell us what is normal, re?ect us, measure us, aim to
embed social hierarchies and understandings within us, make us
fearful, direct our efforts and offer the hope of ful?lling our
insatiable desire for re?ection and to control. The effects of ac-
counting control systems are dependent upon the context in
which they operate. Identi?cation collapses the space for resis-
tance for it is through such identi?cation that we inscribe the
power relation within the self (Roberts, 2005). Although resis-
tance is integral to this process, in part through the felt necessity
to defend our imagined autonomy against the intrusion of others
such resistance can take the form of what
Zizek (2000, p 252)
calls a 'deadly mutual embrace' that binds me ever more tightly
to that which I resist (Roberts, 2005).
Aside from its explanation of how accounting metrics come to
have an extreme impact on those subjected to them, Lacan offers a
further insight into management control from the perspective of
those with organizational superiority over others. The Lacanian
subject is desperate to control or at least to feel in control. Lacan
suggests that this kind of desire is what Freud was trying to grasp in
the concept of death drive, the drive towards negativity (Cooper,
1992). While management control systems will never be able to
satisfy the desire for “con?rmation of selfhood” or to make us feel
completely in control, increasingly sophisticated management
control systems are incredibly seductive in that they continually
offer the promise of complete control. This understanding re?ects
some of the contingency work's ?nding that management are
satis?ed with performance management systems (Chenhall &
Lang?eld-Smith, 1998; Govindarajan, 1988; Govindarajan &
Gupta, 1985; Ittner & Larcker, 1997; Shields & Shields, 1998). This
appears to be the case except when managers are subject to them
(Ittner & Larcker, 1997).
7
Interestingly, Miller and Napier (1993), charts another important change which
occurred after the UK Conservative government election in 1979. Up until this point,
there was some momentum behind the production of “value added statements”
which portrayed three constituents in the construction of value e capital, labour
and the state. After 1979, these three arenas were abruptly transformed. In
particular, state rhetoric was that the state should shrink, and accordingly not
“interfere” in the economic. And the terms on which industrial relations were to be
operated were fundamentally and painfully altered according to the neo-liberal
rationality that nothing should be allowed to interfere in markets.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 18
3.1. Summary
This section draws from work which describes the complex,
seductive and potentially destructive relationship between man-
agement control information and human-beings. Lacanian theory
provides an explanation of the power of management control
technologies that differs from versions of disciplinary power that
rely upon discourse to describe the ways in which power is
constitutive of subjectivity (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Grant,
Keenoy, & and Oswick, 1998; Hardy, Palmer, & Philips, 2000). In
this, the Lacanian work provides an important addition to Fou-
cault's conception of the construction of the entrepreneurial sub-
ject. Individualised metrics will be more powerful in a society
obsessed by rankings, individual accomplishment and entrepre-
neurialism. It is therefore essential when trying to understand the
practices of accounting in a neo-liberal world to investigate the
operation of accounting at the level of practice. There are many
ways in which humans might react to different management con-
trol systems in different organisational, political and economic
contexts. The next section accordingly considers the insights
derived from some of the key research into the practice of man-
agement control published in AOS.
4. Accounting in practice
One of the key AOS articles which presented a longitudinal case
analysis of a company which attempted to make its workers more
entrepreneurial is Miller and O'Leary (1994). This section pays
particular attention to this case and other cases which consider
management accounting practice. In particular it considers the
relationship between the constitution of subjectivity and the eco-
nomic system. With regards to the economic, it teases out some of
the social contradictions of neo-liberalism exposed by the work in
AOS.
4.1. Caterpillar
Miller and O'Leary (1994) present a case study which sets out
the endeavour to reconstruct workers as entrepreneurial units of
human capital (albeit in embryonic form in the guise of “economic
citizens”) in the Decatur plant of US multinational Caterpillar in
their “Plant With a Future (PWAF) programme. The workforce/new
economic citizens
8
were to be empowered/entrpreneurialised so as
to be able to confront the exigencies of global competition in a
direct mediated and personal fashion. The vision presented in
Miller and O'Leary (1994) is optimistic and very much in line with
what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue is the “new spirit of
capitalism” in which capitalism recognises that it will face
increasing problems unless it provides some grounds for hope to
those whose engagement is needed for the system to operate. The
“hope” was that the changes would create a “virtuous circle”
aligning changing work practices and management control systems
to improve both the pro?tability of Caterpillar and the global
competitiveness of the region and the nation. For many of the
workforce, the hope was to preserve their jobs.
The Caterpillar case sets out howthe physical recon?guration of
the factory and the formation of new manufacturing cells/modules
were important for the “creation of entrepreneurs”. The new cells/
modules were to be understood as small businesses or spaces for
collective entrepreneurship by their workers (cell proprietors).
Caterpillar management put forward a case to the workforce that
their US production facilities' costs were too high and so each cell
would be provided with information to enable it to compare its
individual component costs with those of its main competitor
(Komatsu). What might previously have been described as man-
agement concerns (foreign exchange exposure and so on) were
transferred to the workforce. Cost cutting targets were to become
essential benchmarks of performance. A cost measurement mech-
anism was devised to disentangle “permanent” cost reductions
from the effects of in?ation, currency ?uctuations, and shifts in
volume and mix of output. Miller and O'Leary (p 26) explain the
managerial position that whilst, “the Executive Of?ces might pro-
pose plans and coordinate results, according to Executive Vice
President Schlegel, they would not “dictate to operating units the
method for reducing costs”. Means of accomplishment would and
should “originate within each individual organization.”
Miller and O'Leary (1994) adds important contextual detail on
how different forms of knowledge and practice make “the
governable person” possible (Miller & O'Leary, 1987). The case
demonstrates the multiple agents involved in the neo-liberal
project of entrepreneurialising workers. The agents included
management consulting organisations, trade unions, and the state.
The broader context, would from today's perspective, be described
as deindustrialisation (although see Clarida & Hickok, 1993)
?nancialisation (see for example, Bay, Catasús, & Johed, 2014;
Cooper, 2015; Zhang & Andrew, 2014), and the widespread adop-
tion of ?nancial economic rationalities (Gu enin-Paracini &
Gendron, 2010). There was a stated “economic imperative”
behind the changes e both the US government and Caterpillar
expressed concern about falling pro?ts and threats from Japanese
manufacturing which were seen to be exacerbated by a strong
dollar. The “threat fromJapan” has been noted by other AOS writers
(for example, Armstrong, 1991; Dent, 1990; Ittner & Larcker, 1997)
as a rationale for accounting change. It has been suggested that
crises (manufactured and real) have been used to bring about neo-
liberal changes (Klein, 2007; Mirowski, 2013) or at least, to intro-
duce neo-liberal reforms more quickly.
The Caterpillar case brought into focus two important debates
(inaccurately) characterised as a debate between “the Marxists and
the Foucauldians/postmodernists” which raged within the aca-
demic community during the 1990s (see for example, Armstrong,
1994; Marsden, 1998; Neimark, 1990, 1994). One of the issues at
stake was the extent to which identities (selves, subjectivities) are
discursively constituted (Armstrong, 2006, 2015). The other con-
cerned the emphasis which should be placed on the role of the
economic system and the sources of power. The two are dialecti-
cally related (Arnold, 1998; Froud, Williams, Haslam, Johal, &
Williams, 1998).
The extent to which accounting knowledge can produce
altered subjectivities is an issue which is worthy of future research
(see Armstrong, 2015). Alvesson and Karreman (2004) argue that
it is important to investigate how subjectivity is formed “empir-
ically”.
9
Along similar lines, Arnold (1998) was concerned with the
point of viewof the shop?oor workers in the Caterpillar case, who
in her account were very sceptical of and resistant to the man-
agement rhetoric of empowerment and economic citizenship. The
subjective responses of the Caterpillar workers to the programme
8
Miller and O'Leary (1994, p 18) state that given “appropriate regulatory in-
stitutions, shop-?oor workers, supervisors and middle-managers can become new
kinds of economic actors with the advent of advanced, ?exible production.”
9
Froud et al. (1998) were, to some extent, also concerned with the construction
of entrepreneurial subjects noting the role of some of Miller and O'Leary's (1994)
sources (for example Reich, 1991; Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1991; Piore & Sabel,
1984; Hirst & Zeitlin, 1989) as promoters of the types of management technolo-
gies adopted by Caterpillar. They too, saw the economic as an important animator
in the case.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 19
to make them more entrepreneurial were produced in the context
of Caterpillar's cumulative $1bn losses over the past three years
and an implicit threat of more job losses. The company had closed
six US plants, reducing the headcount of hourly paid workers by
44% and that of salaried staffs by 26% (Armstrong, 2006). Arnold's
(1998) Caterpillar staff interviews indicate that the workers were
far more conscious of and in?uenced by the material threats of job
loss and promises of job security than they were by abstract no-
tions of workplace autonomy and self-actualization promised by
the spatial reorganization of the plant into modular cells; the
workers experienced the contradiction between the rhetoric of
empowerment/entrepreneurialism and the insecurity they felt
about their and their children's future. The Caterpillar case poses a
question regarding the extent to which accounting technologies
can impact upon the constitution of subjectivity. Arnold (1998)
strongly suggests that the creation of human capital entrepre-
neurial subjects involves a whole lot more than managerial con-
trol system changes.
One of the concerns of Ahrens and Chapman (2007) study of a
restaurant business is to discover the methods used to enable
entrepreneurial behaviour on the part of the restaurant managers.
It was noted that head of?ce managers were sensitive to the ben-
e?ts of an approach to management control that sought to reckon
with the intelligence of managersdto enable them to act as en-
trepreneurs. Ahrens and Chapman (2007) sees the subjectivities of
the employees as changing through the construction of arrays of
activity by area managers that incorporate corporate objectives
with the restaurant managers' personal understandings. This
research did not see individuals as being “captured” by the per-
formance metrics. Rather, that by actively working with other
organisational members, the metrics were drawn upon in order to
establish a shared understanding of what it meant to do well. For
the neo-liberal entrepreneurial subject, the meaning of doing well
is to maximize returns on their human capital. With this under-
standing the restaurant case reveals the contradiction that entre-
preneurial subjects can be entrepreneurial for themselves (against
the interests of their employer). Ahrens and Chapman (2007) noted
that very good chefs could extract high salaries from their restau-
rant managers, just as commercially successful restaurant man-
agers could attain legendary status even if there was widely shared,
but unproven, suspicion that they ‘‘ripped off the company’’ by
keeping a share of the revenues to themselves. Perhaps this was a
price the restaurant company was prepared to pay for innovative,
pro?table staff.
The second debate invoked by the Caterpillar case e the
importance of the “economic system” e cannot be ignored. This
is not “dogma” e it is the contention here that capitalism shapes
the world. There are imperatives that issue from the systemic
drives of capitalism including the imperatives of cheapening la-
bour, expanding markets, economic growth, and constant reno-
vations in production to generate pro?t, and so forth. As Brown
(2015) cogently argues, if capitalism is omitted in any social
analysis, it will not be possible to grasp the intricate dynamics
between political rationality and the economic constraints, and it
will be impossible to grasp the extent and depth of neo-
liberalism's power in making this world and unfreedom within it.
With respect to the Caterpillar case, Arnold (1998) argued that by
abandoning historical materialism accounting research would
lose its ability to confront the problems posed by capitalism.
While Froud et al. (1998)’s re?ection on the Caterpillar case
maintained an understanding of the importance of pro?tability
by arguing that the ?rst material legacy of the changes at
Caterpillar was a modest increase in outsourcing, this was fol-
lowed by massive reinvestment which left Caterpillar with re-
equipped factories that could not work pro?tably under
existing labour contracts
10
. The drives of capitalism do not
negate the importance of understanding the neo-liberal
conception of humans as entrepreneurial capital units, but, any
analysis of the rationalities of neo-liberalism need to be set
within the context of the imperatives of capitalism.
The Caterpillar case demonstrates the social contradictions
brought about by the drive to entrepreneurialize staff while at the
same time needing to control them. Although individual work
groups met regularly with management to share ideas about how
to make things more cheaply and quickly, the workforce did not
staff the planning departments nor make strategic decisions. One
worker reported that after working hard to ?nd ways to produce a
particular component as cheaply as possible “… ?nally the com-
pany admitted to us, when we really pinned them down … they
said, well, the truth of the matter is that we need the space ewe are
moving something else into that area and if you could do it for free,
we'd still have to send it out” (Arnold, 1998, p 677). This one small
episode re?ects the complex and contradictory nature of manage-
ment control technologies targeted at entrepreneurial subjects.
4.2. The complexity and contradictions of management control
technologies in practice
Other work in AOS has emphasised that in spite of the change in
the targets of management control systems (towards individuals
and teams), there remains the need for management to maintain its
control over both labour productivity and costs. Briers and Chua
(2001) study of an Australian Aluminium Company demonstrates
how the company management came under the sway of an inter-
national consulting ?rm and Australian state initiatives to
“modernise” by acquiring an ABC system. It sets out a fascinating
picture of management as a semi chaotic and complex process. Two
features seemto dominate the case, the ?rst was the overwhelming
desire by management “to ?nd the facts” and secondly (and
materially), that the rationality behind ABC's acceptance was
contingent on the ?gures it produced (whether correct or not)
making the recommendation for the discontinuance of a recalci-
trant machine. In short, acceptance of ABC depended upon it pro-
ducing ?gures to support desired decisions.
The acquisition of the ABC system took place amid the Austra-
lian state promotion of ‘performance enhancing’ techniques like
JIT/TQM. One industrial engineer stated that the real driver behind
the introduction of these new techniques was cycle time e a
euphemism for work intensi?cation (Green & Yanarella, 1996).
Throughout the paper we can see seeds and re?ections of an in-
crease in individual worker accounting controls e described in the
case as “prompt and reliable people related information” (including
the incurrence of sick leave). While Briers and Chua's (2001) study
is seemly concerned with the acquisition of new management ac-
counting technology (an ABC system), it appears that the man-
agement were concerned more with “old fashioned” cost control,
and valorisation of labour than with reconstructing the sub-
jectivities of the workforce.
Although Johnson and Kaplan (1987) argue the case for more
accurate accounting information (through ABC), Hopper and
Armstrong (1991) counter that if management is taken to be
about the control of labour and of junior managers, the issue is
10
Arnold (1998) notes that the economic context is used both to invoke co-
operation as well as being used coercively. Arnold, 1998, p 674 states that “ … ,
labour must concede ?exibility in order to prevent capital ?ight. Thus, union-
management cooperation programs and concession bargaining represent two
faces of the same factory regime; a regime that is built not only on consent, as
emphasized in Miller and O'Leary's notion of “economic citizenship,” but equally on
concession bargaining or, as Burawoy (1985, p. 127) terms it, “consent to sacri?ce.””
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 20
more complex. This is not to argue that “accurate costs” are not
important to management but that, management accounting in-
formation is to be judged by the results which it achieves, rather
than its notional accuracy. For example, the classical literature on
the behavioural aspects of budgets (e.g. Caplan, 1971) discusses the
effects of setting targets at various levels of dif?culty, not whether
these levels are “correct” in some essential sense. Thus, the accu-
racy of budgets and internal attributions of cost might be regarded
as irrelevant, so long as they serve to focus managerial effort in the
directions desired by those who control the organisation. This
resonates with Alvesson and Karreman (2004) whose case study of
a global consulting ?rm (Global) found that managers insisted that
staff report working for 8 h a day irrespective of the number of
additional hours they work. This was because labour-hours is an
important constituent of a key ratio by which management was
judged e the project margin. In spite of a key component of the
information system being entirely wrong, the management control
system in this company “worked” (for shareholders and senior
management) in the sense that for many staff, 70 h weeks were the
norm. In some ways this is indicative of strongly neo-liberal ra-
tionality. While under liberalism labour was a commodity to be
purchased by the hour, under neo-liberalism, staff are human
capital units who provide a service and receive an income.
Alvesson and Karreman (2004) argue that almost all control
practices in Global include aspects of cultural engineering more or
less geared towards the subjectivities of the staff. The control sys-
tems take many different forms and are both ?nancial and non-
?nancial. Socio-ideological controls feature strongly. From the
theoretical perspective of bio-politics, Global's socio-ideological
controls would have been enhanced by neo-liberalism's entrepre-
neurial rationalities. Employees in the study expressed a strong
desire to succeed. The idea of being successful in a certain way is an
outcome of social processes which extends beyond the boundaries of
individual organisations. In Global, success is equated with promo-
tion speed, ranking, job titles, monetary and rewards; each of these
could be seen as Lacanian mirrors. Work in AOS (Roberts, 1990, 1991,
2009) suggests that people are animated to maintain and enhance
their self-esteemand their sense of security and this can be exploited
by forms of power which offer control as a sense of security.
The AOS work in this section presents a complex picture of at-
tempts by management to organize and control labour and un-
derstand the costs of their activities. These management concerns
might have led companies (on the advice of consultants) to adopt
new technical forms of accounting and control systems but the
concerns of management and the contradictions of capitalism
remain substantively the same as when AOS began 40 years' ago.
Although Caterpillar management claimed that it would not dictate
to cells the method for reducing costs; nonetheless, the workforce
did not have the option but to try to reduce costs. Attempts by
management to deliver value by exploiting the skill and expertise of
its workforce in the work discussed here (particularly Ahrens &
Chapman, 2007; Miller & O'Leary, 1994) echoes scienti?c man-
agement's appropriation of worker knowledge. What is clear from
the AOS work discussed in this section is that management ac-
counting control systems act upon many workers intensively and
continuously. This re?ects critical HR research what has found that
organisational life for many is dominated by an unprecedented
micro-measurement and management of individual performance
(see for example, Carter et al., 2013; Scholarios & Taylor, 2014;
Stewart et al., 2010). Controls aimed at changing the subjectivity
of workers have been adopted unevenly
11
and their success at
doing so remains an open question. Resistance to entrepreneur-
ialism is discussed further in the next section.
5. Resistance to neo-liberalism
Employees from many different industries and organisational
levels, who are increasingly harangued to be “more entrepre-
neurial” (eg academics now have to raise funding, sell knowledge,
deliver conferences, improve their personal ranking and so on)
while at the same time subjected to increasingly detailed control
systems, are ?nding work, if not a living death, a cause of anxiety/
stress. The academic literature offers few avenues of resistance.
Arnold (1998) notes the importance of trade unions and commu-
nity in resisting the pressure of neo-liberalism, while other work
attacks and lays-bare neo-liberalisms rationalities. This stream of
work in AOS will be considered ?rst.
5.1. The feminine and sexuality
Shearer and Arrington (1993), drawing from the work of Luce
Irigaray and her feminist deconstruction of Freudian and Lacanian
work, while not speci?cally addressing biopolitics, drives a critical
wedge into its rationalities, by suggesting that entreprenuerialism
is masculine and animated by phallic desire (Burrell, 1987,
12
;
Cooper, 1992). Irigaray reads Western sexuality, economics and
politics as beginning with some notion of desire. To her, according
to Western rationalities all desire is reduced to a singularity e
phallic desire (for example under neo-liberalism, we all deemed to
have the same single desire e to maximize returns on ourselves)
and so society is reducible to a linear aggregation of humans with
the same desire. What Irigaray challenges is the way in which the
phallocratic character of both sexuality and economics, excludes
from view the possibility of a multiplicity of desires and values
(sexual desire as something other than penile/phallic desire and
economics as something other than appropriative self-interest).
Shearer and Arrington (1993) argue that inasmuch as accounting
is discourse, an enactment of a particular language of economic
activity, it codi?es and orchestrates economic participation in
accordance with a telos that governs the place of participants in the
economy.
Shearer and Arrington (1993) argue that the “erasure” of hu-
manity is explained by Marxist theory e the value of the thing-in-
itself is liquidated through a singular telos of its value in exchange,
exchange for capital. They go on to state (p263/4), “To be in the
economy is to subject one's self to the grammar of accounting, …It
is to be assigned a role as inscribed within the numbers, norms and
variances of accounting, to be marked as ef?cient or inef?cient, as
acceptable or deviant …which always, without exception, takes as
its telos the ef?cient exchange of the self for capital.” Thus Shearer
and Arrington (1993) set out an understanding of accounting as an
objecti?er of humanity. To objectify a human being in the name of
teleology (ef?ciency, pro?t etc), is to presume that human value
and desirability is enhanced when it takes a form other than its
own. According to the teleology of neo-liberalism, humans are
valuable if they earn the maximum return on themselves e if they
are not productive (in a very speci?c sense of the word), they are
not valuable. A human being is no longer the subject of her own
value or her own desires. She is an object of the telos presumed to
govern her from outside of herself. Resistance means rejecting this
11
See for example Taylor (2013) which argues the performance management
systems have been implemented with particular robustness in the ?nance industry.
12
Burrell (1987) saw accounting and sexuality as being diametrically opposed.
Taking a broader view of management control, Burrell saw the accounting of time
and of the body as the suppression and repression of (sexual) interrelationships
which threaten rational-calculative techniques.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 21
telos and embracing the rich life-af?rming ?ows of multiplicity.
Shearer and Arrington (1993) proposes that our bodies are not
human capital e they are multiple sites of pleasure.
In a similar vein, Roberts (2005) offers the insight that when
confronted by performance metrics, one should not fall into the
Lacanian mirror but remember that we are not our performance
metrics e we are much more complex and wonderful than the
ludicrous, impoverished re?ection which they offer. Roberts (1990,
1991) suggests that socialising (rather than hierarchical) account-
ability offers a more complete recognition of self. Roberts (1991, p
363), states that there is “a form of organizational talk which
constantly threatens to dissolve the preoccupation with the
objective boundaries of self which hierarchical accountability en-
courages, and instead offers a con?rmation of self as active subject,
different from yet in a relation of interdependence on others.”
Arnold (1998) sees trade unions as an important socialising conduit
for the resistance of neo-liberal rationalities.
5.2. Trade unions and material circumstances
Arnold (1998, p 678) argues, that people “not only re?ect, un-
derstand and interpret their situations in terms of traditions and
class solidarities, they also integrate their experiences at work into
other aspects of their personal lives as parents, family, and com-
munity members”. In a similar vein, Ezzamel, Willmott, and
Worthington (2004) highlight the importance of employees in
shaping the production process. Armstrong (1994) notes that
research (eg Nichols & Beynon, 1977; Burawoy, 1979) has shown
very little sign of the supposed saturation on workers' conscious-
ness by the discourse and practices of disciplinary power. Workers
have always created their own language, rhetoric, and symbols,
often appropriating the management vocabularies, subverting
meanings, and adding irony and sarcasm. So, for example, in the
Caterpillar case, the “Plant With a Future” (PWAF) was dubbed the
“Plant with a Fence” to denote the security-fence erected around
the plant to protect it from protests. The union-management-
cooperation-program, “Employee Satisfaction Process” (ESP), con-
verted to “Easily Suckered People.” Caterpillar's listing of protected
jobs, -“secured employee list” became the “shrinking employee
list”.
13
6. Conclusion
The neo-liberal vision of humanity as individual enterprise units
whose sole value is in their ability to produce an income stream is
horri?c. This is a vision in which our most human characteristics
(empathy, compassion, sexuality, and so on) are not considered to
be valuable unless someone is willing to pay for them. Humans lose
their standing as simply being valuable as humans who should be
granted equal rights and respect. It is not suggested here that the
neo-liberal view perspective is universally shared, internalised or
indeed adopted; the neo-liberal project is incomplete and profound
social understandings are slow to change. However, it is a ratio-
nality which a range of powerful institutions are working very hard
to promote, sell and use. The neo-liberal rationality that the state
should not pursue social welfare policies means that many citizens
are being left without social support and this brings a material force
to attempts to create more entrepreneurial subjects. In accounting,
new management control strategies and technologies are being
developed (Davila et al., 2009), sold and adopted on the basis that
they facilitate “undeniably moral” entrepreneurialism among staff.
This may be described at the ultimate neo-liberal moment in which
organisations use the rhetoric of ethical business while their
workforce suffer from increased workloads, intense work mea-
surement, unprecedented discipline, stress and the fear of
“managed exit” (Cederstrom & Fleming, 2012; Malsch, 2013).
The work in AOS reviewed here has done an outstanding job in
charting accounting changes from systems concerned with costs to
ones oriented towards micro-measurement, micro management,
ratings, rankings and scores. It highlights the roles of management
consultants in selling and globally dispersing control technologies;
the role of the state in promoting the technologies and rationalities
of neo-liberalism; the role of agency theory and its relationship to
control systems; the possibilities for different forms of resistance;
the contradictions of capitalism and its antagonistic nature which
no management control system can overcome; the ?eeting satis-
factions which management control systems can give to managers;
and howmanagement control systems can individualise and create
anxiety.
In order for AOS to continue toful?l its aimto be “concernedwith
all aspects of the relationship between accounting and human
behaviour, organizational structures and processes, and the chang-
ing social and political environment of the enterprise”, there is a
need for more research which considers the perspective of em-
ployees at all levels of the organisational hierarchy. Future research
should be mindful of the gender, race, sexuality and age related
concerns associated with the impact of management control; all of
these are disappointingly absent fromAOS thus far. There is little in
AOS which sees work as the “living death” described so powerfully
by Cederstrom and Fleming (2012). In this respect too it would be
wonderful tohavemorecasestudies whichempathisewithhumans,
insteadof seeingthemas targets of various forms of stimuli designed
to make themworkharder. It is also essential that AOS researchdoes
not accept the status quo as given, and continues to question the
legitimacy of the power and takes class as the analytic basis for
alienation and exploitation.
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doc_494911710.pdf
This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the
theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault
analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of
biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late
1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015 e the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains
which were previously thought to be “non-economic”, specifically, and for the purposes of this paper, to
human-beings.
Entrepreneurs of the self: The development of management control
since 1976
Christine Cooper
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G4 0LN, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 7 August 2015
Accepted 20 October 2015
Available online 21 November 2015
a b s t r a c t
This review article considers some of the key management control articles published in AOS through the
theoretical lens of Foucault's 1978/9 lectures on neo-liberalism and biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault
analyses the shift from classical liberalism to what he describes as American neo-liberalism, the birth of
biopolitics and the understanding of humans as entrepreneurs of the self. Foucault set out in the late
1970s what is now strikingly apparent in 2015 e the spread of neo-liberalism universally to domains
which were previously thought to be “non-economic”, speci?cally, and for the purposes of this paper, to
human-beings.
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Since AOS's inauguration in 1976, accounting, organisations and
society have each undergone signi?cant changes. AOS began at the
tail end of Fordism and the early days of the neo-liberal revolu-
tionary era. During AOS's lifetime, various forms of neo-liberalism
have become ubiquitous, and the economic elites so powerful,
that capitalism has followed a path of increasing economic, politi-
cal, and cultural domination, arguably, to the point that, today, it
controls the most intimate strands of every living body in all cor-
ners of the world (Hardt & Negri, 2001). The injurious effects of
neo-liberalism e intensi?ed inequality (Piketty, 2014), the unethi-
cal commercialization of arenas previously considered inappro-
priate for marketization (for example Cooper &Taylor, 2005; Taylor
& Cooper, 2008), and the economic havoc unleashed on the econ-
omy by the ascendance and liberty of ?nance capital (Brown, 2015;
Cooper, 2015), have been widely analysed. The concern of this pa-
per is with the management control literature in AOS, and more
speci?cally with AOS's re?ection of management control's role as a
portal and/or agent for the globally ubiquitous spread of neo-
liberalism and particularly on its consequent impact on many
employees, which, as will be argued in the paper, have been pro-
found and deleterious.
In a powerful account of work in the neo-liberal era, Cederstrom
and Fleming (2012) argue that, in a wide range of occupations, both
at the top and the bottom of organisational hierarchies, work is
experienced as a “living death”. The majority work for longer hours,
less pay, fewer bene?ts, less security, and less promise of
retirement and upward mobility (Brown, 2015). But there is
something deeper at play. Neo-liberal mentality has recon?gured
humans from being waged/salaried employees to human capital
eentrepreneurs of the self (Foucault, 2010). In a sense, life itself has
been put to work
1
e our sociality, imagination, resourcefulness, and
our desire to learn and share ideas. Corporations increasingly strive
to harness these very human characteristics to drive value but neo-
liberal subjects have a hyper individualised expectation placed
upon them to maximise returns on themselves. In practice, the
majority have both a boss who gives orders, and an overwhelming
management control systemto deal with.
2
It could be that this dual
(and contradictory) pressure, to be entrepreneurial while also be-
ing closely controlled, is at least part of the reason behind the
anguish suffered across all organisational levels described by
Cederstrom and Fleming (2012). This is overlaid by the material
conditions of exploitation (O'Doherty & Willmott, 2002), perfor-
mance related pay, zero-hour contracts, falling real wages, the
removal of state safety nets and so on.
Accounting can serve as a crucial technology of neo-liberalism
(see for example, Arnold, 2009; Arnold, 2012; Covaleski, Dirsmith,
& Weiss, 2013; Jupe, 2012). It enables the rationalities of neo-
liberalism to pass through and thereby transform the
E-mail address: [email protected].
1
This is biopolitics.
2
Under Fordismworkers could mentally tell the boss to “fuck off” as they left the
factory. Turning-off is no longer an available option e 40 years ago weekends and
leisure time were still relatively untouched, now the majority take work home with
them (Cederstrom & Fleming, 2012).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j ournal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aoshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2015.10.004
0361-3682/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24
organisation and create new organisational practices (Hopwood,
1987) targeted at the workforce. Management control systems
play an important role in controlling and providing individualised
ranking of “entrepreneurs of the self” as well as providing the
technologies which create the growing divisions in wealth and
income.
In the transition from Fordism to neo-liberalism, there are ac-
counting continuities and discontinuities; management control
continues with the roles it played under Fordism (control, indi-
vidualisation, providing costing information and so on); but some
of its technologies are newand importantly constitute subjects in a
very different way. Under neoliberalism people are construed on
the model of the ?rm and are accordingly expected to act in ways
that maximize their (human) capital value, through entrepre-
neurialism, self-investment and/or attracting investors/networking
(Brown, 2015).
The notion of “putting life itself to work” was described by
Michel Foucault as biopower. Foucault was a professor at the
Coll ege de France from 1971 until 1984 when he died. The rules of
the Coll ege are that professors must annually deliver 26 h of public
lectures. The dominant theoretical perspective in this paper comes
from the lectures which Foucault gave for the year 1978/9 on the
birth of biopolitics. In these lectures Foucault begins to painstak-
ingly distinguish biopolitics from disciplinary power (Di Vittorio,
2005, 102e103; Reyes-Zaga, 2014). Foucault set out in the 1970s
what is nowblindingly obvious in 2015. Although it is impossible to
do justice to Foucault's extraordinarily prescient lectures, this pa-
per re-considers some of the key management control articles in
AOS through the theoretical lens of neo-liberalism presented in his
lectures. It is also impossible to do justice to every management
control paper published in AOS. On the premise that academic
research both re?ects and constitutes accounting practice, this re-
viewpaper aims to consider at a micro level the roles and processes
of, and the rhetoric behind, accounting's roles in displacing the
management function onto newly entrepreneurialised workers at
all levels of the organisation. It also considers howwork in AOS has
dealt with the impact of newly con?gured management control
technologies on the individual and the spaces for resistance. The
paper turns ?rst to Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics which
set out the rationalities of neoliberalism. While these rationalities
are important for the argumentation in this paper, the economic
context of neoliberalism (capitalism) cannot be ignored. Capitalism
dominates the human beings and human worlds it organises
(Brown, 2015).
1. Foucault's biopolitics and neo-liberalism
Neoliberalism is not stable or uni?ed. It ranges and changes
temporally and geographically and is still being made and remade.
The problem of de?ning neo-liberalism is not solved by Michel
Foucault's account of it. But Foucault's explanation of neo-
liberalism brackets it in a useful way. Foucault conceives neoliber-
alism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes
ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a
speci?c formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to
every dimension of human life (Brown, 2015). Brown (2015) notes
that this governing rationality involves what Caliskan and Callon
(2009, 2010) term the “economisation” of heretofore noneco-
nomic spheres and practices, a process of remaking the knowledge,
form, content, and conduct appropriate to these spheres and
practices. This economization of arenas previously considered as
inappropriate for marketization has been considered by academic
accounting research (for example Callon, 2009; Muniesa &
Linhardt, 2011; Poon, 2009; Samuel, Dirsmith, & McElroy, 2005)
but while the “market” term “human capital” appears fairly
frequently in AOS, it is analysed here as a very speci?c neo-liberal
concept.
1.1. Humans as human capital
Foucault's biopolitics, set out the neo-liberal mode of thought in
which humans are recon?gured from being waged employees to
entrepreneurs of the self. He states that neo-liberals argue that
although classical economists have always seen production as
depending on land, capital and labour, that labour has been left
either unexplored or dealt with in an abstract way.
3
Foucault dis-
cusses the attempts by Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker and Jacob
Mincer and other Rational Choice theorists to bring labour into the
?eld of economic analysis in a “non-abstract way”. To neo-liberals
work must be studied as economic conduct practiced, imple-
mented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works. The
worker is not present in economic analysis as an objectdthe object
of supply and demanddbut as an active economic subject. Foucault
(2010, pp 223/4) explains that neo-liberal mentality cannot see any
reason to work except to produce an income. In their analysis of
income neo-liberals refer to the (early twentieth century) de?ni-
tion, of Irving Fisher, who said that an income is simply the product
or return on a capital. Under neo-liberalism “Capital” has come to
mean a source of future income (Cooper, 2015). From the side of the
worker, labour is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to the
time which it is used. The neo-liberal understanding of a worker is a
conception of capital-ability which, according to diverse variables
receives a certain income so that the worker appears as an enter-
prise for herself. Neo-liberal human capital includes both genetic
and acquired elements. The genetic elements, akin to social Dar-
winism, are such that individuals achieve advantage over others as
the result of genetic or biological superiority; the acquired ele-
ments include education and other investments in the self.
Importantly, inequality, not equality, is the medium and relation of
competing capitals. When we are con?gured as human capital,
equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one
another (Brown, 2015). Humans lose their standing as being simply
valuable as humans.
Aside from representing humans as “naturally unequal”, the
neo-liberal vision of human capital further serves to distort a class
perspective. One of the social contradictions of neoliberalismis that
the majority are employees enot just human capital for themselves
but also for their employers and/or shareholders. Human capital is
at once in charge of itself, responsible for itself, yet an instru-
mentalizable and potentially dispensable element of the whole.
And when humans are cast as capital, labour disappears as a
category, as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic
basis for alienation, exploitation and association among labourers
(Brown, 2015, p 38). Moreover, the neo-liberal hyper-individualised
rationality serves to efface what Marx described as the forces and
relations of production e the capitalist class own the means of
production, while the majority can only survive by selling their
labour while the owners of the means of production pro?t from
their labour.
The neo-liberal conception of “entrepreneurs of the self” is one
in which human action is animated by rewards or future rewards.
Foucault (2010, p 270), makes the connection between this and the
work of behavioural psychologists like Skinner stating that “…you
can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of
techniques, those called behavioural techniques, which are
currently in fashion in the United States. You ?nd these methods in
3
Foucault argues that although Marx placed labour at the centre of his theo-
retical work, the American neo-liberals would see Marx's analysis as too “abstract”.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 15
their purest, most rigorous, strictest or aberrant forms, as you wish,
in Skinner, and precisely they do not consist in analysing the
meaning of different kinds of conduct, but simply in seeing how,
through mechanisms of reinforcement, a given play of stimuli entail
responses whose systematic nature can be observed and on the
basis of which other variables of behaviour can be introduced.”
1.2. The pursuit of individual wealth maximisation as a moral
practice
The neo-liberal understanding of humans as animated by in-
come is supplemented by the belief that individuals should strive to
maximize their individual wealth. Rather than seeing individual
wealth maximising behaviour as “greedy” e it is moral. This mo-
rality is based upon Adam Smith's invisible hand, which in a neo-
liberal grid means that humans maximise social wealth by max-
imising their own wealth. Foucault states (2010, p 277) that neo-
liberal rationality is that each person is dependent on an uncon-
trollable, unspeci?ed whole of the ?ow of things and the world. At
the same time, an individual's interest, without her knowing,
wishing, or being able to control it, is linked to a series of positive
effects which mean that everything which is to her advantage will
turn out to be to the advantage of others. What is usually stressed in
Smith's famous theory of the invisible hand is the existence of
something like providence which would tie together all the
dispersed threads. To Foucault (2010), invisibility is absolutely
indispensable to neo-liberal argumentation. Invisibility means that
no economic agent should try to pursue the “collective good”. Po-
litical power (the state) must not interfere with this dynamic
naturally inscribed in the heart of man. Under this mentality, the
state is accordingly prohibited from obstructing market mecha-
nisms, though, for example, the payment of unemployment bene-
?ts which would distort the ef?cient functioning of labour markets.
The neo-liberal “market” mentality suggests that the role of
competition as a disciplining device is reduced if the state pursues
social welfare policies.
4
Foucault argues that fromthe point of view
of the problem of power and of the legitimate exercise of power
homo œconomicus is radically new, although, over the last 40 years
this conceptualisation of humanity has gradually become doxic.
1.3. The accounting implications of the “entrepreneurialisation of
people”
The accounting implications of the “entrepreneurialisation of
people” are profound. As Brown (2015, p 36) explains, human
capital's “constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, intern-
ing, working, planning retirement, …, is to entrepreneurialize its
endeavours, appreciate its value, and increase its rating or ranking.
In this it mirrors the mandate for contemporary ?rms, countries,
academic departments or journals, universities, media or websites:
entrepreneurialize, enhance competitive positioning and value,
maximize ratings or rankings.” Neoliberalism transmogri?es hu-
manity according to a speci?c image of the economic. All conduct is
economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed by economic
terms and metrics (even when those spheres are not directly
monetized). Accordingly, accounting's ?nancial and non-?nancial
performance metrics, ratios, balanced-scorecards and other tech-
nologies, play a role in producing an account of the value of our
human capital, its ranking, position and so on. Froma managerialist
perspective accounting metrics hold the promise of an ability to
motivate, monitor and rank the endeavours of employees; under
neo-liberalism the targets of these metrics are not waged em-
ployees but income maximizing entrepreneurial units of human
capital.
How to make agents self-monitor and motivate is an enduring
management accounting concern (Herzberg, 1968). Baiman (1990)
notes that, agency theory states that, it is best if agents self-monitor
in the interests of the principal. It might seem as if accounting
metrics which give entrepreneurial human capital units informa-
tion about their performance rankings so that they can maximize
their current and/or future income may be a “solution” to this
persistent management problem. Indeed, agency theory's dualism
in which the principal is risk-neutral while agents are risk-averse
(and so not naturally entrepreneurial) is in some senses made
redundant by neo-liberal conceptions of agents. A feature of neo-
liberalism is that risk is pushed downwards to the most vulner-
able. However, when neo-liberal rationalities overlay the agency
perspective, risk-averse agents need to be both made to be more
entrepreneurial, and strictly controlled. After all, entrepreneur-
ialism may lead workers to act in ways which are inconsistent with
the needs of their employers. Paradoxically then, the neo-liberal
view of humanity may invoke more managerialism and tighter
management control systems. This would depend upon the power
of the groups involved. Work in AOS has rejected technological
determinism and economic imperatives as a satisfactory basis for
explaining changes in the modes of management control; ac-
counting controls are rooted in struggles as ?rms attempted to
control labour processes in various epochs of capitalistic develop-
ment (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991).
5
In spite of their differences,
neo-liberal rationality shares a similar methodology to work which
adopts the agency perspective.
From a methodological perspective, neo-liberal ideas epitomize
an extreme form of functionalism
6
eobjectivism/behaviourism.
Neo-liberal methodology articulates with functionalist research in
accounting which has an extremely high degree of commitment to
models and methods derived from natural science, have a strong
faith in markets, and adopt a Skinneristic atomised view of the
individual as responding re?exively to incentive and monitoring
schemes (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Hopper & Armstrong, 1991).
The ability to include performance metrics in, for example, per-
formance related pay contracts articulates well to functionalist
work's “Skinneristic” pre-occupation with the in?uence of incen-
tive and monitoring systems and contracts on the behaviour of
agents (Armstrong, 1991; Eisenhardt, 1985, 1988; Kosnick, 1987).
Research which adopted this functionalist methodology grew to
become the mainstream or orthodox during the life of AOS.
From its inception, AOS has published work from very different
methodological paradigms. It established a space in accounting for
non-orthodox (non-functionalist) perspectives to establish them-
selves so that their possibilities could be explored and understood.
AOS was a leader in publishing work (Armstrong, 1985, 1987; Miller
& O'Leary, 1987; Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Loft, 1986; Merino &
Neimark, 1982; Hopwood, 1987; Miller & Napier, 1993) which
differentiated itself from orthodox work which saw accounting
change as a process of technical elaboration and improvement. AOS
4
Baiman (1990) gives the example of “human capital” e a person with skills that
are needed in a particular organisation, who cannot be easily replaced e so can
demand higher wages from their employer. The corrective to this “market imper-
fection” would be unemployment (including unemployment of highly skilled
people) which would enable the market to function better.
5
The notion that searches for ef?ciency under the pressure of competitive
markets were the primary drive behind the development of capitalistic organisa-
tions and scienti?c management is highly contentious and has been strongly
disputed by historians and radical political economists (e.g Montgomery, 1979,
1987; Braverman, 1974; Clawson, 1980; Nelson, 1974).
6
Ontologically realist; epistemologically positivist; extremely deterministic;
methodologically nomothetic.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 16
showed how organisational accounts are actively constructed as a
powerful means for creating a particular economic visibility which
facilitated management control along economic lines (Cooper,
1980, 1981; Hopper, Cooper, Lowe, Capps, & Mouritsen, 1986;
Tinker, 1980; Tinker, Merino, & Neimark, 1982). Further, it
showed how accounting facts could be distanced from yet re?ect
the physical production processes (Cooper and Taylor, 2000; Miller
& Napier, 1993). Thus some of the early AOS work on management
control systems saw that although accounting functions in orga-
nisations, accounting is something which is best understood as in
the domain of the social rather than the narrowly organisational.
AOS discouraged academic sectarianism, and encouraged high-
quality dialogue and debate. There is a stream of management
control research within AOS much of which adopts a neo-
functionalist view that management control systems should
direct and motivate employees to act in accordance with organ-
isational strategy; if they fail to do so then accounting technologies
should be amended. This research is also concerned with the
relationship between management control technologies, organ-
isational performance and management satisfaction. Some of this
research's large data sets, help to enhance wider understandings of
the progressively increased use of and scope of management con-
trol systems under neo-liberalism frequently from a managerial
perspective. It also to some extent re?ects the development of neo-
liberal rationalities in the accounting literature. This more orthodox
stream of research will be considered next.
2. Contingency e linking strategy to control systems and
organisational performance
The contingency approach to the study of organisations came
into prominence during the 1970s. Organisational research on in-
dividual motivation, job satisfaction, leadership style, organisation
structure, technology and many other organisational variables was
interpreted within the context of a managerially oriented set of
propositions, which assert that the effective operation of an en-
terprise is dependent upon there being an appropriate ?t between
its internal organisation and the nature of the demands placed
upon it by its tasks, its environment and the needs of its members.
(Burrell and Morgan, 1979). A stream of work began in the 1970s in
AOS and continues to this day, adopts this approach, and is con-
cerned with whether or not a company's strategy or its value
drivers align with its management control systems (for example,
Chenhall, 2003; Chenhall & Lang?eld-Smith, 1998; Cadez &
Guilding, 2008; Dent, 1990; Dermer, 1990; Gerdin, 2005; Gerdin &
Greve, 2004, 2008; Haka, 1987; Hartmann & Moers, 1999; Henri,
2006; Ho, Wu, & Wu, 2014; Merchant, 1984; Otley, 1980; Perera,
Harrison, &Poole, 1997; Selto, Renner, &Young, 1995; Simons, 1987,
1990; Lang?eld-Smith, 1997). The early focus of this research was
on more senior management controls and their alignment with
strategy (Lang?eld-Smith, 1997; Simons, 1987). But gradually re-
?ected the trickle down of management control systems through
middle management (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991) to increasingly
lower levels of organisational hierarchies (e.g., Abernethy & Lillis,
1995; Abernethy & Brownell, 1997, 1999; Adler & Chen, 2011;
Bisbe & Otley, 2004; Davila, 2000; Davila, Foster, & Li, 2009;
Ditillo, 2004). This work also charts the introduction and imple-
mentation of newer accounting technologies (targeted more at
individuals) and mirrors the qualitative change in management
control which developed substantially during the life of AOS in both
the public and private sector (see for example, Grafton, Lillis, &
Widener, 2010; Habersam, Piber, & Skoog, 2013; Ho et al., 2014)
although, like neo-liberalism itself, there are cultural differences in
the rate of adoption of new management control systems (Jansen,
Merchant, & Van der Stede, 2009).
Research into the “linkages” between management control
systems, strategy and performance is mixed (Adler & Chen, 2011;
Ittner, Larcker, & Randall, 2003)). The work in AOS demonstrates
that while there may be the desire on the part of management to
produce (for example) pro?t maximisation or shareholder value
maximization (Chabrak, 2014), that management control systems
may produce unintended negative consequence (eg Simons, 1987;
Ittner & Larcker, 1997). Negative consequences are frequently
explained in functionalist terms e lack of alignment to strategy and
so on (Ittner & Larcker, 1997). Interestingly, Ittner and Larcker
(1997) speci?cally found that “employee empowerment” which
allows workers to become more entrepreneurial, form teams and
select projects without management approval, may prevent orga-
nizations from identifying and implementing those improvement
projects offering the highest potential contribution to overall
business performance.
2.1. A critical appraisal of the contingency work in AOS
The body of AOS work which adopts a contingency approach to
management control and/or measures the impact on organisational
performance, outlined here, on the whole, could be categorised by
Burrell and Morgan (1979) as belonging to the functionalist para-
digm which assumes continuing order and pattern and is geared
towards providing an explanation of “what is”. Newly introduced
accounting technologies are simply “taken-for-granted.” Research
in this paradigm is virtually silent on the impact of management
control on the well-being of the workforce. Although a variant of
this work built upon Cherns (1978) which was concerned about the
quality of working life. Cherns (1978) adopted the position that that
a more humane working situation is a functional imperative within
the context of the system as a whole. In its depiction of humanity,
the contingency work, while not adopting the language of workers
as entrepreneurs (although it does use “human capital”) does
contain some of neo-liberalisms rationalities. It is Skinneristic in
its treatment of human actors in its concern to ?nd the most ef?-
cient mechanisms to make humans achieve organisational goals.
Whether this is in a “humane” way (akin to Cherns, 1978) or
through the implementation of techniques with virtually no
concern about the impact on workers except in as much as they
ful?l organisational objectives.
Most contingency work adopts a regulative stance which is
concerned to make piecemeal adjustments and accepts the status
quo as given e there are no alternatives to neo-liberalism. Expla-
nation in functional theory is teleological in that functional prob-
lems are assumed to call forth their own solution, with no
explanation of howthis is actually accomplished (Armstrong, 1991).
Research with a very different methodology with respect to
management control, perhaps more associated with Burrell and
Morgan's sociology of radical change, featured heavily early in the
life of AOS. This work was clear that accounting re?ected and
served certain economic and political interests (for example,
Cooper & Sherer, 1984; Covaleski & Aiken, 1986; Hopper and
Armstrong, 1991; Lehman & Tinker, 1987; Neimark & Tinker,
1986; Toms, 2005; Tinker et al., 1982). Tinker et al., (1982) p 192,
stated that the “importance of giving due weight to the social
context of accounting becomes even more apparent if we recognize
that, to date, when accounting has affected the work-lives of em-
ployees, it has done so overwhelmingly on behalf of corporations
and employers. Budgeting, motivating, coordinating and planning
are methods for controlling the behaviour of people within orga-
nizations. The traditional areas of cost and management accounting
(together with more recent approaches based on industrial psy-
chology and organization theory) have escaped virtually Scot-free
from critical social appraisal.” In its insistence that it is important
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 17
to remember that on the whole, large corporations own the means
of production and so the majority work for someone else, this early
work provides a tool for “remembering” the importance of class in
the face of the seeming eradication of class relations by neo-liberal
rationalities.
Unlike the more functionalist work in AOS, it is important to the
labour process theorists that management power isn't simply taken
for granted. Armstrong (1991, p 6) argues that within “the capitalist
social relations of production, the most basic contradiction arises
because employers and managers are faced with the inescapable
problem of achieving co-operative activity by antagonistic means.
Because there is always a necessary element of voluntary activity in
any system of co-operation this contradiction can never be ?nally
overcome within capitalism.” This contradiction applies to man-
agement too, Armstrong (1991, p 7) argues, “individual managers
and “profession” groups may possess short-run interests which are
imperfectly aligned with, although not, of course, independent of,
those of capital ownership.” Nonetheless, it is the role of manage-
ment to continue to attempt to overcome these social
contradictions.
With the development of neo-liberalism, as re?ected in the AOS
contingency literature noted above, accounting has transformed
from cost accounting which was concerned with the calculation of
product costings for pricing policy rather than for example
manufacturing strategy (Hopper and Armstrong, 1991) towards
management accounting and more individualised “human ac-
counting” metrics. In effect there has been a shift towards man-
agement accounts targeted at the conduct of individuals rather
than (for example) pricing strategy, although this is still important.
AOS work which considers the shift in accounting from costing to
management control is considered next.
3. Control and “Normalisation” of entrepreneurial subjects e
the shift from cost to management accounting
AOS research provides some compelling albeit necessarily
incomplete explanations concerning accounting's role and power
in both individualising people and at the same time animating
them to “unwittingly collude with power”. Work in AOS and else-
where has been concerned with howindividuals seemto so readily
accept a reductionist numerical accounting vision of the self
(Collier, 2005; Dixon & Gaf?kin, 2014; Edgley, 2014; Farjaudon &
Morales, 2013; Hammond, Clayton, & Arnold, 2012; Lehman,
2013; Roberts, 2005; 2009; Upton & Arrington, 2012). In a histor-
ical analysis of the transformation of “cost accounting” into
“management accounting”, Miller and Napier (1993),
7
sets man-
agement accounting within a complex set of practices (IQ scores,
BMI indices, and so on) which place individuals within statistical
distributions, and measure and calibrate them according to norms.
Once (for example), a BMI score is taken to represent a very com-
plex human being, it is only a short step to accepting a management
control metric as representing the ranking and/or value of a human.
Numerical (and other) rankings are ubiquitous under neo-
liberalism. Fourcade and Healy (2013) argue that in the neoliberal
era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to
split and sort individuals into classi?cation situations that shape
life-chances. More recent work in AOS attests to the ubiquity of
performance measures (Dambrin & Robson, 2011; Artz, Homburg,
& Rajab, 2012).
In terms of the “power” of numerical metrics more generally,
Knights and Collinson (1987) identify the class-speci?c power of
accounting, by showing the disciplinary power of ?nancial ac-
counts over male manual workers. Financial numbers refer to an
economic reality to which male manual workers are especially
sensitive and vulnerable. Although workers resisted psychological
discipline from human resources managers, workers self-subjected
to the numbers, as they share materialist and unambiguous char-
acteristics with them.
There is an emotional edge to accounting which is seldom
recognised (Boedker & Chua, 2013). Some of the most powerful
work in AOS, which considers the potent impact of performance
metrics on individual angst and emotions, draws from Lacanian
psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1979). Lacan's human subject is an
anxious one with imaginary relations and an empty core, whose
continuing and overwhelming desire is for “con?rmation of
selfhood”. Unfortunately, nothing can ever truly satisfy this
desire because recognition from others is always ?eeting and
temporary. A Lacanian insight into the implications of the
atomised reductionist management accounting ?eld of vision, is
that accounting metrics become mirrors in which individual
humans are re?ected. Management accounting constructs a ?eld
of visibility through which individuals and/or groups can be
made visible and accordingly compared, differentiated, hierar-
chized, homogenized and/or excluded/?red (Roberts, 2005). Ac-
cording to Lacanian theory individuals have a preoccupation with
how they are seen and judged and this preoccupation is intensely
individualising. Numerical metrics can offer the hope of ful?lling
our overwhelming desire for re?ection (I would kill to achieve
the illusive “10” rating). Accounting can set standards and mea-
sures which tell us what is normal, re?ect us, measure us, aim to
embed social hierarchies and understandings within us, make us
fearful, direct our efforts and offer the hope of ful?lling our
insatiable desire for re?ection and to control. The effects of ac-
counting control systems are dependent upon the context in
which they operate. Identi?cation collapses the space for resis-
tance for it is through such identi?cation that we inscribe the
power relation within the self (Roberts, 2005). Although resis-
tance is integral to this process, in part through the felt necessity
to defend our imagined autonomy against the intrusion of others
such resistance can take the form of what
Zizek (2000, p 252)
calls a 'deadly mutual embrace' that binds me ever more tightly
to that which I resist (Roberts, 2005).
Aside from its explanation of how accounting metrics come to
have an extreme impact on those subjected to them, Lacan offers a
further insight into management control from the perspective of
those with organizational superiority over others. The Lacanian
subject is desperate to control or at least to feel in control. Lacan
suggests that this kind of desire is what Freud was trying to grasp in
the concept of death drive, the drive towards negativity (Cooper,
1992). While management control systems will never be able to
satisfy the desire for “con?rmation of selfhood” or to make us feel
completely in control, increasingly sophisticated management
control systems are incredibly seductive in that they continually
offer the promise of complete control. This understanding re?ects
some of the contingency work's ?nding that management are
satis?ed with performance management systems (Chenhall &
Lang?eld-Smith, 1998; Govindarajan, 1988; Govindarajan &
Gupta, 1985; Ittner & Larcker, 1997; Shields & Shields, 1998). This
appears to be the case except when managers are subject to them
(Ittner & Larcker, 1997).
7
Interestingly, Miller and Napier (1993), charts another important change which
occurred after the UK Conservative government election in 1979. Up until this point,
there was some momentum behind the production of “value added statements”
which portrayed three constituents in the construction of value e capital, labour
and the state. After 1979, these three arenas were abruptly transformed. In
particular, state rhetoric was that the state should shrink, and accordingly not
“interfere” in the economic. And the terms on which industrial relations were to be
operated were fundamentally and painfully altered according to the neo-liberal
rationality that nothing should be allowed to interfere in markets.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 18
3.1. Summary
This section draws from work which describes the complex,
seductive and potentially destructive relationship between man-
agement control information and human-beings. Lacanian theory
provides an explanation of the power of management control
technologies that differs from versions of disciplinary power that
rely upon discourse to describe the ways in which power is
constitutive of subjectivity (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Grant,
Keenoy, & and Oswick, 1998; Hardy, Palmer, & Philips, 2000). In
this, the Lacanian work provides an important addition to Fou-
cault's conception of the construction of the entrepreneurial sub-
ject. Individualised metrics will be more powerful in a society
obsessed by rankings, individual accomplishment and entrepre-
neurialism. It is therefore essential when trying to understand the
practices of accounting in a neo-liberal world to investigate the
operation of accounting at the level of practice. There are many
ways in which humans might react to different management con-
trol systems in different organisational, political and economic
contexts. The next section accordingly considers the insights
derived from some of the key research into the practice of man-
agement control published in AOS.
4. Accounting in practice
One of the key AOS articles which presented a longitudinal case
analysis of a company which attempted to make its workers more
entrepreneurial is Miller and O'Leary (1994). This section pays
particular attention to this case and other cases which consider
management accounting practice. In particular it considers the
relationship between the constitution of subjectivity and the eco-
nomic system. With regards to the economic, it teases out some of
the social contradictions of neo-liberalism exposed by the work in
AOS.
4.1. Caterpillar
Miller and O'Leary (1994) present a case study which sets out
the endeavour to reconstruct workers as entrepreneurial units of
human capital (albeit in embryonic form in the guise of “economic
citizens”) in the Decatur plant of US multinational Caterpillar in
their “Plant With a Future (PWAF) programme. The workforce/new
economic citizens
8
were to be empowered/entrpreneurialised so as
to be able to confront the exigencies of global competition in a
direct mediated and personal fashion. The vision presented in
Miller and O'Leary (1994) is optimistic and very much in line with
what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue is the “new spirit of
capitalism” in which capitalism recognises that it will face
increasing problems unless it provides some grounds for hope to
those whose engagement is needed for the system to operate. The
“hope” was that the changes would create a “virtuous circle”
aligning changing work practices and management control systems
to improve both the pro?tability of Caterpillar and the global
competitiveness of the region and the nation. For many of the
workforce, the hope was to preserve their jobs.
The Caterpillar case sets out howthe physical recon?guration of
the factory and the formation of new manufacturing cells/modules
were important for the “creation of entrepreneurs”. The new cells/
modules were to be understood as small businesses or spaces for
collective entrepreneurship by their workers (cell proprietors).
Caterpillar management put forward a case to the workforce that
their US production facilities' costs were too high and so each cell
would be provided with information to enable it to compare its
individual component costs with those of its main competitor
(Komatsu). What might previously have been described as man-
agement concerns (foreign exchange exposure and so on) were
transferred to the workforce. Cost cutting targets were to become
essential benchmarks of performance. A cost measurement mech-
anism was devised to disentangle “permanent” cost reductions
from the effects of in?ation, currency ?uctuations, and shifts in
volume and mix of output. Miller and O'Leary (p 26) explain the
managerial position that whilst, “the Executive Of?ces might pro-
pose plans and coordinate results, according to Executive Vice
President Schlegel, they would not “dictate to operating units the
method for reducing costs”. Means of accomplishment would and
should “originate within each individual organization.”
Miller and O'Leary (1994) adds important contextual detail on
how different forms of knowledge and practice make “the
governable person” possible (Miller & O'Leary, 1987). The case
demonstrates the multiple agents involved in the neo-liberal
project of entrepreneurialising workers. The agents included
management consulting organisations, trade unions, and the state.
The broader context, would from today's perspective, be described
as deindustrialisation (although see Clarida & Hickok, 1993)
?nancialisation (see for example, Bay, Catasús, & Johed, 2014;
Cooper, 2015; Zhang & Andrew, 2014), and the widespread adop-
tion of ?nancial economic rationalities (Gu enin-Paracini &
Gendron, 2010). There was a stated “economic imperative”
behind the changes e both the US government and Caterpillar
expressed concern about falling pro?ts and threats from Japanese
manufacturing which were seen to be exacerbated by a strong
dollar. The “threat fromJapan” has been noted by other AOS writers
(for example, Armstrong, 1991; Dent, 1990; Ittner & Larcker, 1997)
as a rationale for accounting change. It has been suggested that
crises (manufactured and real) have been used to bring about neo-
liberal changes (Klein, 2007; Mirowski, 2013) or at least, to intro-
duce neo-liberal reforms more quickly.
The Caterpillar case brought into focus two important debates
(inaccurately) characterised as a debate between “the Marxists and
the Foucauldians/postmodernists” which raged within the aca-
demic community during the 1990s (see for example, Armstrong,
1994; Marsden, 1998; Neimark, 1990, 1994). One of the issues at
stake was the extent to which identities (selves, subjectivities) are
discursively constituted (Armstrong, 2006, 2015). The other con-
cerned the emphasis which should be placed on the role of the
economic system and the sources of power. The two are dialecti-
cally related (Arnold, 1998; Froud, Williams, Haslam, Johal, &
Williams, 1998).
The extent to which accounting knowledge can produce
altered subjectivities is an issue which is worthy of future research
(see Armstrong, 2015). Alvesson and Karreman (2004) argue that
it is important to investigate how subjectivity is formed “empir-
ically”.
9
Along similar lines, Arnold (1998) was concerned with the
point of viewof the shop?oor workers in the Caterpillar case, who
in her account were very sceptical of and resistant to the man-
agement rhetoric of empowerment and economic citizenship. The
subjective responses of the Caterpillar workers to the programme
8
Miller and O'Leary (1994, p 18) state that given “appropriate regulatory in-
stitutions, shop-?oor workers, supervisors and middle-managers can become new
kinds of economic actors with the advent of advanced, ?exible production.”
9
Froud et al. (1998) were, to some extent, also concerned with the construction
of entrepreneurial subjects noting the role of some of Miller and O'Leary's (1994)
sources (for example Reich, 1991; Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1991; Piore & Sabel,
1984; Hirst & Zeitlin, 1989) as promoters of the types of management technolo-
gies adopted by Caterpillar. They too, saw the economic as an important animator
in the case.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 19
to make them more entrepreneurial were produced in the context
of Caterpillar's cumulative $1bn losses over the past three years
and an implicit threat of more job losses. The company had closed
six US plants, reducing the headcount of hourly paid workers by
44% and that of salaried staffs by 26% (Armstrong, 2006). Arnold's
(1998) Caterpillar staff interviews indicate that the workers were
far more conscious of and in?uenced by the material threats of job
loss and promises of job security than they were by abstract no-
tions of workplace autonomy and self-actualization promised by
the spatial reorganization of the plant into modular cells; the
workers experienced the contradiction between the rhetoric of
empowerment/entrepreneurialism and the insecurity they felt
about their and their children's future. The Caterpillar case poses a
question regarding the extent to which accounting technologies
can impact upon the constitution of subjectivity. Arnold (1998)
strongly suggests that the creation of human capital entrepre-
neurial subjects involves a whole lot more than managerial con-
trol system changes.
One of the concerns of Ahrens and Chapman (2007) study of a
restaurant business is to discover the methods used to enable
entrepreneurial behaviour on the part of the restaurant managers.
It was noted that head of?ce managers were sensitive to the ben-
e?ts of an approach to management control that sought to reckon
with the intelligence of managersdto enable them to act as en-
trepreneurs. Ahrens and Chapman (2007) sees the subjectivities of
the employees as changing through the construction of arrays of
activity by area managers that incorporate corporate objectives
with the restaurant managers' personal understandings. This
research did not see individuals as being “captured” by the per-
formance metrics. Rather, that by actively working with other
organisational members, the metrics were drawn upon in order to
establish a shared understanding of what it meant to do well. For
the neo-liberal entrepreneurial subject, the meaning of doing well
is to maximize returns on their human capital. With this under-
standing the restaurant case reveals the contradiction that entre-
preneurial subjects can be entrepreneurial for themselves (against
the interests of their employer). Ahrens and Chapman (2007) noted
that very good chefs could extract high salaries from their restau-
rant managers, just as commercially successful restaurant man-
agers could attain legendary status even if there was widely shared,
but unproven, suspicion that they ‘‘ripped off the company’’ by
keeping a share of the revenues to themselves. Perhaps this was a
price the restaurant company was prepared to pay for innovative,
pro?table staff.
The second debate invoked by the Caterpillar case e the
importance of the “economic system” e cannot be ignored. This
is not “dogma” e it is the contention here that capitalism shapes
the world. There are imperatives that issue from the systemic
drives of capitalism including the imperatives of cheapening la-
bour, expanding markets, economic growth, and constant reno-
vations in production to generate pro?t, and so forth. As Brown
(2015) cogently argues, if capitalism is omitted in any social
analysis, it will not be possible to grasp the intricate dynamics
between political rationality and the economic constraints, and it
will be impossible to grasp the extent and depth of neo-
liberalism's power in making this world and unfreedom within it.
With respect to the Caterpillar case, Arnold (1998) argued that by
abandoning historical materialism accounting research would
lose its ability to confront the problems posed by capitalism.
While Froud et al. (1998)’s re?ection on the Caterpillar case
maintained an understanding of the importance of pro?tability
by arguing that the ?rst material legacy of the changes at
Caterpillar was a modest increase in outsourcing, this was fol-
lowed by massive reinvestment which left Caterpillar with re-
equipped factories that could not work pro?tably under
existing labour contracts
10
. The drives of capitalism do not
negate the importance of understanding the neo-liberal
conception of humans as entrepreneurial capital units, but, any
analysis of the rationalities of neo-liberalism need to be set
within the context of the imperatives of capitalism.
The Caterpillar case demonstrates the social contradictions
brought about by the drive to entrepreneurialize staff while at the
same time needing to control them. Although individual work
groups met regularly with management to share ideas about how
to make things more cheaply and quickly, the workforce did not
staff the planning departments nor make strategic decisions. One
worker reported that after working hard to ?nd ways to produce a
particular component as cheaply as possible “… ?nally the com-
pany admitted to us, when we really pinned them down … they
said, well, the truth of the matter is that we need the space ewe are
moving something else into that area and if you could do it for free,
we'd still have to send it out” (Arnold, 1998, p 677). This one small
episode re?ects the complex and contradictory nature of manage-
ment control technologies targeted at entrepreneurial subjects.
4.2. The complexity and contradictions of management control
technologies in practice
Other work in AOS has emphasised that in spite of the change in
the targets of management control systems (towards individuals
and teams), there remains the need for management to maintain its
control over both labour productivity and costs. Briers and Chua
(2001) study of an Australian Aluminium Company demonstrates
how the company management came under the sway of an inter-
national consulting ?rm and Australian state initiatives to
“modernise” by acquiring an ABC system. It sets out a fascinating
picture of management as a semi chaotic and complex process. Two
features seemto dominate the case, the ?rst was the overwhelming
desire by management “to ?nd the facts” and secondly (and
materially), that the rationality behind ABC's acceptance was
contingent on the ?gures it produced (whether correct or not)
making the recommendation for the discontinuance of a recalci-
trant machine. In short, acceptance of ABC depended upon it pro-
ducing ?gures to support desired decisions.
The acquisition of the ABC system took place amid the Austra-
lian state promotion of ‘performance enhancing’ techniques like
JIT/TQM. One industrial engineer stated that the real driver behind
the introduction of these new techniques was cycle time e a
euphemism for work intensi?cation (Green & Yanarella, 1996).
Throughout the paper we can see seeds and re?ections of an in-
crease in individual worker accounting controls e described in the
case as “prompt and reliable people related information” (including
the incurrence of sick leave). While Briers and Chua's (2001) study
is seemly concerned with the acquisition of new management ac-
counting technology (an ABC system), it appears that the man-
agement were concerned more with “old fashioned” cost control,
and valorisation of labour than with reconstructing the sub-
jectivities of the workforce.
Although Johnson and Kaplan (1987) argue the case for more
accurate accounting information (through ABC), Hopper and
Armstrong (1991) counter that if management is taken to be
about the control of labour and of junior managers, the issue is
10
Arnold (1998) notes that the economic context is used both to invoke co-
operation as well as being used coercively. Arnold, 1998, p 674 states that “ … ,
labour must concede ?exibility in order to prevent capital ?ight. Thus, union-
management cooperation programs and concession bargaining represent two
faces of the same factory regime; a regime that is built not only on consent, as
emphasized in Miller and O'Leary's notion of “economic citizenship,” but equally on
concession bargaining or, as Burawoy (1985, p. 127) terms it, “consent to sacri?ce.””
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 20
more complex. This is not to argue that “accurate costs” are not
important to management but that, management accounting in-
formation is to be judged by the results which it achieves, rather
than its notional accuracy. For example, the classical literature on
the behavioural aspects of budgets (e.g. Caplan, 1971) discusses the
effects of setting targets at various levels of dif?culty, not whether
these levels are “correct” in some essential sense. Thus, the accu-
racy of budgets and internal attributions of cost might be regarded
as irrelevant, so long as they serve to focus managerial effort in the
directions desired by those who control the organisation. This
resonates with Alvesson and Karreman (2004) whose case study of
a global consulting ?rm (Global) found that managers insisted that
staff report working for 8 h a day irrespective of the number of
additional hours they work. This was because labour-hours is an
important constituent of a key ratio by which management was
judged e the project margin. In spite of a key component of the
information system being entirely wrong, the management control
system in this company “worked” (for shareholders and senior
management) in the sense that for many staff, 70 h weeks were the
norm. In some ways this is indicative of strongly neo-liberal ra-
tionality. While under liberalism labour was a commodity to be
purchased by the hour, under neo-liberalism, staff are human
capital units who provide a service and receive an income.
Alvesson and Karreman (2004) argue that almost all control
practices in Global include aspects of cultural engineering more or
less geared towards the subjectivities of the staff. The control sys-
tems take many different forms and are both ?nancial and non-
?nancial. Socio-ideological controls feature strongly. From the
theoretical perspective of bio-politics, Global's socio-ideological
controls would have been enhanced by neo-liberalism's entrepre-
neurial rationalities. Employees in the study expressed a strong
desire to succeed. The idea of being successful in a certain way is an
outcome of social processes which extends beyond the boundaries of
individual organisations. In Global, success is equated with promo-
tion speed, ranking, job titles, monetary and rewards; each of these
could be seen as Lacanian mirrors. Work in AOS (Roberts, 1990, 1991,
2009) suggests that people are animated to maintain and enhance
their self-esteemand their sense of security and this can be exploited
by forms of power which offer control as a sense of security.
The AOS work in this section presents a complex picture of at-
tempts by management to organize and control labour and un-
derstand the costs of their activities. These management concerns
might have led companies (on the advice of consultants) to adopt
new technical forms of accounting and control systems but the
concerns of management and the contradictions of capitalism
remain substantively the same as when AOS began 40 years' ago.
Although Caterpillar management claimed that it would not dictate
to cells the method for reducing costs; nonetheless, the workforce
did not have the option but to try to reduce costs. Attempts by
management to deliver value by exploiting the skill and expertise of
its workforce in the work discussed here (particularly Ahrens &
Chapman, 2007; Miller & O'Leary, 1994) echoes scienti?c man-
agement's appropriation of worker knowledge. What is clear from
the AOS work discussed in this section is that management ac-
counting control systems act upon many workers intensively and
continuously. This re?ects critical HR research what has found that
organisational life for many is dominated by an unprecedented
micro-measurement and management of individual performance
(see for example, Carter et al., 2013; Scholarios & Taylor, 2014;
Stewart et al., 2010). Controls aimed at changing the subjectivity
of workers have been adopted unevenly
11
and their success at
doing so remains an open question. Resistance to entrepreneur-
ialism is discussed further in the next section.
5. Resistance to neo-liberalism
Employees from many different industries and organisational
levels, who are increasingly harangued to be “more entrepre-
neurial” (eg academics now have to raise funding, sell knowledge,
deliver conferences, improve their personal ranking and so on)
while at the same time subjected to increasingly detailed control
systems, are ?nding work, if not a living death, a cause of anxiety/
stress. The academic literature offers few avenues of resistance.
Arnold (1998) notes the importance of trade unions and commu-
nity in resisting the pressure of neo-liberalism, while other work
attacks and lays-bare neo-liberalisms rationalities. This stream of
work in AOS will be considered ?rst.
5.1. The feminine and sexuality
Shearer and Arrington (1993), drawing from the work of Luce
Irigaray and her feminist deconstruction of Freudian and Lacanian
work, while not speci?cally addressing biopolitics, drives a critical
wedge into its rationalities, by suggesting that entreprenuerialism
is masculine and animated by phallic desire (Burrell, 1987,
12
;
Cooper, 1992). Irigaray reads Western sexuality, economics and
politics as beginning with some notion of desire. To her, according
to Western rationalities all desire is reduced to a singularity e
phallic desire (for example under neo-liberalism, we all deemed to
have the same single desire e to maximize returns on ourselves)
and so society is reducible to a linear aggregation of humans with
the same desire. What Irigaray challenges is the way in which the
phallocratic character of both sexuality and economics, excludes
from view the possibility of a multiplicity of desires and values
(sexual desire as something other than penile/phallic desire and
economics as something other than appropriative self-interest).
Shearer and Arrington (1993) argue that inasmuch as accounting
is discourse, an enactment of a particular language of economic
activity, it codi?es and orchestrates economic participation in
accordance with a telos that governs the place of participants in the
economy.
Shearer and Arrington (1993) argue that the “erasure” of hu-
manity is explained by Marxist theory e the value of the thing-in-
itself is liquidated through a singular telos of its value in exchange,
exchange for capital. They go on to state (p263/4), “To be in the
economy is to subject one's self to the grammar of accounting, …It
is to be assigned a role as inscribed within the numbers, norms and
variances of accounting, to be marked as ef?cient or inef?cient, as
acceptable or deviant …which always, without exception, takes as
its telos the ef?cient exchange of the self for capital.” Thus Shearer
and Arrington (1993) set out an understanding of accounting as an
objecti?er of humanity. To objectify a human being in the name of
teleology (ef?ciency, pro?t etc), is to presume that human value
and desirability is enhanced when it takes a form other than its
own. According to the teleology of neo-liberalism, humans are
valuable if they earn the maximum return on themselves e if they
are not productive (in a very speci?c sense of the word), they are
not valuable. A human being is no longer the subject of her own
value or her own desires. She is an object of the telos presumed to
govern her from outside of herself. Resistance means rejecting this
11
See for example Taylor (2013) which argues the performance management
systems have been implemented with particular robustness in the ?nance industry.
12
Burrell (1987) saw accounting and sexuality as being diametrically opposed.
Taking a broader view of management control, Burrell saw the accounting of time
and of the body as the suppression and repression of (sexual) interrelationships
which threaten rational-calculative techniques.
C. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 47 (2015) 14e24 21
telos and embracing the rich life-af?rming ?ows of multiplicity.
Shearer and Arrington (1993) proposes that our bodies are not
human capital e they are multiple sites of pleasure.
In a similar vein, Roberts (2005) offers the insight that when
confronted by performance metrics, one should not fall into the
Lacanian mirror but remember that we are not our performance
metrics e we are much more complex and wonderful than the
ludicrous, impoverished re?ection which they offer. Roberts (1990,
1991) suggests that socialising (rather than hierarchical) account-
ability offers a more complete recognition of self. Roberts (1991, p
363), states that there is “a form of organizational talk which
constantly threatens to dissolve the preoccupation with the
objective boundaries of self which hierarchical accountability en-
courages, and instead offers a con?rmation of self as active subject,
different from yet in a relation of interdependence on others.”
Arnold (1998) sees trade unions as an important socialising conduit
for the resistance of neo-liberal rationalities.
5.2. Trade unions and material circumstances
Arnold (1998, p 678) argues, that people “not only re?ect, un-
derstand and interpret their situations in terms of traditions and
class solidarities, they also integrate their experiences at work into
other aspects of their personal lives as parents, family, and com-
munity members”. In a similar vein, Ezzamel, Willmott, and
Worthington (2004) highlight the importance of employees in
shaping the production process. Armstrong (1994) notes that
research (eg Nichols & Beynon, 1977; Burawoy, 1979) has shown
very little sign of the supposed saturation on workers' conscious-
ness by the discourse and practices of disciplinary power. Workers
have always created their own language, rhetoric, and symbols,
often appropriating the management vocabularies, subverting
meanings, and adding irony and sarcasm. So, for example, in the
Caterpillar case, the “Plant With a Future” (PWAF) was dubbed the
“Plant with a Fence” to denote the security-fence erected around
the plant to protect it from protests. The union-management-
cooperation-program, “Employee Satisfaction Process” (ESP), con-
verted to “Easily Suckered People.” Caterpillar's listing of protected
jobs, -“secured employee list” became the “shrinking employee
list”.
13
6. Conclusion
The neo-liberal vision of humanity as individual enterprise units
whose sole value is in their ability to produce an income stream is
horri?c. This is a vision in which our most human characteristics
(empathy, compassion, sexuality, and so on) are not considered to
be valuable unless someone is willing to pay for them. Humans lose
their standing as simply being valuable as humans who should be
granted equal rights and respect. It is not suggested here that the
neo-liberal view perspective is universally shared, internalised or
indeed adopted; the neo-liberal project is incomplete and profound
social understandings are slow to change. However, it is a ratio-
nality which a range of powerful institutions are working very hard
to promote, sell and use. The neo-liberal rationality that the state
should not pursue social welfare policies means that many citizens
are being left without social support and this brings a material force
to attempts to create more entrepreneurial subjects. In accounting,
new management control strategies and technologies are being
developed (Davila et al., 2009), sold and adopted on the basis that
they facilitate “undeniably moral” entrepreneurialism among staff.
This may be described at the ultimate neo-liberal moment in which
organisations use the rhetoric of ethical business while their
workforce suffer from increased workloads, intense work mea-
surement, unprecedented discipline, stress and the fear of
“managed exit” (Cederstrom & Fleming, 2012; Malsch, 2013).
The work in AOS reviewed here has done an outstanding job in
charting accounting changes from systems concerned with costs to
ones oriented towards micro-measurement, micro management,
ratings, rankings and scores. It highlights the roles of management
consultants in selling and globally dispersing control technologies;
the role of the state in promoting the technologies and rationalities
of neo-liberalism; the role of agency theory and its relationship to
control systems; the possibilities for different forms of resistance;
the contradictions of capitalism and its antagonistic nature which
no management control system can overcome; the ?eeting satis-
factions which management control systems can give to managers;
and howmanagement control systems can individualise and create
anxiety.
In order for AOS to continue toful?l its aimto be “concernedwith
all aspects of the relationship between accounting and human
behaviour, organizational structures and processes, and the chang-
ing social and political environment of the enterprise”, there is a
need for more research which considers the perspective of em-
ployees at all levels of the organisational hierarchy. Future research
should be mindful of the gender, race, sexuality and age related
concerns associated with the impact of management control; all of
these are disappointingly absent fromAOS thus far. There is little in
AOS which sees work as the “living death” described so powerfully
by Cederstrom and Fleming (2012). In this respect too it would be
wonderful tohavemorecasestudies whichempathisewithhumans,
insteadof seeingthemas targets of various forms of stimuli designed
to make themworkharder. It is also essential that AOS researchdoes
not accept the status quo as given, and continues to question the
legitimacy of the power and takes class as the analytic basis for
alienation and exploitation.
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