Description
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's in¯uence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a
quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting,
a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces ®rst the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines
the order of ``The Quanti®ed Customer'', its eects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this
enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new
calculable spaceÐchanging the trajectory of events.
Examining ``The Quanti®ed Customer''
Juhani Vaivio
Department of Accounting and Finance, Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration,
Runeberginkatu 22-24, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's in¯uence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a
quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting,
a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces ®rst the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines
the order of ``The Quanti®ed Customer'', its e?ects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this
enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new
calculable spaceÐchanging the trajectory of events. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
What is a Customer? The question was
unearthed in bold print on an internal manual of
Lever Industrial, United Kingdom, the empirical
context of this study. For this company, the o-
cial answers appeared clear-cut:
A Customer is the most important person
ever in this oceÐin person, by mail, or by
telephone.
A Customer is not an outsider to our busi-
nessÐshe is a part of it.
A Customer is not dependent on usÐwe are
dependent on her.
These textual observations illustrate what mag-
nitude the imperative of The Customer has gained
in contemporary organizations. Embodied into
programs of industrial eciency and market
orientation (Kohli & Javorski, 1990; Maskell,
1989), and sustained by commercial agendas such
as Total Quality Management, The Customer now
plays a critical role in ``the new economic citizen-
ship'' (Miller & O'Leary, 1993, 1994). In the name
of The Customer's demands, strategies are
reshaped and production processes are reordered
(Schonberger, 1990; Whiteley, 1991). Governance
structures and managerial technologies are
designed to perpetuate The Customer inside orga-
nizations. Clearly, substantial e?orts are being
made for coupling The Customer more tightly into
the enterprise (Miller & O'Leary, 1987, 1993;
Munro & Hatherly, 1993).
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's
growing in¯uence. Demands are being made for
the production of a quanti®ed knowledge that
transforms The Customer into a novel, highly
¯exible calculable space inside the enterprise
(Miller, 1994; Miller & O'Leary, 1994). It has
been suggested that conventional management
accounting techniques should be reinforced by
0361-3682/99/$ - see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PI I : S0361- 3682( 99) 00008- 2
Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
calculative routines that link The Customer
directly with the innermost organizational activ-
ities (see Mouritsen, 1997, pp. 5±6; 1994). As
articulated in proposals for more comprehensive
``scorecards'' and company ``dashboards'' (Eccles,
1991; Kaplan, 1995; Kaplan & Norton, 1992,
1993, 1996; see also Ezzamel, 1994a and Lebas,
1994), management accounting is taking a pro-
gressive leap beyond monetary measurement as non-
®nancial, ``Customer-focused'' measures become a
part of the modernized management accounting
apparatus. In this enquiry, the alignment of
accounting's ``new hard numbers'' with The Cus-
tomer will be discussed in terms of ``The Quanti-
®ed Customer.''
Transforming The Customer into a calculable
space seems at ®rst like the latest mutation of
``governing'' and ``managing'' by numbers (Ezza-
mel, 1994a; Ezzamel, Hoskin & Macve, 1990;
Hoskin & Macve, 1994; Miller, 1994) or ``man-
agement by accounting'' (McSweeney, 1994,
1996). However, this study takes the perspective
that the construction of The Customer's calculable
space and the creation of new quanti®ed entities,
in general, merit thorough consideration. The
purposeful quanti®cation of organizational life,
management that builds upon new calculable
entities, and the problematics which are associated
with these calculable spaces are not marginal phe-
nomena. Calculable spacesÐdesigned in the name
of normative ideals and assertions like The Cus-
tomerÐplay a central part in the changes that a
large number of enterprises are undergoing. Instead
of being a trivial technical improvement, The
Quanti®ed Customer encompasses fundamental
organizational issues. This needs to be examined
in earnest.
With quanti®cation, The Customer is rein-
scribed in arguably more objective terms (Robson,
1992), symbolizing commitment to rational con-
duct (Brunsson, 1989; Meyer & Rowan, 1977).
But the calculable space of The Customer espe-
cially opens up new visibility across segments.
And it reallocates attention by altering institutio-
nalized scripts (Scapens, 1994; Scapens, Burns &
Ezzamel, 1996)Ðimposing new preferences into
everyday choices. It reconstitutes organizational
order (Hopwood, 1983, 1987). Moreover, within
this calculable space, activities are rationalized,
new dependencies are established, and new forms
of management are applied (Miller, 1994). Ulti-
mately, important modes of organizational action
become a?ected. Hence, because more should be
known about the emergence and the real purposes
of these powerful ``new'' quanti®ed entities in
organizational contexts, the paper ®rst addresses
the events which lead to the quanti®cation of The
Customer in a speci®c locale, Lever Industrial,
United Kingdom. It then proceeds into an inves-
tigation of how this particular knowledge actually
operates in aligning organizational order with the
discourse of The Customer. The process of this
alignment will be exposed in detail.
But this study also points out that The Custo-
mer's calculable space sustains particular dis-
ciplinary practices. The new formal knowledge
``by numbers'' is implicated with the organiza-
tion's underlying structures of power. The Quan-
ti®ed Customer can be seen as an expression of
power/knowledge (Foucault, 1977, 1980; Hoskin
& Macve, 1986), having both enabling and con-
straining e?ects. The quantitative knowledge of
The Customer penetrates into protected organiza-
tional niches, regulating practices, forging new
routines and consolidating the interests of exper-
tise. In these instances relations of power are
inevitably located (Clegg, 1989, 1994; Deetz,
1992). The Quanti®ed Customer is far from a
neutral instrument that avoids the interconnec-
tions between power, discipline and certain prac-
tices of knowledge. This could also be observed at
Lever Industrial, United Kingdom. Therefore,
because a new order suggests new organizational
dependencies, the paper seeks an understanding of
the mechanism which relates disciplinary aspects
and subtle elements of power with The Quanti®ed
Customer.
However, this study is particularly concerned
with approaching the creation of quanti®ed enti-
ties in organizations uncritically. Hence, the
introduction of The Quanti®ed Customer should
not be accepted as an unchallenged, consensual
process. The organization should be recognized as
a turbulent arena in which di?erent knowledges
are embedded. Encounters with other organiza-
tional knowledges of The Customer take place
690 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
(Ahrens, 1997) and collisions often occur between
competing forms of knowledge. In contrast to
normative claims, transforming The Customer
into a calculable space can become a controversial
exercise. Instead of meeting passive relays, resis-
tance to new knowledge can suddenly develop. As
the examination of Lever Industrial, United
Kingdom suggested, a rival knowledge of The
Customer rises against The Quanti®ed Customer,
contesting accounting's expansionist attempt to ®x
The Customer's meaning.
The study focuses in detail on the organizational
resistance to The Quanti®ed Customer, investi-
gating the knowledge-base of this resistance, as
well as its articulation (Armstrong, 1994; Clegg,
1989, pp. 207±208; Ezzamel, 1994b, p. 220; Knights
& Collinson, 1987; Scapens & Roberts, 1993). The
study is illustrative of how a rival knowledge and
resistant counter-discourse meet the advance of
The Quanti®ed Customer. The foundations and
the speci®c forms of a locally grounded knowledge
of The CustomerÐproducing other disciplinary
implications and containing an alternative logic of
actionÐwill be investigated and analyzed. The
implications of this resistance in what concerns the
creation of a ``Customer-focused'' calculable space
will be uncovered.
The paper combines observations from an
explorative case study at Lever Industrial, United
Kingdom with a theoretically informed inter-
pretation of events. It traces The Quanti®ed Cus-
tomer in a brie¯y sketched industrial environment
where a number of pressures have appeared for a
prompt quanti®cation of The Customer. The ori-
ginal data were collected during a period of almost
six months in 1992±1993. This empirical material
included 42 ®eld interviews, amounting to more
than 48 full interview hours on several organiza-
tional levels at Lever Industrial (see Appendix C).
The interviews were not tape recorded to minimize
respondent bias, but notes were taken by hand
and were immediately transcribed after the inter-
views. A triangulation of the interview observa-
tions was attempted by engaging into participant
observation of several management meetings that
concerned The Quanti®ed Customer in this spe-
ci®c locale, and by studying numerous doc-
umentary sources, like budget reports, internal
manuals and memos, as well as ocial corporate
plans (McKinnon, 1988; Vaivio, 1995, p. 36).
Numerous informal conversations with informants
provided invaluable clues as to how the interview
observations and documentary data should be
viewed and interpreted. Whilst penetrating deep
into the investigated organizational reality, the
study tried by multiple means to avoid the ``Ver-
anda Model'' of ®eld research (see Scapens,
1990).
1
In the following, the paper explains the complex
conditions that prevailed on the explored organi-
zational site. It then traces the introduction of The
Quanti®ed Customer in this setting and examines
its de facto functioning. Next, the mobilization
and articulation of a rival knowledge, a challen-
ging organizational discourse of The Customer is
investigated, leading to the ®nal act of this
detailed narrative. The paper concludes with a
discussion of the main ®ndings.
2. Tracing ``The Quanti®ed Customer'' at Lever
Industrial, UK
2.1. Coping with complexity
At ®rst glance, Lever Industrial, United King-
dom (LI-UK) failed to capture any particular
research interest. In 1991 it stood as a rather
unimpressive part of the industrial detergents
business of the multinational Unilever PLC, pro-
ducing a variety of chemicals and some accom-
panying cleaning equipment. With two factories it
had a turnover of £70 million and employed about
750 people, not large ®gures on the Unilever scale.
Nor was there anything unusual about the tech-
nology it applied. Mixing primary chemicals was
not a demanding task. Also, in the ¯oorcare
machines business of the company, assemb-ling
rotaries and vacuum-cleaners happened without
1
The ``Veranda Model'' is introduced by Burgess (1984) as a
model of anthropological ®eldwork where Victorian research-
ers viewed, often with some detached contempt, the studied
natives from the verandas of their colonial residencies (see
Scapens, 1990, p. 278).
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 691
robotics or JIT-idealsÐthis was ``low tech'', the
Technical Director explained. Moreover, LI-UK's
experiments with Total Quality Management
were not very original either. The company had
embraced the Total Quality discourse and had
started to discover the importance of ``The Cus-
tomer''. But one should guard against ®rst
appearances.
What was, in closer examination, impressive
about LI-UK was the intricacy of its operations.
The company's products, often intended for very
speci®c uses, were numbered in the hundreds and
were of a perplexing varietyÐliquids for dish-
washers, laundry detergents, conditioners, soaps,
kitchen degreasers, polishers, sanitizers and
scourers, to name a few. And the company had a
heterogenous customer base, ranging from large
food producers and catering operations to modest
hotels and canteens. To complicate matters, LI-
UK was not only o?ering its multiple customers
the above mentioned physical products. It sup-
plied most of them with high value added bundles
of physical products and specialized servicesÐ
with ``Total Hygiene Systems''. These individually
tailored packages, di?erentiating the company
against its rivals, consisted of physical products,
``hygiene consulting'' services, technical equipment
and e?ective ®eld engineering assistance. Hence,
the multiplicity of product/service combinations
which were o?ered to such a diversity of custo-
mers entailed substantial complexity at LI-UK.
One of the company's Sales Managers, for
instance, commented:
LI-U.K. has so much diversity. The com-
plexity of the business is really our Achilles
heel.
But the company tried to cope with this inherent
complexity by serving clearly identi®ed market
segmentsÐeach requiring particular products,
speci®c equipment, certain types of services, and
peculiar distribution channels. Separate pro®t
responsible business units were a necessity (see
Appendix A).
The largest unit, Industrial and Leisure, served
cleaning companies, hotel chains and caterers.
Another important unit, Food and Beverage
Hygiene, provided comprehensive systems for
these industries. Public and institutional custo-
mers, like schools, were served by the Contracts
segment. The smallest customers, pubs and farms
for instance, were usually addressed through cash
and carries by the Promotional/Agri unit. Finally,
Healthcare specialized in the problems of hospi-
tals. All of these customer groups were providing
LI-UK with widely di?ering challenges. In Food
and Beverage Hygiene, LI-UK had to be familiar
with food producers' complex processes. The
company elaborated ``hygiene plans'', introduced
special products, trained customer sta? and pro-
vided an uninterrupted ¯ow of chemicals and ®eld
engineering service. Customer intelligence, techni-
cal know-how and specialized marketing e?orts
were all required. By contrast, serving minor cus-
tomers was based on the reputation of brand pro-
ducts, like the ``Domestos'' cleaning liquid.
It should be stressed that individual customer
preferences could vary and were often highly idio-
syncratic also, inside these market segments. Some
industrial customers, for instance, would appreci-
ate elaborate technical solutions and a compre-
hensive range of special products. With a number
of buyers, physical product quality would be cru-
cial. Others would see prompt delivery of a few
bulk products as critical; a manager joked that LI-
UK would make headlines if it failed to deliver its
dish-washer soaps to Heathrow airport's catering,
a big customer.
Clearly, thorough market expertise was essential
in this complex environment. In the company's
rather traditional functional organization the
managers of the ®ve business units, thus, held a
position of relative strength. Pro®t responsible
``Sales Managers'', as they were addressed, were
acknowledged specialists of their respective mar-
ket segments. They remained deeply involved with
their customers' intricacies. Moreover, the Sales
Managers held a ®rm grip on substantive parts
of the company's productive chain. The other
``functional units''Ðtechnical production, quality
control, delivery, as well as the important ®eld
engineering and Customer Services functionsÐ
remained tightly coupled to the Sales Managers'
operational guidance. Through unocial but well-
established horizontal channels and often direct
692 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
personal links of in¯uence, the Sales Managers
would relate with the functional units on an
ongoing basis. This pervasive lateral management
and co-ordination of operational action was not
recognized in the company's ocial functional
structure, however.
As the inquiry proceeded, an unusual feature in
LI-UK's structure drew attention. The company
had a Deputy Chairman and ``Commercial Direc-
tor'' who was in fact LI-UK's Controller. He was
head of the accounting department and served as a
link to LI-UK's international mother company,
Lever Industrial International. But the Commercial
Director's position, which is often emphasized in
Unilever organizations, had become even more
central through a recent, rather unorthodox orga-
nizational arrangement. Following the turmoil
caused by a major acquisition, several important ser-
vice functions were subordinated under his authority.
Distribution and the internally co-ordinating ``Cus-
tomer Services'' entity, as well as the critical ®eld
engineering unit, now had to report directly to the
in¯uential Controller/Commercial Director.
2.2. Enter The Quanti®ed Customer
From the beginning of 1991 something occurred
at LI-UK which captures attention and stands as
the focal point of this investigation. The ``Custo-
mer Service Summary'', hereafter referred to as
the CSS, was introduced. In technical terms this
was a monthly management report which com-
plemented ®nancial measurements by regularly
monitoring an array of activities and functions
that were deemed critical areas of this locale in
terms of The Customer's satisfaction. With the CSS
the company was ``..trying to build an approach to
monitoring Customer Service that is valuable to
our Customer and therefore to ourselves'', an
internal memo stated. A dozen non-®nancial
measuresÐsuch as total customer complaints and
quality complaints in particular, the number of
deliveries out of speci®cations, uncompleted ®eld
engineering jobs, stock availability, invoicing
complaints and received business enquiriesÐ
would become the numerical texture which was
now to portray The Customer's wants within the
company. The Quanti®ed Customer was born.
Some developments which preceded the emer-
gence of The Quanti®ed Customer should brie¯y
be noted. First of all, its ancestor, The Customer,
had already been deployed onto the studied
scene. Through acquisitions, the rhetoric of The
Customer was transplanted into LI-UK, as the
acquired units embraced various ``Total Quality''
agendas. These units served as solid reference
points and ready models of advanced practice
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 69), standing as
illustrative terrains that The Customer had suc-
cessfully conquered. ``The Customer was put in
the middle'', a manager observed. LI-UK's top
management was especially in¯uenced by the per-
formance of Solan, an acquired specialist of
hygiene solutions for the food industry. Solan
emphasized ``Customer orientation'' and could,
for instance, promise The Customer order-day
delivery. A manager recalled these early events and
the example set by Solan: ``We started asking what
The Customer really means.'' But another com-
pany which had also given The Customer con-
sideration was Jeyes Hygiene, a larger ¯oorcare
company that merged with LI-UK in 1989. Jeyes
Hygiene, as LI-UK's Customer Info manager
pointed out, had been seeking ``improvement'' in
the eyes of The Customer with an internal, Total
Quality-inspired eciency program called ``Our
Service at Your's''.
Second, it should be stressed that within other
Unilever companies a coercive pressure concern-
ing The Customer was gathering strength
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, pp. 67±68), as can be
documented in a quote from Unilever's Total
Quality manual, ``The Delighted Customer'':
Without measurements, we are unable to
monitor progress e?ectively and thus re®ne
the improvement e?ort. . .To create appro-
priate measures, we need to look again at our
customer's needs and devise standards which
most closely represent her.
As could be directly observed by attending an
internal Unilever Total Quality meeting, units
such as Elida Gibbs in personal products had
proceeded far into quantitative measures of The
Customer.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 693
Furthermore, The Customer appeared to ask for
recognition as a quanti®ed subject. The company's
customers had established quantitative ``scoring
systems'' for monitoring the ``quality'' and relia-
bility of their suppliers, often looking forward to
certi®ed production standards such as the ISO
9001. As the company's Customer Services Man-
ager noted, LI-UK was for instance given a pre-
cise temporal ``window of arrival'' in some
deliveries. This was tightly monitored. Physical
delivery of LI-UK's products was to take place
strictly, for example, between 1.30 and 3.00 pm
every Monday. Such demands by The Customer
were recognized in a budget review as follows:
Customers are increasingly requiring formal
statements concerning service targets, quality
standards, and health and safety practices.
These are seen to be basic requirements
before contracts can be entered into.
Finally, competition had suddenly increased in
LI-UK's principal markets. Also, major problems,
such as delivery delays and incorrect invoicing,
had recently appeared in customer relations,
partly as a re¯ection of the restructuring which
followed the recent acquisitions. A Sales Manager
observed:
Competition in LI-U.K.'s business intensi®ed
because the market place shrunk as a result of
the U.K. recession.
Another manager recalled the merger with Jeyes
Hygiene and the problems with The Customer:
The merger created a lot of problems and
dissatis®ed Customers, so something had to
be done about Customer satisfaction.
2.3. Assembling The Quanti®ed Customer:
numbers instead of ``ad hocracy''
But apart from this background, the organiza-
tional incidents and the very argument which
introduced The Quanti®ed Customer need to be
explored in yet another short backtrack. Here LI-
UK's Commercial management, and the Commer-
cial Director especially, should be given central
stage. For the quanti®cation of The Customer
seemed to be very much a Commercial initiative,
as several accounts suggested. The CSS was
regarded as the ``brainchild'' of the Controller/
Commercial Director. He was considered the
report's organizational ``owner''. In the words of
an informant from the company's accounting
function, ``there was an overall Commercial
responsibility over the CSS''. Thus, with the
Commercial Director chairing, a somewhat unba-
lanced ``cross-functional'' design team was formed
around the concept of The Customer. The team
involved a dozen functional managers from such
``critical'' functions as distribution, ®eld engineer-
ing, logistics and quality control, but did not
include any representatives from Sales, however.
Once within the team, The Customer was drawn
into the focus of rapidly moving events. The Cus-
tomer's ``dissatisfaction'' with LI-UK was ®rst
dramatized. A detailed re-examination of the
company's ``business processes'' from The Custo-
mer's vantage point followed. As a result, the
team's e?orts exposed a picture of the poorly per-
forming areas that disappointed The Customer.
Six organizational areas were identi®ed as ``fail-
ures'' vis-aÁ -vis The Customer. These ``failures''
were visualized in a ``®shbone-chart'', showing the
roots of ``Customer dissatisfaction'': missed deliv-
eries and out of stocks, disappointing product
performance, incorrect invoicing, unresolved
complaints, poor ®eld service and failures in
responding to The Customer's enquiries. Then the
team set out to ®nd, as a member loosely descri-
bed, ``something realistic, acceptable and mean-
ingful'' which was to produce lasting results in the
unraveled causes of The Customer's discontent.
What emerged next from the team's considera-
tions was, in retrospect, much more fundamental.
With the Controller/Commercial Director holding
the initiative, a consensus was formed on how the
company should move beyond ``ad hoc approa-
ches'' in its overall relationship with The Customer.
With this concept the team sought to problematize
persistent modes of operational action which
prevailed at LI-UK (see Miller, 1991, pp. 737±
738). ``Ad hocs'' were unaligned, unsystematic
694 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
management initiatives along LI-UK's productive
chain. They were sporadic e?orts for better physical
quality in one of the multiple products, for a tigh-
ter delivery time with a particular buyer, or for
better ®eld engineering service in a couple of the
many sales areas. All these managerial moves
were, it seemed, taken for the bene®t of The Cus-
tomer. But they su?ered from wrong priorities,
poor preparation, lack of consistency and minimal
internal co-ordination. They were now regarded as
unplanned and often hastily executed individual
initiatives which were dispersed around the orga-
nization. As a team member recalled, The Custo-
mer was su?ering because of this disorganized
activity: ``We were a bit of a mess; not giving
Customers the sort of service they wanted.''
``Some sort of co-ordination, harmonization and
standardization was needed'', the company's Qual-
ity Manager added. Moreover, for the Commercial
Director in particular, it seemed as if these ``ad
hocs'' could not achieve sucient ``improvement''
or any permanent results vis-aÁ -vis The Customer.
The team soon agreed that things would change. A
fundamentally di?erent solution than piecemeal
``ad hoc approaches'' was sought to the problem of
The Customer's quite obvious ``dissatisfaction''.
For the team, systematic measurement seemed
to provide an answer. A progressive calculative
practice was needed for regaining The Customer's
goodwill. Once represented with a handful of well-
pondered measures The Customer would, it was
hoped, become a formalized, stable and more
authoritative entity at LI-UK. The Customer
would become something ®rmer and more pre-
dictable than an elusive concept which remained
trapped into ``ad hocracy''. The Customer would
become more than a matter of arbitrary interest
and impulsive individual initiatives. Measures
would ensure that vagueness was replaced by pre-
cision. And these measures that represented The
Customer would ®nally systematize the frantic but
ine?ective ``ad hoc'' actionsÐthey would serve as
a co-ordinating and stabilizing medium. Also, they
would become deeply embedded into the organi-
zation, instituting a permanent concern for The
Customer. Instead of a disorderly and subjective
``ad hocracy'', a coherent and objective system
would become establishedÐone which would steer
the company in the right strategic direction. The
Customer Services Manager, a team member,
explained:
Measurement is essential in the long run. You
have to build in measurements into the busi-
ness, otherwise you don't cope with chan-
ge. . .Without measurements you can be
happily going on and not be concerned.
The measures would, however, also have other
powers which became acknowledged within the
team. Quanti®cation would create a formalized
organizational memory. It would introduce a
documented dimension of internal comparability
in space and time. With the backing of The Cus-
tomer, unambiguous norms of accomplishment
could be articulated for certain key activities. An
element of standardization could be imposed upon
the organization's most critical achievements which
were related to The Customer. And better perfor-
mance would naturally be required, since otherwise
the company's future would be put in jeopardy.
``Improvement was important'', the Commercial
Director emphasized. The Quanti®ed Customer
would be mobilized as a permanent ``exercise in
discomfort'' which was to drive out complacency,
as the Commercial Director observed whilst further
explaining the CSS's design. ``You wanted to see an
improving trend'', the Logistics Manager added.
Building on the above steps, the team's remain-
ing task was to agree on the cluster of measures
that would, in concrete terms, delineate The
Quanti®ed Customer. To speed up matters, there
was little dwelling on what sort of technology and
what type of numbers would here be useful.
Within the company's Commercial function ``non-
®nancial measures'' were held in high esteem. In
the Commercial Director's opinion the introduc-
tion of non-®nancial measures was highly impor-
tant, since ``that is how the company should be
run'', he observed. LI-UK's Chief Accountant
commented for his part:
Non-®nancials are the things we ought to
manage. Traditional accounting has been a
good cover-up for many people. It has been
convenient to manage pounds.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 695
As a consequence, it was agreed that the suitable
measures for crafting The Quanti®ed Customer
were to be non-monetary in nature. These were
perceived as the most modern and most tangible
®gures that should represent The CustomerÐ
showing ``how the Customers would judge us'', as
a manager recalled. The Commercial Director
went even further on this point. ``The measures
came from Customers'', he maintained.
A pool of various non-®nancial numbers which
already existed at LI-UK was of considerable
value to the design team. Some of these existing
measures were ``local'' operational ®gures and had
a long history at LI-UK. Delivery's performance,
as well as stock levels, had always been measured
by their respective managers. A manager recalled
these measurements, which dated from the com-
pany's early days in the 1970's, and which were
now remobilized in the CSS:
People kept sometimes an eye on things like
speed of delivery and split orders, but it was
not systematic assessment and following.
For his part, LI-UK's Managing Director com-
mented further on the rediscovery of these now
valuable ``local'' measures:
The CSS contains some local information
that generations of managers have been
keeping. The information has been there. The
di?erence is that previously it was not con-
sidered as important. And it was not collected
in a systematic way. Now we say `Hey, this is
actually important!'.
Other existing measures which were also redis-
covered dated from earlier, more modest Total
Quality experiments which had, however, been
aborted. In these TQ-e?orts, the previous Mana-
ging Director of LI-UK, a TQ-enthusiast, had
required some corresponding non-®nancial mea-
surements that supported the TQ program. In these
somewhat unsystematic attempts of non-®nancial
calculus, LI-UK ``..started to tackle black holes by
internal measurements'', as a service manager
recalled. For example, non-®nancial measure-
ments on ®eld engineering's performance had been
reported to the previous Managing Director. Most
of these ``old'' but unorganized and dispersed TQ-
measures were still available. Another source of
non-®nancial data thus became identi®ed.
For the CSS, ®eld engineering would now be
monitored by ``uncompleted engineering contracts''
and by ``the percentage of breakdown response
within time speci®cations''. And the amount of
``customer complaints'', also an ``old'' TQ-mea-
sure, was now revitalized. A more focused mea-
sure, complaints concerning product quality in the
chemicals in particular, was re®ned from this
existing stream of quantitative data. Yet another
measure, ``new business opportunities'' was fur-
ther elaborated from the existing information
source. ``We also wanted to measure something
positive'', the Commercial Director explained.
Some new measurements were also needed for
The Customer's full quanti®cation. Product qual-
ity in the manufactured cleaning equipment was to
be monitored with a surrogate measure, ``the pro-
portion of delivered machines requiring service''. An
engineer from the machines department observed:
``It was really a stab in the dark for getting a mea-
sure of how things were looking. It was an entirely
new concept for us''. Finally, a recently installed
``query management system'' supplied data about
The Customer's invoice queriesÐthe result of an
invoicing ``failure''. Hence, the CSS would include
measures of ``received and resolved invoice queries''.
Most of these non-®nancial measurements could
be further analyzed to a certain degree and were
broken into ``sub measures'', showing especially
``performance by sales operation''. For instance,
``customer complaints'' graphics showed whether
the complaints were due to ``stock'', ``distribu-
tion'', ``processing'' or ``other'' problems. Com-
plaints could also be further analyzed by selling
operations. Thus, with this elaborate metrics once
compressed into the CSS's compact reporting for-
mat, The Quanti®ed Customer took its ®nal
shape. (See Appendix D for the CSS measures.)
2.4. Living with The Quanti®ed Customer:
``Customer Service meetings''
What The Quanti®ed Customer now needed was
an appropriate organizational arena where it
696 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
would be introduced and where it would operate.
This was created and declared the ``Customer
Service meeting''. These regular monthly gather-
ings were instituted and were meant to become
cross-functional in character, bringing together
key functional managers, all Sales Managers and
some expert sta?. They were chaired by the Com-
mercial Director. ``The Customer Service meetings
were very much commercially led meetings. It was
the commercial people trying to raise quality,'' a
manager noted.
Within these meetings The Quanti®ed Customer
became embedded in the necessary social platform
where its true potential would be discovered. In
the context of these rituals, the select ``critical''
organizational agents would ®rst listen to the
Commercial Director displaying the compiled
quantitative data of the summary. It should be
emphasized that the participants would then pro-
ceed by discussing the so called ``key issues'' which
The Quanti®ed Customer was most forcefully
pointing at. Emerging foremost from the month's
fresh quantitative materialÐand constituting the
agenda of the meetingsÐthese central themes were
selected by the Commercial Director. By high-
lighting a few ``key issues'', the Commercial Direc-
tor would guide the course of the CS meetings.
2.5. Establishing ``improvement''
As intended, ``improvement'' became a pre-
occupation of The Quanti®ed Customer. A moral
recalibration of the organization appeared to be
underwayÐThe Quanti®ed Customer had suc-
cessfully penetrated the selected locales at LI-UK,
rendering these calculable and remaining tightly
linked to them. The Field Engineering Manager,
for instance, emphasized:
I never discard my measurements. They are
highly important. They don't always address
the speci®c, but they showyou trends. Looking
at trends, often over the years, reveals interest-
ing developments which otherwise would be
forgotten in day-to-day ®re ®ghting.
The new standard measurementsÐpublicized
and celebrated within the companyÐwere
``..e?ective in bolting down some spirit and
important ideals'', the company's Chairman
explained. Encouraging hard numerical facts about
``improvement'' were exhibited in graphical for-
mat, some of them being elevated to ``key issues''
such as illustrated below:
Service response for company improved fur-
ther to 96% (Field Eng. sect., March 1992).
Delivery sizes improved particularly in Con-
tracts and Food & Beverage Hygiene. (Deliv-
ery of Orders section, April 1991.)
Service levels of 1.7 days average process time
is the best this year. (Delivery of Orders sec-
tion, September 1991.)
By building a record of achieved ``improve-
ment'', which allowed for comparisons in time and
also between various functional units, The Quan-
ti®ed Customer would, of course, not focus solely
on the positive. The ``trends'' of the measure-
ments, as they were called, could manifest such
negative developments within the company as in
the ``key issues'' that follow:
Quality complaints highest this year, mainly
in Industrial & Leisure. (Product Quality sec-
tion, September 1992.)
Damage complaints are increasing. (Custo-
mer complaints section, November 1991.)
Very quiet overall compared to previous
months.'' (New Business Opportunities sec-
tion, November 1992.)
Deviations from the normalizing targets and
standards, articulated with the speci®city of quan-
titative expression, would be revealed. Moreover,
they would become shared and widely publicized
within the organization. A new form of knowledge
based on numerical clarity was ®xing the expected
organizational virtues in the monitored areas of
``performance.'' As a consequence, a certain amount
of self-surveillance appeared in the followed activities
at LI-UK. Because of The Quanti®ed Customer's
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 697
persistent tracking it seems that ``improvement''
became internalized as a serious concern in many
functional locales. A manager from the engineer-
ing design department, for instance, observed:
With measurement we have an objective way
of looking at things. You cannot sweep hard
results under the carpet if you see the graph
slowly rising.
Much evidence suggested that the vocabulary
and the formal calculations of ``improvement'', as
well as the less pleasing technology of ``trends'',
were quite well received in the functional niches
where The Quanti®ed Customer became attached.
After further investigation, it appeared that a
practical defensive potential had been discovered
in The Customer's quanti®cation. Because of the
argumentative power of the formal measurements,
they were readily embraced by LI-UK's functional
managers. To them the measures constituted
insulating and much needed defensive formations
against negative rumors and attacksÐwhich often
emanated from the Sales domain. A Design Engi-
neer explained this further:
The measurements have helped us to squash
rumorsÐfor example about vacuum cleaners.
Rumors breed and magni®ed stories go
round. If one machine breaks, by the time it
has gone round the company, it's suddenly
twenty machines that went down. Now we
can ask which serial number it was and beat
a rumor by showing how many actually
failed.
The Sales Managers, in a functional manager's
words, often ``got emotional about problems that
happened yesterday'', in their frequent ``direct''
connections with the functional units. These
instances caused considerable resentment. The
novel measurements, it seemed, now provided the
rigorous facts for fending o? such unwarranted
criticism (see Earl & Hopwood, 1980, pp. 9±10).
The measurements protected established func-
tional privacies. They reduced the functional
dependency from the Sales-led business units.
The documented and accurate quantitative
knowledge would have the upper hand on the
often vaguely articulated and perhaps more
emotionally charged claims of the Sales Man-
agers. For instance the Quality Manager further
clari®ed:
Some people say that `We are having a pro-
blem with quality' and put the blame on
Quality people...When somebody exaggerates
and says `We are having dozens of quality
problems', you can grab the CSS and say
`NoÐwe didn't have dozens but only two last
month'.
2.6. Diagnosing the urgent
However, The Quanti®ed Customer also became
implicated with other, perhaps ®nally more
important mechanisms. These dealt with the
alleged ``ad hocracy'' at LI-UK. This investigation
was initially introduced to these issues, and to
other related questions which were soon to unfold,
by recurring comments from several interviewees
that stressed the ``diagnostic'' role of the CSS
measures. The company's Quality Manager, for
instance, characterized the measurements as
``information for identifying, in a diagnostic sense,
where a particular problem lies.'' He was echoed
by another manager, who described the measures
as ``focusing attention to key areas by bringing
them under the light''. And for his part, the Dis-
tribution and Customer Services Manager
observed bluntly: ``The measures made your mis-
takes appear.''
Hence, what gradually emerged was a deeper
understanding of The Customer as a calculable
space. The new measurements probed deep into
the workings of the studied organization, creating
an unprecedented urgency within it. In the
monthly Customer Service Meetings, more of The
Quanti®ed Customer's potential became realized.
Abrupt turns or large variances in the measured
variables would be crying for explanation. For-
tunately, measures could breed some new measures,
amplifying the e?ect of the original calculus. In the
company's jargon ``submeasures'' were at times
derived from the original ®gures. Factors ``standing
behind'' deviations of particular measures were
698 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
analyzed, dramatized and then discussed. ``Root
causes'' were identi®ed and held for examination.
The Commercial Director explained: ``If we found
important root causes they then became urgent
issues in the meetings''. The company's Field
Engineering Manager, recalling these purposes of
the meetings, also admitted: ``Some people felt
they were being put under the microscope''.
For instance in the practices of ®eld engineering,
a ``key issue'' that dominated the agenda of the CS
meeting in March 1991 concerned the company's
performance in responding to The Customer's
service calls. This was highlighted in the CSS in
the following terms:
Service response (breakdown calls) down to
78% this month. Work in hand to identify
causes. (Field engineering section, March
1991.)
In the same meeting, also invoice queries and
customer complaints had been identi®ed as objects
of attention. The new measurements indicated
clearly that The Customer was not satis®ed with
LI-UK's inaccurate invoicing routines. Incorrect
prices were being charged. And too many of the
company's products seemed to be out of stock
when The Customer needed them most. These
acute problems became exposed in the ``key
issues'' as follows:
Queries have continued at an average rate of
75 per day, adding to the backlog. (Invoice
queries section, March 1991.)
Stock outs improved at the start of the month
but fell away again towards the end. (Custo-
mer complaints section, March 1991.)
During 1991, invoice queries, ®eld engineering's
response to The Customer's technical problems
and The Customer's explicit complaints about
distribution and product quality continued to be
urgent problem areas. A ``diagnostic'' study of
these problems was pursued further at LI-UK, as
illustrated in the acknowledged ``key issues''
below:
56% of queries in July relate to price dis-
crepancies in Contracts, Industrial & Leisure,
and Promotional areas. (Invoice Queries sec-
tion, July 1991.)
Response to breakdowns fell below our target
of 90% for Food and Beverage Hygiene and
Industrial & Leisure. (Field engineering sec-
tion, July 1991.)
Distribution and product quality complaints
increased during October. (Customer Com-
plaints section, October 1991.)
But especially the systematic quanti®cation of
delivery's performance in The Customer's eyes
caused further alarm within the company in 1991;
some improvement was, however, registered
towards the end of the year. These operational
frictions became recognized and categorized as
``key issues'' in the following terms:
Delivery performance continues to be sig-
ni®cantly a?ected by stock shortages, although
all sectors except agricultural showed small
improvements. (Delivery of orders section,
June 1991.)
Average delivery size declined particularly in
Industrial and Leisure as a result of the high
number of splits [split orders]. (Delivery of
orders section, October 1991.)
Best delivery performance achieved this year.
(Delivery of orders section, November 1991.)
During 1992, the diagnostic investigation of the
urgent that concerned The Customer was pursued
with the same intensity at LI-UK. For example, The
Customer's continuing expressions of discontent
were again a central topic in the March 1992 meet-
ing. The ``key issue'' documented the hard facts:
Complaints overall increased by 59 over Feb-
ruaryÐstock shortages and damaged goods
predominate. Complaints for March repre-
sented 6.9% of orders received. (Customer
complaints section, March 1992.)
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 699
And in August 1992, for instance, product
quality in the manufactured equipment became
focused. The applied measures indicated that a
particular product category required six times
more service than other types of machines. The
``key issue'' was ®xed on the problem with these
words:
Scrubber Driers under guarantee continue to
show a much higher percentage of breakdown
than other groups of machines. (Product
quality section, August 1992.)
Moreover, in October 1992 the invoice queries
of The Customer would again become recognized
as a serious, acute problem-area. A ``root cause''
analysis yielded the following ``key issue'':
Damages & Pricing form the highest propor-
tion of invoice queries. (Invoice queries sec-
tion, October 1992.)
Nevertheless, by the year's end not much had
changed in The Customer's negative reactions
towards LI-UK, as presented in the CSS:
Areas of concern are short deliveries and
machine complaints. (Customer complaints
section, December 1992.)
Hence, because of The Customer's quanti®ca-
tion, such ``urgent issues'' as illustrated in the
examples above dominated the agenda of the CS
meetings. The urgent operational problems
became elevated into ocial ``key issues'' by the
Commercial DirectorÐon the basis of the evi-
dence of the novel calculus that had been installed
in the name of The Customer.
2.7. The making of a new order
With The Quanti®ed Customer's ``diagnostic''
knowledge, a restructured organizational order
could be introducedÐan order which would
replace the prevailing, incoherent ``ad hocracy''
around The Customer (Hopwood, 1986, pp. 17±
18). A new way of selecting which cues matter
and a new way of constructing the problematic
became established at LI-UK (Weick, 1995).
What were the most acute operational problems
which cried out for management attention?
Which urgent functional issues predominated
and demanded instant recognition? What organi-
zational initiatives were needed in speci®c activ-
ities? In the monthly meetings, the quantitative
knowledge of the CSS was used for ``seeing what
was going on in the business'', as an informant
observed. The Quanti®ed Customer now con-
stituted the systematic and ``objective'' assessment
of the urgently important. It would point out the
burning ``problems''Ðthe very ``key issues'' which
were to be acknowledged and acted upon at
LI-UK. And what the latest ``Customer Service''
measures focused on would naturally be
endowed with much organizational relevance.
Consequently, the measurements of LI-UK's
``failures'' in The Customer's eyes would give
prominence to certain types of operationally
signi®cant matters.
In the operational management process a new
order emerged. Because The Quanti®ed Customer
was fundamentally a Commercial initiative at LI-
UK, this knowledge embodied the values and
assumptions which emanated from accounting's
expert judgement. The Quanti®ed Customer was
an extension of accounting's arguably ``rational''
analysisÐan analysis that maintains a distance to
its objects. This quantitative knowledge reinforced
formal ways of seeing and reasoning (see Meyer,
1986). Hence, by following The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's guidance, the objects of organizational
attention had to ®t into the summarized, standar-
dized, and numerically documented format of the
CSS.
The operationally problematic became de®ned
with speci®c patterns of calculus. And within the
calculable categories of the CSS operational rea-
lity was constructed from computable units. With
The Customer's calculable space a more general
order would be established, overshadowing the
minutiae of concrete particularities. Re¯ecting on
this, the company's Customer Information Man-
ager, who regularly assisted the Commercial
Director in preparing the necessary quantitative
knowledge for the Customer Service Meetings,
noted the following:
700 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
You cannot rely on an emotional response.
You should quantify, try to be objective and
set realistic targets. You should measure.
Quite a number of objects which were not cal-
culable became, of course, marginalized. Or they
would not be included in The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's calculable model of LI-UK's acute reality in
the ®rst place (Robson, 1992, p. 688). Many oper-
ationally meaningful but elusive issues were not
captured by the quanti®cations of the CSS. Also,
the ®xed categories of The Quanti®ed Customer,
the identi®ed ``failures'' vis-aÁ -vis The Customer,
would often not conform with the exceptions and
individual ``cases'' of day-to-day business. Those
odd instances and more irregular ``failures'' which
had a qualitative, unique character, would not
become visible in The Customer's quanti®cation.
The idiosyncracies of The Customer, as will later
be shown, would go unnoticed.
However, the complexities of operational man-
agement were reduced. A more rigorous view of
necessary organizational actionsÐbased on the
calculative fundamentÐwas replacing the myopic
hunches and arbitrary gut feelings, the hallmarks
of ``ad hocracy''. A much needed simpli®cation of
the company's ambiguous world was underway.
With The Quanti®ed Customer, the heterogenous
elements of the environment and the irregularities
of the operations ®nally became neatly structured
into a more manageable space.
2.8. Reshaping action
It would, however, be hasty to assert that The
Quanti®ed Customer was only a matter of tran-
quilizing management consciousness, for much
more was at stake. In a short time The Quanti®ed
Customer reforged concrete organizational action.
With the CSS measurements pointing out the few
operationally critical problems, remedial ``actions''
were elaborated and ®nally initiated in the CS
meetings. Whilst chairing these meetings, several
accounts suggested that the Commercial Direc-
tor's role was central in the consideration of these
``actions''. The ``actions'' were subsequently dis-
cussed in the meetings and became then assigned
to concerned managers or other functional experts
for execution. ``About three hundred actions, of
which about twelve could be called major initia-
tives, were undertaken in 1991,'' for instance the
company's Customer Information Manager recal-
led the CS meetings.
What took shape was a rationale for reorganiz-
ing the most acute tasks. In the operational
``management of the urgent'', The Customer's
quanti®cation imposed a new discipline. The mea-
surements changed the organization's responses to
incidents that traditionally had belonged to the
dubious realm of the ``ad hoc''. A realignment was
underway, especially in how the company's func-
tional activities were responding to the often
abrupt turns and urgent demands of The Custo-
mer. A more formal script was now to be followed
in how the company's day-to-day processes of
operational action were arranged; in how the most
urgent organizational initiatives were acknowl-
edged, prioritized, and eventually launched. The
company's Customer Information Manager, for
instance, described the procedure of the CS meet-
ing along these lines:
The meetings went through in an orderly
fashion. We always started the discussion
from the measures, went through them, asked
questions and decided over the action part.
Whilst interpreting the pieces of evidence con-
cerning the Customer Service meetings, it
appeared as if ``hard'' quantitative data sustained
``cross-functional'' analysis of the company's
operational moves. Following the schedule of the
meetings, di?erent action alternatives were for-
mulated with the assistance of the quantitative
knowledge. These options and their consequences
were then evaluated in the context of the CS
meetings. Well-focused and synchronized actions
were considered and sometimes ®ercely debated;
``There was a lot of emotion in the meetings'', the
Commercial Director admitted. Internally con-
sistent e?orts were sought and di?erent opinions
on these were respected. Finally, an agreement
was usually reached. Co-ordinated actions were
launched for tackling the urgent and for removing
frictions in the now calculable areas of the
productive chain. Clearly assigned individual
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 701
responsibilities were imposed. The CS measures
®nally ``put people on the spot and created a
monitoring track'', as a manager observed. The
diverse ``ad hoc'' actions, it seems, yielded ground
for these more rationally managed e?orts.
For example, the previously illustrated ``key
issues'' in ®eld engineering and invoice queries of
March 1991 resulted in speci®c ``actions'' that
were documented in the CSS as follows:
Evelyn D. to analyze breakdown response.''
(Field Engineering section, March 1991.)
Implement short term measures to overcome
the backlog and reduce the outstanding
queries. Invite Rob O. [Chief Accountant] to
next meeting to discuss the e?ect of the high
query level on cash ¯ow. (Invoice queries
section, March 1991.)
In 1991 for instance the following actions were
also implemented, as a consequence to some of the
``key issues'' discussed earlier:
Organize pricing training. Present the next
meeting with reasons for the continued pricing
errors. (Invoice queries section, July 1991.)
Martin H. to be asked if the `60 duplicate
codes for Food and Beverage Hygiene equip-
ment can be changed at the next opportunity.
(Field Engineering section, July 1991.)
Compare order activity against complaints in
each Sales Operation. (Customer complaints
section, October 1991.)
De®ne core products for Industrial and Lei-
sure with G.W. (Delivery of orders section,
October 1991.)
And as a response to some problematized ``key
issues'' in 1992, for instance these ``actions'' below
were to be immediately executed:
Returned Persil damages to be inspected at
Lever Industrial Development Center. (Cus-
tomer Complaints section, March 1992.)
Clarify marketing policy to replacement of
machines under guarantee. (Product quality
section, August 1992.)
Investigate why it takes 5 days to process a
Food & Beverage 3rd party order from order
receipt to despatch. (Delivery of orders sec-
tion, September 1992.)
Review the marketing protocol that alerts the
pricing administrators of changes in packs.
(Invoice queries section, October 1992.)
Because the new calculable space suggested
novel forms of action, central parts of the organi-
zation now concentrated on ®nding concrete
answers to the particular problems which had
become highlighted by The Quanti®ed Customer.
Since organizational attention had become redir-
ected towards the ``key issues'', organizational e?ort
was forced into the much narrower alleys of the
proposed ``actions''. Instead of addressing other,
perhaps equally pressing concerns, the most urgent
action was reallocated to meet the problematized
and ocially acknowledged ``key issues''Ðwhich
were backed by the ``more objective'' numerical
data. Many rules of operational practice, in func-
tional areas like ®eld engineering and the compa-
ny's invoicing routines, were reshaped by this
formal knowledge. The widely practiced ``ad hoc
approaches'' for managing the organization's
dealings with The Customer had to make room
for a more disciplined and much more centralized
organizational endeavor.
2.9. The power in The Quanti®ed Customer
Because of these developments important
dependencies were rearranged. Also, the new knowl-
edge of The Customer exposed its intimate links with
power (Armstrong, 1994; Clegg, 1989; Ezzamel,
1994b; Foucault, 1980; Hoskin, 1994; Markus &
Pfe?er, 1983). With The Quanti®ed Customer, rela-
tive in¯uence in the organization's operational a?airs
was about to be concentrated to Commercial man-
agement. The accounting logic of approaching
operations and Commercial management's ten-
dency of acting on the advice of numbers could
702 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
now be extended into the innermost a?airs of the
functional units. The Quanti®ed Customer enabled
Commercial intervention into an array of activities.
With the CS measurements the Commercial
domain could in¯uence organizational incidents
deep inside the functional units. Commenting on
the Commercial Director's central role in the CS
meetings and his management style, the com-
pany's Logistics Manager, for instance, observed:
It was a numbers-person [The Commercial
Director] driving a basically qualitative activity
with an obvious quantitative bias.
Another manager had this to say:
The Customer Service meetings were very
much commercially led meetings. It was the
commercial people trying to raise quality.
A new and much stronger dependency between
Commercial management and the functional units
was becoming establishedÐat the expense of the
Sales domain. With the removal of what had been
termed ``ad hocracy'', Sales management's estab-
lished in¯uence over the functional units was
challenged. With the new calculative practiceÐ
extending commercial in¯uence and providing
functional management with ``defenses'' against
SalesÐan uncoupling of unocial horizontal
relays between Sales and the functional units was
about to take place. A Sales Manager commented,
with considerable reserve:
The meetings were very much the commercial
people doing their own thing. . .we were won-
dering what was going on.
2.10. The emergence of The Sales Customer
But in this particular setting the quanti®cation
of The Customer would not take place in a linear
fashion and without a contest. It can be argued, of
course, that organizations are locales where dif-
ferent knowledges emerge and co-exist in relative
harmony. However, it also seems that organiza-
tions are terrains where knowledges collide and
where resistance against a particular knowledge
can occur. Hence, what this investigation further
uncovered was the mobilization of a challenging
knowledge of The Customer. This knowledge was
not formalized in any way. It remained outside the
``ocial'' edi®ce of management systems and was
lacking in analytic sophistication. By contrast, this
competing knowledge was more practically rooted
and was articulated in other than quantitative
terms. The rival knowledge would have its own
particular ways to undermine The Quanti®ed
Customer. It would become the basis for the
resistance against The Customer's calculability,
setting a new trajectory for events.
The rise of the rival knowledge, its discursive
forms, as well as its disciplinary implications are
here discussed as the emergence of The Sales Cus-
tomer. The notion of The Sales Customer serves
as a useful abstraction and poses a contrast. For
The Sales Customer was ``owned'' by the compa-
ny's Sales Managers. This local interpretation of
The Customer was a central pilar of Sales' exper-
tise. It contained the subtle codes of manoeuvre
for the dynamic interplay between LI-UK's key
functional activities and the sudden jumps of the
market. Trying to understand the studied events,
one cannot avoid the picture of The Sales Custo-
mer as comprising something tacit and mundane.
In comparison with the programmatic rhetoric
behind The Quanti®ed Customer, The Sales Cus-
tomer was built upon ``little'' and, prima facie,
uninteresting local knowledge.
This ``little'', practical knowledge of The Custo-
mer came from the niches of the Sales organiza-
tion. In Sales the notion of The Customer was
based on a myriad of minor business practices, on
intrinsic market conventions, and on the needs of
a ``common'' and perhaps less glorious trade.
Instead of an arguably ``hard'' calculative basis,
the roots of The Sales Customer were elsewhere.
The Sales Customer had been made during the
countless days that Sales Managers had spent
``out'' in the ®eld. From an apprehension of the
detailed ``hygiene problems'', from being familiar
with the peculiar productive environments where
The Customer operated, and from the bonds to
the individuals that regularly dealt with LI-UK, a
detailed local knowledge of The Customer had
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 703
been constructed. This seemed to go beyond ana-
lytic exercises or surface impressions of ``the mar-
ket''. The Sales Customer represented understanding
about the varying needs and the unique operating
logics of all those enterprises and institutions that
had some business with the company.
In Sales, The Customer was constructed from
practical know-howÐfrom an unformalized,
``qualitative'' base material. The ``little'' knowl-
edge of The Sales Customer was an almost prosaic
part of the investigated context. It was, for exam-
ple, detailed knowledge of how the dosage pumps
of a food manufacturer should be calibrated for
liquid washers. It was knowledge about the
delivery problems to The Customer that could be
avoided if a reorder was soon issued to High
Wycombe. It was knowledge about when The
Customer in north London was ®nally having
enough about damaged soap packages or stock
outs in critical products.
Having been ignored in The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's introduction and having to face its rapid
implementation, The Sales Customer took a di?er-
ent role. Instead of remaining an ordinary building
block in the Sales' claims of expertise, it stood up
on the organizational scene as a discursive entity.
It became externalized and articulated by the Sales
Managers (Nonaka & Konno, 1998, pp. 43±44). It
started to in¯uence the organizational debate
through a number of discursive elements. The
knowledge components of The Sales Customer
were identi®ed and were knitted into a vocabulary.
This critical vocabulary gradually took the shape
of an organizational discourse, widely dissemin-
ated throughout the organization by the Sales
Managers. The Sales Customer, another local
form of power/knowledge within the explored
context, would oppose The Quanti®ed Customer's
commercially-led expansion (Clegg, 1989; see
Ezzamel, 1994b, pp. 219±220; Foucault, 1980).
Whilst examining the Sales Managers' reactions
and their often harsh judgements on The Quanti-
®ed Customer's advance, something central to The
Sales Customer's discourse surfaced. These are
revelations about the substance in this rival
knowledge. They concern the alternative order
which was maintained by it. And they shed light
on the Sales domain's logic of actionÐhow the
Sales Managers handled the operationally urgent
in terms of ``ad hocracy''. Naturally, these judge-
ments should also be attached to the prevailing
organizational power arrangements and the dis-
cipline that were sustained by The Sales Custo-
mer's knowledge.
2.11. Mobilizing complexity and ``the speci®cs''
The core in the Sales Customer's knowledge
could be traced to LI-U.K.'s complexity. Because
the Sales Managers soon discovered the discursive
value of this complexity, they underlined how the
company had to operate in multiple market seg-
ments, in a heterogenous and dynamic environ-
ment. The Customer was not a clear-cut matter,
but was covered in ambiguity. As the Sales Man-
agers emphasized, The Customer was not one but
many. And The Customer was rarely a predictable
and stable entity. The Customer had shifting pre-
ferences, odd tastes and sudden whims. In this
light, the standardization and systematization of
The Customer's variable pro®le seemed a futile
e?ort. The Sales Customer remained embedded in
the complexity of the business. In a representative
comment on the quanti®cation of The Customer,
a Sales Manager maintained:
Measurement, in this business, is extremely
dicult because of the complexity. Customer
needs are all di?erent. . .When you make a
plastic bottle it is easy to measure. But our
product is complexÐnot simple at all. It is
dicult to measure for example your service
quality. What does it really mean to some
speci®c customers?
By ®rst dramatizing LI-UK's complexity, the
Sales Managers regained the organizational
initiative. They refocused attention on ``the spe-
ci®cs'' that mattered to The Sales Customer. ``The
speci®cs'' would, henceforth, appear as a dis-
cursive category. In the Sales jargon, ``the spe-
ci®cs'' implied critical knowledge of all the
relevant details and practices concerning The
Customer. Moreover, ``the speci®cs'' contained
the rules for coupling The Customer's wants to
internal processes at LI-UK with precision. An
704 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
understanding of The Sales Customer's most
recent problems and often idiosyncratic needs was
hardly possible without professional experience of
``the speci®cs''. This practical knowledge of ``the
speci®cs'', it was claimed, was always up-to-date.
And this knowledge would of course combine with
the Sales Managers' know-how on how to mix the
company's products and services into comprehen-
sive ``Total Hygiene Systems''. Thus, ``the spe-
ci®cs'' now gained a new signi®cance within the
debate around The Quanti®ed Customer.
The practical knowledge of ``the speci®cs'' was
often built upon tacit individual understandings
(Leonard & Sensiper, 1998; Polanyi, 1966). In the
organization's everyday speech it would some-
times be verbalized as idiosyncratic ``touches'',
``hunches'' and ``rules of thumb''. This knowledge
represented the intellectual capital of the Sales
ManagersÐthe gain from ®eld exposure. It con-
tained fragmented pieces of detail and cues of
what mattered in the ®eldÐmaintaining cognitive
models on how to make sense of The Customer's
problems (Weick, 1995). It sustained codes of
conduct on how to match The Customer's exi-
gencies with the relevant functional processes. The
knowledge of ``the speci®cs'' was a binding ele-
ment in the daily routines of the business. Just
what would be the safest remedy for the con-
tamination problems that had appeared in the
Northampton fast-food outlet? Or how is one to
deliver all of the 54 di?erent goods on time to the
Lancashire brewery which had altered its normal
purchasing schedule? And what should be done
about the hotel chain that once again complained
about damaged packages of Persil?
But the mundane knowledge of ``the speci®cs''
that provided the answers to such questions was not
to be calculated. It was not to be compressed into
quanti®ed categories. As a combination of indivi-
dually gathered ``soft'' facts and professional intui-
tion, the Sales Managers' knowledge of ``the
speci®cs'' would now stand against the attempt to
inject ``hard numbers'' into the organization in The
Customer's name. A Sales Manager, for instance,
criticized The Quanti®ed Customer along these lines:
What I always wanted was the analysis that
would show us the speci®c. Which complaints
were from which customers and so on. We
ought to have picked select areas that were
problems to us.
Another Sales Manager added:
I want to know speci®cs about why one of
our customers is not, for example, receiving a
product. This information was not helping
me much.
The calculable space of The Customer came
under assault. Instead of being welcomed as
``objective'' pieces of knowledge, the numbers that
represented The Customer became dubious prox-
ies for something more subtle that could not
meaningfully be quanti®ed. And furthermore, The
Quanti®ed Customer's knowledge could be
attacked by the Sales Managers as being too
monolithic. The CSS measures, it was claimed,
were too aggregated. The ``new'' measurements
were devoid of critical detail. At their worst, they
overshadowed the relevant ``speci®cs'' behind
summarized calculus. Crucial distinctions could
not be captured by The Quanti®ed Customer's
formalizations. With misplaced measurements one
would ``loose sight of individual customers'', the
Sales Customer's discourse warned. In a repre-
sentative comment, the company's Sales and
Marketing Director bluntly observed:
Details were lost in the total mix. The meet-
ings never brought to the surface the indivi-
dual items. If you measure too much things
get lost.
Another Marketing Manager, for his part,
recalled events in these terms:
It wasn't focused enough for the Sales Man-
agers. People were trying to get into the nitty-
gritty, but the detail wasn't there.
2.12. The order of ``real problems''
The order of The Sales Customer was a contrast
to what The Customer's quanti®cation suggested.
In the Sales vocabulary that became a central
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 705
object of this investigation, this order revolved
around ``real problems''. These ``real problems''
were now introduced by the Sales Managers as the
relevant issues that the organization should focus
on in day-to-day operations. From practical
knowledge of ``the speci®cs'', the ``real problems''
concerning The Customer would be extracted,
re¯ecting the Sales Managers' experience and tacit
sense of the de facto operational priorities in the
market. ``Real problems'' were directly connected
with The Customer's operationsÐwith the speci®c
needs where LI-UK's products and services yiel-
ded bene®ts and, ®nally, economic value for The
Customer.
As a result of the Sales' delicate ``touch'' of what
was going on with The Customer, ``real problems''
would stand out from the ¯ow of acute phenom-
ena. ``Real problems'' were the critical cues which
constituted ``the urgent'' (Weick, 1995). As an
informant recounted, the Sales Managers ``want
to know what they are doing todayÐnot what
happened yesterday''. They concentrate on their
personal sense of the most imminent and ®nan-
cially important. The emerging ``real problems''
are the building blocks that bring order into their
hectic, at times chaotic professional worlds. In
their experience of everyday business various
``problems'' appear in abundance. But it seemed
that The Sales Managers' perception of the most
pressing problems, their sense of the ``real pro-
blems'', constructs the Sales organization's view of
the operationally urgent. The ``real problems''Ð
arising from the ¯ux of ``the speci®cs''Ðare the
ones that matter in Sales. And what is acknowl-
edged as a ``real problem'' gets full recognition,
crying loudest for a solution. A ``real problem''
stands out as something which is coupled with
rapid action. One of the Sales Managers, for
instance, assured in a typical comment:
We are interested in real problems that we have
with customers and cost us a lot of money.
The Sales Managers would now claim that The
Quanti®ed Customer discarded the ``real pro-
blems'', producing operational inertia. In more
diplomatic terms, a Sales Manager observed: ``Of
course you may need some measures, but the key
thing is to solve the problem.'' The calculative
mechanism for ®xing the urgently relevant with
``new'' non-®nancial monitors was criticized. The
aggregated CSS measurements highlighted decon-
textualized and irrelevant ``key issues'', which
would lead the organization astray. With The
Sales' expert knowledge of The Customer, the
organization would instead concentrate on the
``real problems''. These would not emanate from
calculable sources but would be suggested by the
Sales Managers' judgement. The formal analysis
of numerical data or ``diagnostic'' studies of
abstract measurements and ``statistics'', as expres-
sed in the Sales vocabulary, were not the way for
capturing the urgently relevant. This organiza-
tional exercise in quantifying The Customer, the
Sales' discourse emphasized, had done enough
damage by confusing priorities. For instance one
of the Sales Managers maintained:
Some customer complaints are more impor-
tant than others, but this does not show in the
statistics.
Other typical reactions, critical of the CSS mea-
surements, went on as follows:
I attended as few Customer Service Meetings
as possible. Most of the time was spent
showing and analyzing these wonderful
charts. (Sales Manager.)
The concept of the Customer Service Meet-
ings was good, but we got too hung up with
the statistics. (Sales Manager.)
2.13. The logic of ``ad hoc'' action
The Sales Customer's knowledge also suggested
an alternative logic of organizational action. Also,
the Sales Managers would now argue for this
competing logic, as nothing less than the everyday
management of the company was under dispute.
How would the operationally urgent be dealt
with? The Sales Customer's logic of producing
action vis-aÁ -vis The Customer was something
di?erent than what the ``Customer focused''
measurements were initiating.
706 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
Facing The Customer as a calculable space, the
Sales Managers would stress their intricate knowl-
edge of the market and their ability to identify the
``real problems''. And the Sales Managers would
stress their competence to proceed immediately
into ¯exible ``ad hoc'' operational action, a super-
ior code of conduct in the fragmented and hetero-
genous market. ``Ah hoc'' actionÐso harshly
treated in The Customer's quanti®cationÐwould
follow unocial lateral linkages between the Sales
Managers and the concerned functional agents.
This form of action, it was maintained by the Sales
Managers, would connect without friction func-
tional expertise with those ``real problems'' which
caused The Customer's dissatisfaction. The Sales
managers stressed, for instance, how direct con-
tacts to the delivery function had been established.
If problems appeared ``you just communicate with
them on a daily basis'', a Sales Manager explained.
Another Sales Manager added in a critical tone: ``I
prefer to address Customer Service problems in
speci®c meetings with the relevant people involved.
Direct contacts are often more useful [than CS
meetings].''
``Ad hoc'' action remained in place as informal
horizontal management, giving de facto opera-
tional initiative into the hands of the Sales Man-
agers. As a mode of operating, it seemed to re¯ect
LI-UK's complexity and the pace of its markets. It
was inevitably unsystematic and was not based on
any ``hard'' data. The Sales Customer's opera-
tional knowledge showed little respect for formal
analysis, bypassing wider organizational discus-
sion in formal management meetings. It avoided
time-consuming decision processes. The Sales
Customer's vocabulary could produce an image of
unbureaucratic, focused actionЮrmly led by the
Sales Managers. Within Sales, it seemed, rational
processes of decision-making were deemed too
cumbersome for tackling the unpredictable opera-
tional situations that Sales Managers had to face.
The Sales Customer's resistance to The Customer's
quanti®cation can thus be interpreted as originating
in the ``irrational''management processes that pre-
vailed in the Sales territory (Brunsson, 1982, 1990).
During the incidents that soon followed the
introduction of the CSS measurements, The Sales
Customer's competing logic of action would resist
The Quanti®ed Customer. A critical discourse
would circulate again and again within the orga-
nization. It would underline the advantages of The
Sales Customer's ¯exible responses to the urgent.
At the same time, much emphasis was given to the
weaknesses of the new calculus that turned The
Customer into a calculable space. In the widely
circulating Sales jargon, the CSS measures
appeared as ``too historical for the sharp line of
the business'', as a Sales Manager explained. And
the gloomy consequences of the quantitative ana-
lysis were emphasized, as re¯ected in a comment
by a Sales Manager:
They spent too much time analyzing the situa-
tion to death. It produced paralysis by analysis.
Another Sales Manager added his opinion on
the ``new monitors'':
We can become obsessed by monitoring, but
in the end of the day you must show how it
helps the business.
By the force of The Sales Customer's dis-
cursively powerful logic, The Quanti®ed Customer
became portrayed as something quite di?erent
than what Commercial management had intended.
It became a backward-oriented, ``historical'' entity
instead of a space that could be better managed
here and now. For initiating rapid operational
action, it could not be relied upon. As a calculable
space, The Customer appeared as a bureaucratic
experiment and was reduced to an unpractical
accounting ideal. The Quanti®ed Customer was
further criticized as a creation which was detached
from the hectic rhythm of the business. In a typi-
cal observation, a Sales Manager maintained:
It was not pro-active enough. The measures
encouraged a too passive instead of an active
attitude.
2.14. The organizational discipline in The Sales
Customer
It should, of course, be emphasized that The
Sales Customer's knowledge, the order it sustained,
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 707
as well as its logic of action also legitimized a part
of the organizational discipline. The Sales Custo-
mer was linked with the persistent structures of
power at LI-UK (Clegg, 1989, pp. 190±193), since
this local knowledge held in place particular
arrangements of the ``proper'' organizational traf-
®c between the functional units and the Sales
Managers. It regulated important operational
processes. To a substantial extent, the ``little'' local
knowledge of The Sales Customer secured the
Sales Managers' relative positioning, as well as
much of their de facto organizational initiative
and executive power within the investigated
context.
Many of the company's operational decisions
and the speci®c forms of its day-to-day function-
ing depended on The Sales Customer's legitimacy
and authority. This local knowledge of The Cus-
tomer consolidated existing access channelsÐthe
``direct contacts'' into the functional domain. It
maintained the numerous relays and dependencies
between the functional activities and Sales. It was
in many ways entwined with the normal practices
of everyday business, with the recurring ``matrix-
type'' connections that took place between Sales
and functional activities, as for instance in what
concerned ``real problems'' in delivery and ®eld
engineering. Thus, The Sales Customer's resistant
counter-discourse should be interpreted as an
attempt to preserve existing organizational power
formations at LI-UK. These quite sedimented
micro-structures, lying behind the taken-for-gran-
ted appearance of how things were normally con-
ducted, had been disrupted by The Quanti®ed
Customer's emergence onto the studied site.
2.15. The ®nal act: restructuring along The Sales
Customer and the performance review
By mobilizing the operational advantages of
The Sales Customer discursivelyÐand by later
enhancing this locally grounded knowledge and
the related discourse with further negative argu-
ments concerning, for instance, the standards of
the CSS measures as well as the uncertain rela-
tionship between the measures and traditional
®nancial variablesÐthe Sales Managers would
prevent The Quanti®ed Customer from reshaping
the operational processes of this locale. Poignant
arguments from the Sales Managers, as illustrated
below, would give more strength to The Sales
Customer's mobilization at LI-UK:
You can make anything out of these statistics
and feel comfortable. But we cannot aim at
95% of the target. What we need is 100%.
Zero defects is what we really should aim at,
like they do in Japan.
There is of course a correlation between for
example deliveries and sales. But it is a sup-
posed thing, not a clear one.
Furthermore, the Sales Managers would also
move against The Quanti®ed Customer on a non-
discursive level by rarely attending the CS meet-
ings. ``The Sales representatives were missing'', for
instance the Field Engineering Manager observed.
This isolated the CS meeting into an e?ort domi-
nated by Commercial management, undermining
its organizational support and its credibility in
addressing ``Customer Service'' matters. It should
also be noted that the Sales Managers' explicit
criticism and their passive resistance in what con-
cerned the meetings were further ampli®ed by the
fact that the Customer Service measures, after
some initial successes at launch, did not show a
remarkably positive development. As the Com-
mercial Director admitted, the measures ``started
to plateau''.
As a consequence of the controversy between
these rival knowledges of The Customer, Com-
mercial management was forced to re-evaluate its
position and the entire structure of the organi-
zation from the beginning of 1993. The era of
The Quanti®ed Customer had lasted for almost 2
years. The Customer Service meetings were
abolished. They were replaced by ®ve separate,
minor ``new style'' Customer Service meetings, as
they were called. These business unit-speci®c
monthly meetings were each chaired by respec-
tive Sales Managers. The meetings involved the
company's key functional managers and addres-
sed the acute operational problems of the ®ve
business units. The CSS measures did not play a
signi®cant role in these gatherings. As it could be
708 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
observed, the most pressing operational matters
would now be discussed on a more ``qualitative''
basis, following The Sales Customer's ``little''
knowledge and logic of action. ``The Sales are
now judge and jury'', a key manager commented.
The Sales and Marketing Director, for his part,
observed:
Now the meetings have a very short term focus,
because they are led by the Sales people.
The Commercial Director commented on this
turn of events:
It was important for me to let go and start
moving responsibility. We recognized the
importance of di?erent customer groups.
More was soon to follow, however. The com-
pany's board tackled the issue of an organiza-
tional restructuring. From July 1994 a new
organization was adopted, reshu?ing the compa-
ny's structure and dissolving the extended in¯u-
ence of Commercial management vis-aÁ -vis The
Customer (see Appendix B). The Sales Managers
became ``Customer Sector Managers'', holding
under their authority the critical service resources
that previously were placed under Commercial
management. These resources are now managed
by each business unit's ``Customer Care Man-
ager,'' who handles ``any interface where The
Customer requires a service''. They accept an
``ownership of The Customer'', as one of these
managers explained. Commenting on this, the
Commercial Director admitted how essential it
was that LI-UK had taken ``another look at the
way we were organizing''.
But despite the contest between these two
knowledges of The Customer and the ®nal turn of
events, The Quanti®ed Customer would still not
be buried and put to rest. It would be somewhat
re®ned technically, becoming a more reduced cal-
culable space which did not interfere with the
processes of operational management. This served
the organization's need for a diplomatic solution.
In practice, a refashioned reporting system was
instituted. Previously, the monthly budget report
had contained only ®nancial data. Now, a
reshaped ``Performance Review'' would accom-
modate also some of the non-®nancial calculus
which initially had built The Quanti®ed Customer.
Hence, the more passive and unintrusive monitor-
ing by Commercial management of ``improve-
ment'', initially rather well-received by the
organization, ocially continued. All concerned
organizational parties seemed to accept this out-
come. The Quanti®ed Customer had been granted
an honorable retreat at LI-UK.
3. Conclusions and discussion
The paper has provided a detailed account of
how The Customer is transformed into a quanti-
tative knowledge. A real-life setting was explored
to cast light on The Quanti®ed Customer's intro-
duction, de facto workings, and reception within a
speci®c organizational site. Non-®nancial man-
agement accounting measures created a new cal-
culable space within the organization. This space
reshaped traditional segmentations of responsibility.
It made visible new dimensions of performance.
And it restructured the patterns of dependency and
power between organizational agents.
The paper's interpretation of events in this par-
ticular empirical context is, of course, partial and
subjective, restricted by a limited set of data, per-
ceptual biases, and certain theoretically informed
choices. As any piece of ®eld research which is
grounded in the events of one empirical site, the
study does not allow for generalizations across
organizations. Transforming The Customer into a
calculable space remains a complex task, which is
in many ways dependent on the unique organiza-
tional circumstances and other contextual factors
that surround this e?ort. The paper's theoretical
implications, however, point elsewhere than to
empirical generalizations across di?erent contexts.
Although caution is needed in drawing conclu-
sions from a single case with its own idiosyncracies,
the study suggests a number of propositions con-
cerning ``new'' quanti®ed entitiesÐsuch as The
Quanti®ed Customer. These propositions should
serve further investigations in this important ®eld
of management accounting enquiry and will assist
the conceptualization of the explored phenomena.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 709
The events at LI-UK suggest that calculable
spaces like The Quanti®ed Customer will change
conventional management accounting and the
familiar tasks of the controller, bringing them
much closer to the complexities of everyday man-
agement. The ``new'' management accounting is
tightly coupled with the practical side of the
organization's acute concerns. Management
accounting now moves beyond the constraints of
®nancial analysis and the passive monitoring of
economic aggregates. It becomes a more active
management craft, addressing directly what it
deems urgent. Instead of controlling the major
courses of events at a distance, the new manage-
ment accounting is implicated with the day-to-day
issues, decisions and actions of a business. By
``owning'' a ¯exible calculable space that probes
deeply into the necessary operational details with
non-®nancial measures, management accounting
can expand its organizational in¯uence.
It seems, however, that this ``new'' calculable
space transforms organizational power relations
and is ®lled with controversy. The evidence of this
study suggests that the new calculable space focu-
ses interventions sharply into ``root causes'' of
operational instances. And in these interventions,
boundaries shift between accounting and other
organizational expertiseÐas between production
specialists and controllers in cost management
programs (Lukka & Granlund, 1997; Cooper,
1996). Management accounting takes more initia-
tive and becomes involved with intricate questions
that preoccupy other organizational ``experts''.
Controllers can take a more active role in these
decision making processes around speci®c opera-
tional issues. As between the Commercial Director
and the Sales Managers at LI-UK, tensions arise.
Organizational power formations are destabilized.
The new calculable space can become a space for
encounters between controllers and rival profes-
sional expertise.
The events at LI-UK especially illustrate how a
calculable space meets resistance built upon local
knowledge. As a calculable space, The Customer
was opposed by practical knowledge that initially
took tacit forms. But as soon as The Quanti®ed
Customer entered the territory of the rival organi-
zational expertise, this tacit knowledge became
externalized. It became mobilized as a critical
vocabulary, emphasizing what could not be cap-
tured by the new numbers. This resistant knowl-
edge and counter-discourse of ``the speci®cs'',
``real problems'', and ``ad hoc'' action, is sugges-
tive of what forms resistance to new calculable
spaces can take.
However, on a more general level this resistance
at LI-UK is also suggestive of what may under-
mine the new quanti®ed entities which are called
for in so many normative pronouncements.
Extending ever deeper into the organization's
operational dimension, the new non-®nancial
measures will probably meet the limits of what can
be expected from the increasing quanti®cation of
organizational life and prevailing management
practices. Systematic quanti®cation, even with
focused non-®nancial measurements, tends to
aggregate and standardize within the spaces where
it is being injected. Quanti®cation pays little
attention to the complexity of detail. But the
resistance that surfaced at LI-UK suggests that in
the domain of operational management detail
maintains critical signi®cance.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments
and suggestions of Thomas Ahrens, Anthony
Hopwood, Eamonn Walsh, John Burns, Kari
Lukka, Teemu Malmi, Eero Kasanen and two
anonymous referees on earlier versions of the
paper. Many thanks are also due to Ingrid Jeacle,
Sue Llewellyn, Jan Mouritsen, Peter Armstrong,
and Trevor Hopper who participated in the Fifth
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting
Conference in Manchester, UK, July 1997.
710 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
Appendix A
J
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t
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Appendix B
7
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)
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±
7
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5
Appendix C
Interviews
Person Interviewed Date Duration (min)
Marketing Services Manager LII 23.10.1992 140
Marketing Services Manager LII 3.11.1992 90
Marketing Services Manager LII 9.11.1992 120
Marketing Services Manager LII 18.11.1992 60
Controller LII 24.11.1992 60
Commercial Accountant LI-UK 25.11.1992 60
Chairman/Managing Director LI-UK 25.11.1992 60
Sales and Marketing Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 30
Personnel Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 70
Technical Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 45
Marketing Services Manager LII 5.1.1993 30
Customer Info Manager LI-UK 6.1.1993 100
Commercial Accountant LI-UK 14.1.1993 45
Distribution & Cust. Serv. Manager LI-UK 14.1.1993 90
Cust. Engineering Serv. Manager LI-UK 18.1.1993 100
Quality Manager LI-UK 18.1.1993 70
Commercial Director LI-UK 20.1.1993 60
Chief Accountant LI-UK 20.1.1993 45
Sales Managers 4 & 5 LI-UK 1.3.1993 75
Customer Engineering Serv. Manager LI-UK 4.3.1993 75
Sales Correspondents' Team Leader LI-UK 4.3.1993 120
Sales Manager 1 LI-UK 4.3.1993 70
Sales and Marketing Director LI-UK 9.3.1993 60
Sales Manager 2 LI-UK 10.3.1993 70
Corporate Marketing Manager LI-UK 10.3.1993 80
Logistics Manager LI-UK 10.3.1993 70
Senior Technical Manager LI-UK 11.3.1993 70
Customer Services Manager LI-UK 12.3.1993 90
Customer Info Manager LI-UK 16.3.1993 130
Sales Manager 3 LI-UK 18.3.1993 80
Credit Control Manager LI-UK 18.3.1993 60
Distribution & Cust. Serv. Manager LI-UK 18.3.1993 30
Design Engineer LI-UK 19.3.1993 75
Chairman/Managing Director LI-UK 23.3.1993 60
Chief Accountant LI-UK 23.3.1993 45
Commercial Director LI-UK 23.3.1993 70
Marketing Services Manager LII 25.3.1993 120
Technical Director LI-UK 1.4.1993 45
Controller LII 15.4.1993 45
Commercial Director LI-UK 7.7.1995 60
Marketing Services Manager LII (Telephone) 15.8.1995 30
Customer Care Manager LI-UK (Telephone) 17.8.1995 20
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 713
Appendix D
The measures of the ``customer service summary''
1. Product quality
Quality complaints (total and per sales
operation).
Proportion of serviced machines (total and
per machine type).
2. Delivery and stocks
Average drop size (total in tonnes).
Deliveries out of speci®cations (% of all
deliveries and per sales operation).
Orders without stock restraint (as % of all
ordersÐmonthly snapshot).
3. Field engineering service
Breakdown response in speci®cations (total
% and % per sales operation).
Field engineering jobs not completed (total).
4. Invoicing
Recorded invoice queries (total and per sales
operation).
Resolved invoice queries (total and per sales
operation).
5. Customer complaints
Total customer complaints (broken into
``stock'', ``distribution'', ``processing'', and
``other'' causes).
Customer complaints per sales operation
(broken into ``stock'', ``distribution'', ``pro-
cessing'', and ``other'' causes).
6. New business opportunities
Recieved business enquiries (total and per
sales operation).
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J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 715
doc_475620063.pdf
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's in¯uence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a
quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting,
a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces ®rst the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines
the order of ``The Quanti®ed Customer'', its eects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this
enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new
calculable spaceÐchanging the trajectory of events.
Examining ``The Quanti®ed Customer''
Juhani Vaivio
Department of Accounting and Finance, Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration,
Runeberginkatu 22-24, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's in¯uence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a
quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting,
a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces ®rst the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines
the order of ``The Quanti®ed Customer'', its e?ects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this
enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new
calculable spaceÐchanging the trajectory of events. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
What is a Customer? The question was
unearthed in bold print on an internal manual of
Lever Industrial, United Kingdom, the empirical
context of this study. For this company, the o-
cial answers appeared clear-cut:
A Customer is the most important person
ever in this oceÐin person, by mail, or by
telephone.
A Customer is not an outsider to our busi-
nessÐshe is a part of it.
A Customer is not dependent on usÐwe are
dependent on her.
These textual observations illustrate what mag-
nitude the imperative of The Customer has gained
in contemporary organizations. Embodied into
programs of industrial eciency and market
orientation (Kohli & Javorski, 1990; Maskell,
1989), and sustained by commercial agendas such
as Total Quality Management, The Customer now
plays a critical role in ``the new economic citizen-
ship'' (Miller & O'Leary, 1993, 1994). In the name
of The Customer's demands, strategies are
reshaped and production processes are reordered
(Schonberger, 1990; Whiteley, 1991). Governance
structures and managerial technologies are
designed to perpetuate The Customer inside orga-
nizations. Clearly, substantial e?orts are being
made for coupling The Customer more tightly into
the enterprise (Miller & O'Leary, 1987, 1993;
Munro & Hatherly, 1993).
Accounting has not escaped The Customer's
growing in¯uence. Demands are being made for
the production of a quanti®ed knowledge that
transforms The Customer into a novel, highly
¯exible calculable space inside the enterprise
(Miller, 1994; Miller & O'Leary, 1994). It has
been suggested that conventional management
accounting techniques should be reinforced by
0361-3682/99/$ - see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PI I : S0361- 3682( 99) 00008- 2
Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
calculative routines that link The Customer
directly with the innermost organizational activ-
ities (see Mouritsen, 1997, pp. 5±6; 1994). As
articulated in proposals for more comprehensive
``scorecards'' and company ``dashboards'' (Eccles,
1991; Kaplan, 1995; Kaplan & Norton, 1992,
1993, 1996; see also Ezzamel, 1994a and Lebas,
1994), management accounting is taking a pro-
gressive leap beyond monetary measurement as non-
®nancial, ``Customer-focused'' measures become a
part of the modernized management accounting
apparatus. In this enquiry, the alignment of
accounting's ``new hard numbers'' with The Cus-
tomer will be discussed in terms of ``The Quanti-
®ed Customer.''
Transforming The Customer into a calculable
space seems at ®rst like the latest mutation of
``governing'' and ``managing'' by numbers (Ezza-
mel, 1994a; Ezzamel, Hoskin & Macve, 1990;
Hoskin & Macve, 1994; Miller, 1994) or ``man-
agement by accounting'' (McSweeney, 1994,
1996). However, this study takes the perspective
that the construction of The Customer's calculable
space and the creation of new quanti®ed entities,
in general, merit thorough consideration. The
purposeful quanti®cation of organizational life,
management that builds upon new calculable
entities, and the problematics which are associated
with these calculable spaces are not marginal phe-
nomena. Calculable spacesÐdesigned in the name
of normative ideals and assertions like The Cus-
tomerÐplay a central part in the changes that a
large number of enterprises are undergoing. Instead
of being a trivial technical improvement, The
Quanti®ed Customer encompasses fundamental
organizational issues. This needs to be examined
in earnest.
With quanti®cation, The Customer is rein-
scribed in arguably more objective terms (Robson,
1992), symbolizing commitment to rational con-
duct (Brunsson, 1989; Meyer & Rowan, 1977).
But the calculable space of The Customer espe-
cially opens up new visibility across segments.
And it reallocates attention by altering institutio-
nalized scripts (Scapens, 1994; Scapens, Burns &
Ezzamel, 1996)Ðimposing new preferences into
everyday choices. It reconstitutes organizational
order (Hopwood, 1983, 1987). Moreover, within
this calculable space, activities are rationalized,
new dependencies are established, and new forms
of management are applied (Miller, 1994). Ulti-
mately, important modes of organizational action
become a?ected. Hence, because more should be
known about the emergence and the real purposes
of these powerful ``new'' quanti®ed entities in
organizational contexts, the paper ®rst addresses
the events which lead to the quanti®cation of The
Customer in a speci®c locale, Lever Industrial,
United Kingdom. It then proceeds into an inves-
tigation of how this particular knowledge actually
operates in aligning organizational order with the
discourse of The Customer. The process of this
alignment will be exposed in detail.
But this study also points out that The Custo-
mer's calculable space sustains particular dis-
ciplinary practices. The new formal knowledge
``by numbers'' is implicated with the organiza-
tion's underlying structures of power. The Quan-
ti®ed Customer can be seen as an expression of
power/knowledge (Foucault, 1977, 1980; Hoskin
& Macve, 1986), having both enabling and con-
straining e?ects. The quantitative knowledge of
The Customer penetrates into protected organiza-
tional niches, regulating practices, forging new
routines and consolidating the interests of exper-
tise. In these instances relations of power are
inevitably located (Clegg, 1989, 1994; Deetz,
1992). The Quanti®ed Customer is far from a
neutral instrument that avoids the interconnec-
tions between power, discipline and certain prac-
tices of knowledge. This could also be observed at
Lever Industrial, United Kingdom. Therefore,
because a new order suggests new organizational
dependencies, the paper seeks an understanding of
the mechanism which relates disciplinary aspects
and subtle elements of power with The Quanti®ed
Customer.
However, this study is particularly concerned
with approaching the creation of quanti®ed enti-
ties in organizations uncritically. Hence, the
introduction of The Quanti®ed Customer should
not be accepted as an unchallenged, consensual
process. The organization should be recognized as
a turbulent arena in which di?erent knowledges
are embedded. Encounters with other organiza-
tional knowledges of The Customer take place
690 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
(Ahrens, 1997) and collisions often occur between
competing forms of knowledge. In contrast to
normative claims, transforming The Customer
into a calculable space can become a controversial
exercise. Instead of meeting passive relays, resis-
tance to new knowledge can suddenly develop. As
the examination of Lever Industrial, United
Kingdom suggested, a rival knowledge of The
Customer rises against The Quanti®ed Customer,
contesting accounting's expansionist attempt to ®x
The Customer's meaning.
The study focuses in detail on the organizational
resistance to The Quanti®ed Customer, investi-
gating the knowledge-base of this resistance, as
well as its articulation (Armstrong, 1994; Clegg,
1989, pp. 207±208; Ezzamel, 1994b, p. 220; Knights
& Collinson, 1987; Scapens & Roberts, 1993). The
study is illustrative of how a rival knowledge and
resistant counter-discourse meet the advance of
The Quanti®ed Customer. The foundations and
the speci®c forms of a locally grounded knowledge
of The CustomerÐproducing other disciplinary
implications and containing an alternative logic of
actionÐwill be investigated and analyzed. The
implications of this resistance in what concerns the
creation of a ``Customer-focused'' calculable space
will be uncovered.
The paper combines observations from an
explorative case study at Lever Industrial, United
Kingdom with a theoretically informed inter-
pretation of events. It traces The Quanti®ed Cus-
tomer in a brie¯y sketched industrial environment
where a number of pressures have appeared for a
prompt quanti®cation of The Customer. The ori-
ginal data were collected during a period of almost
six months in 1992±1993. This empirical material
included 42 ®eld interviews, amounting to more
than 48 full interview hours on several organiza-
tional levels at Lever Industrial (see Appendix C).
The interviews were not tape recorded to minimize
respondent bias, but notes were taken by hand
and were immediately transcribed after the inter-
views. A triangulation of the interview observa-
tions was attempted by engaging into participant
observation of several management meetings that
concerned The Quanti®ed Customer in this spe-
ci®c locale, and by studying numerous doc-
umentary sources, like budget reports, internal
manuals and memos, as well as ocial corporate
plans (McKinnon, 1988; Vaivio, 1995, p. 36).
Numerous informal conversations with informants
provided invaluable clues as to how the interview
observations and documentary data should be
viewed and interpreted. Whilst penetrating deep
into the investigated organizational reality, the
study tried by multiple means to avoid the ``Ver-
anda Model'' of ®eld research (see Scapens,
1990).
1
In the following, the paper explains the complex
conditions that prevailed on the explored organi-
zational site. It then traces the introduction of The
Quanti®ed Customer in this setting and examines
its de facto functioning. Next, the mobilization
and articulation of a rival knowledge, a challen-
ging organizational discourse of The Customer is
investigated, leading to the ®nal act of this
detailed narrative. The paper concludes with a
discussion of the main ®ndings.
2. Tracing ``The Quanti®ed Customer'' at Lever
Industrial, UK
2.1. Coping with complexity
At ®rst glance, Lever Industrial, United King-
dom (LI-UK) failed to capture any particular
research interest. In 1991 it stood as a rather
unimpressive part of the industrial detergents
business of the multinational Unilever PLC, pro-
ducing a variety of chemicals and some accom-
panying cleaning equipment. With two factories it
had a turnover of £70 million and employed about
750 people, not large ®gures on the Unilever scale.
Nor was there anything unusual about the tech-
nology it applied. Mixing primary chemicals was
not a demanding task. Also, in the ¯oorcare
machines business of the company, assemb-ling
rotaries and vacuum-cleaners happened without
1
The ``Veranda Model'' is introduced by Burgess (1984) as a
model of anthropological ®eldwork where Victorian research-
ers viewed, often with some detached contempt, the studied
natives from the verandas of their colonial residencies (see
Scapens, 1990, p. 278).
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 691
robotics or JIT-idealsÐthis was ``low tech'', the
Technical Director explained. Moreover, LI-UK's
experiments with Total Quality Management
were not very original either. The company had
embraced the Total Quality discourse and had
started to discover the importance of ``The Cus-
tomer''. But one should guard against ®rst
appearances.
What was, in closer examination, impressive
about LI-UK was the intricacy of its operations.
The company's products, often intended for very
speci®c uses, were numbered in the hundreds and
were of a perplexing varietyÐliquids for dish-
washers, laundry detergents, conditioners, soaps,
kitchen degreasers, polishers, sanitizers and
scourers, to name a few. And the company had a
heterogenous customer base, ranging from large
food producers and catering operations to modest
hotels and canteens. To complicate matters, LI-
UK was not only o?ering its multiple customers
the above mentioned physical products. It sup-
plied most of them with high value added bundles
of physical products and specialized servicesÐ
with ``Total Hygiene Systems''. These individually
tailored packages, di?erentiating the company
against its rivals, consisted of physical products,
``hygiene consulting'' services, technical equipment
and e?ective ®eld engineering assistance. Hence,
the multiplicity of product/service combinations
which were o?ered to such a diversity of custo-
mers entailed substantial complexity at LI-UK.
One of the company's Sales Managers, for
instance, commented:
LI-U.K. has so much diversity. The com-
plexity of the business is really our Achilles
heel.
But the company tried to cope with this inherent
complexity by serving clearly identi®ed market
segmentsÐeach requiring particular products,
speci®c equipment, certain types of services, and
peculiar distribution channels. Separate pro®t
responsible business units were a necessity (see
Appendix A).
The largest unit, Industrial and Leisure, served
cleaning companies, hotel chains and caterers.
Another important unit, Food and Beverage
Hygiene, provided comprehensive systems for
these industries. Public and institutional custo-
mers, like schools, were served by the Contracts
segment. The smallest customers, pubs and farms
for instance, were usually addressed through cash
and carries by the Promotional/Agri unit. Finally,
Healthcare specialized in the problems of hospi-
tals. All of these customer groups were providing
LI-UK with widely di?ering challenges. In Food
and Beverage Hygiene, LI-UK had to be familiar
with food producers' complex processes. The
company elaborated ``hygiene plans'', introduced
special products, trained customer sta? and pro-
vided an uninterrupted ¯ow of chemicals and ®eld
engineering service. Customer intelligence, techni-
cal know-how and specialized marketing e?orts
were all required. By contrast, serving minor cus-
tomers was based on the reputation of brand pro-
ducts, like the ``Domestos'' cleaning liquid.
It should be stressed that individual customer
preferences could vary and were often highly idio-
syncratic also, inside these market segments. Some
industrial customers, for instance, would appreci-
ate elaborate technical solutions and a compre-
hensive range of special products. With a number
of buyers, physical product quality would be cru-
cial. Others would see prompt delivery of a few
bulk products as critical; a manager joked that LI-
UK would make headlines if it failed to deliver its
dish-washer soaps to Heathrow airport's catering,
a big customer.
Clearly, thorough market expertise was essential
in this complex environment. In the company's
rather traditional functional organization the
managers of the ®ve business units, thus, held a
position of relative strength. Pro®t responsible
``Sales Managers'', as they were addressed, were
acknowledged specialists of their respective mar-
ket segments. They remained deeply involved with
their customers' intricacies. Moreover, the Sales
Managers held a ®rm grip on substantive parts
of the company's productive chain. The other
``functional units''Ðtechnical production, quality
control, delivery, as well as the important ®eld
engineering and Customer Services functionsÐ
remained tightly coupled to the Sales Managers'
operational guidance. Through unocial but well-
established horizontal channels and often direct
692 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
personal links of in¯uence, the Sales Managers
would relate with the functional units on an
ongoing basis. This pervasive lateral management
and co-ordination of operational action was not
recognized in the company's ocial functional
structure, however.
As the inquiry proceeded, an unusual feature in
LI-UK's structure drew attention. The company
had a Deputy Chairman and ``Commercial Direc-
tor'' who was in fact LI-UK's Controller. He was
head of the accounting department and served as a
link to LI-UK's international mother company,
Lever Industrial International. But the Commercial
Director's position, which is often emphasized in
Unilever organizations, had become even more
central through a recent, rather unorthodox orga-
nizational arrangement. Following the turmoil
caused by a major acquisition, several important ser-
vice functions were subordinated under his authority.
Distribution and the internally co-ordinating ``Cus-
tomer Services'' entity, as well as the critical ®eld
engineering unit, now had to report directly to the
in¯uential Controller/Commercial Director.
2.2. Enter The Quanti®ed Customer
From the beginning of 1991 something occurred
at LI-UK which captures attention and stands as
the focal point of this investigation. The ``Custo-
mer Service Summary'', hereafter referred to as
the CSS, was introduced. In technical terms this
was a monthly management report which com-
plemented ®nancial measurements by regularly
monitoring an array of activities and functions
that were deemed critical areas of this locale in
terms of The Customer's satisfaction. With the CSS
the company was ``..trying to build an approach to
monitoring Customer Service that is valuable to
our Customer and therefore to ourselves'', an
internal memo stated. A dozen non-®nancial
measuresÐsuch as total customer complaints and
quality complaints in particular, the number of
deliveries out of speci®cations, uncompleted ®eld
engineering jobs, stock availability, invoicing
complaints and received business enquiriesÐ
would become the numerical texture which was
now to portray The Customer's wants within the
company. The Quanti®ed Customer was born.
Some developments which preceded the emer-
gence of The Quanti®ed Customer should brie¯y
be noted. First of all, its ancestor, The Customer,
had already been deployed onto the studied
scene. Through acquisitions, the rhetoric of The
Customer was transplanted into LI-UK, as the
acquired units embraced various ``Total Quality''
agendas. These units served as solid reference
points and ready models of advanced practice
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, p. 69), standing as
illustrative terrains that The Customer had suc-
cessfully conquered. ``The Customer was put in
the middle'', a manager observed. LI-UK's top
management was especially in¯uenced by the per-
formance of Solan, an acquired specialist of
hygiene solutions for the food industry. Solan
emphasized ``Customer orientation'' and could,
for instance, promise The Customer order-day
delivery. A manager recalled these early events and
the example set by Solan: ``We started asking what
The Customer really means.'' But another com-
pany which had also given The Customer con-
sideration was Jeyes Hygiene, a larger ¯oorcare
company that merged with LI-UK in 1989. Jeyes
Hygiene, as LI-UK's Customer Info manager
pointed out, had been seeking ``improvement'' in
the eyes of The Customer with an internal, Total
Quality-inspired eciency program called ``Our
Service at Your's''.
Second, it should be stressed that within other
Unilever companies a coercive pressure concern-
ing The Customer was gathering strength
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1991, pp. 67±68), as can be
documented in a quote from Unilever's Total
Quality manual, ``The Delighted Customer'':
Without measurements, we are unable to
monitor progress e?ectively and thus re®ne
the improvement e?ort. . .To create appro-
priate measures, we need to look again at our
customer's needs and devise standards which
most closely represent her.
As could be directly observed by attending an
internal Unilever Total Quality meeting, units
such as Elida Gibbs in personal products had
proceeded far into quantitative measures of The
Customer.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 693
Furthermore, The Customer appeared to ask for
recognition as a quanti®ed subject. The company's
customers had established quantitative ``scoring
systems'' for monitoring the ``quality'' and relia-
bility of their suppliers, often looking forward to
certi®ed production standards such as the ISO
9001. As the company's Customer Services Man-
ager noted, LI-UK was for instance given a pre-
cise temporal ``window of arrival'' in some
deliveries. This was tightly monitored. Physical
delivery of LI-UK's products was to take place
strictly, for example, between 1.30 and 3.00 pm
every Monday. Such demands by The Customer
were recognized in a budget review as follows:
Customers are increasingly requiring formal
statements concerning service targets, quality
standards, and health and safety practices.
These are seen to be basic requirements
before contracts can be entered into.
Finally, competition had suddenly increased in
LI-UK's principal markets. Also, major problems,
such as delivery delays and incorrect invoicing,
had recently appeared in customer relations,
partly as a re¯ection of the restructuring which
followed the recent acquisitions. A Sales Manager
observed:
Competition in LI-U.K.'s business intensi®ed
because the market place shrunk as a result of
the U.K. recession.
Another manager recalled the merger with Jeyes
Hygiene and the problems with The Customer:
The merger created a lot of problems and
dissatis®ed Customers, so something had to
be done about Customer satisfaction.
2.3. Assembling The Quanti®ed Customer:
numbers instead of ``ad hocracy''
But apart from this background, the organiza-
tional incidents and the very argument which
introduced The Quanti®ed Customer need to be
explored in yet another short backtrack. Here LI-
UK's Commercial management, and the Commer-
cial Director especially, should be given central
stage. For the quanti®cation of The Customer
seemed to be very much a Commercial initiative,
as several accounts suggested. The CSS was
regarded as the ``brainchild'' of the Controller/
Commercial Director. He was considered the
report's organizational ``owner''. In the words of
an informant from the company's accounting
function, ``there was an overall Commercial
responsibility over the CSS''. Thus, with the
Commercial Director chairing, a somewhat unba-
lanced ``cross-functional'' design team was formed
around the concept of The Customer. The team
involved a dozen functional managers from such
``critical'' functions as distribution, ®eld engineer-
ing, logistics and quality control, but did not
include any representatives from Sales, however.
Once within the team, The Customer was drawn
into the focus of rapidly moving events. The Cus-
tomer's ``dissatisfaction'' with LI-UK was ®rst
dramatized. A detailed re-examination of the
company's ``business processes'' from The Custo-
mer's vantage point followed. As a result, the
team's e?orts exposed a picture of the poorly per-
forming areas that disappointed The Customer.
Six organizational areas were identi®ed as ``fail-
ures'' vis-aÁ -vis The Customer. These ``failures''
were visualized in a ``®shbone-chart'', showing the
roots of ``Customer dissatisfaction'': missed deliv-
eries and out of stocks, disappointing product
performance, incorrect invoicing, unresolved
complaints, poor ®eld service and failures in
responding to The Customer's enquiries. Then the
team set out to ®nd, as a member loosely descri-
bed, ``something realistic, acceptable and mean-
ingful'' which was to produce lasting results in the
unraveled causes of The Customer's discontent.
What emerged next from the team's considera-
tions was, in retrospect, much more fundamental.
With the Controller/Commercial Director holding
the initiative, a consensus was formed on how the
company should move beyond ``ad hoc approa-
ches'' in its overall relationship with The Customer.
With this concept the team sought to problematize
persistent modes of operational action which
prevailed at LI-UK (see Miller, 1991, pp. 737±
738). ``Ad hocs'' were unaligned, unsystematic
694 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
management initiatives along LI-UK's productive
chain. They were sporadic e?orts for better physical
quality in one of the multiple products, for a tigh-
ter delivery time with a particular buyer, or for
better ®eld engineering service in a couple of the
many sales areas. All these managerial moves
were, it seemed, taken for the bene®t of The Cus-
tomer. But they su?ered from wrong priorities,
poor preparation, lack of consistency and minimal
internal co-ordination. They were now regarded as
unplanned and often hastily executed individual
initiatives which were dispersed around the orga-
nization. As a team member recalled, The Custo-
mer was su?ering because of this disorganized
activity: ``We were a bit of a mess; not giving
Customers the sort of service they wanted.''
``Some sort of co-ordination, harmonization and
standardization was needed'', the company's Qual-
ity Manager added. Moreover, for the Commercial
Director in particular, it seemed as if these ``ad
hocs'' could not achieve sucient ``improvement''
or any permanent results vis-aÁ -vis The Customer.
The team soon agreed that things would change. A
fundamentally di?erent solution than piecemeal
``ad hoc approaches'' was sought to the problem of
The Customer's quite obvious ``dissatisfaction''.
For the team, systematic measurement seemed
to provide an answer. A progressive calculative
practice was needed for regaining The Customer's
goodwill. Once represented with a handful of well-
pondered measures The Customer would, it was
hoped, become a formalized, stable and more
authoritative entity at LI-UK. The Customer
would become something ®rmer and more pre-
dictable than an elusive concept which remained
trapped into ``ad hocracy''. The Customer would
become more than a matter of arbitrary interest
and impulsive individual initiatives. Measures
would ensure that vagueness was replaced by pre-
cision. And these measures that represented The
Customer would ®nally systematize the frantic but
ine?ective ``ad hoc'' actionsÐthey would serve as
a co-ordinating and stabilizing medium. Also, they
would become deeply embedded into the organi-
zation, instituting a permanent concern for The
Customer. Instead of a disorderly and subjective
``ad hocracy'', a coherent and objective system
would become establishedÐone which would steer
the company in the right strategic direction. The
Customer Services Manager, a team member,
explained:
Measurement is essential in the long run. You
have to build in measurements into the busi-
ness, otherwise you don't cope with chan-
ge. . .Without measurements you can be
happily going on and not be concerned.
The measures would, however, also have other
powers which became acknowledged within the
team. Quanti®cation would create a formalized
organizational memory. It would introduce a
documented dimension of internal comparability
in space and time. With the backing of The Cus-
tomer, unambiguous norms of accomplishment
could be articulated for certain key activities. An
element of standardization could be imposed upon
the organization's most critical achievements which
were related to The Customer. And better perfor-
mance would naturally be required, since otherwise
the company's future would be put in jeopardy.
``Improvement was important'', the Commercial
Director emphasized. The Quanti®ed Customer
would be mobilized as a permanent ``exercise in
discomfort'' which was to drive out complacency,
as the Commercial Director observed whilst further
explaining the CSS's design. ``You wanted to see an
improving trend'', the Logistics Manager added.
Building on the above steps, the team's remain-
ing task was to agree on the cluster of measures
that would, in concrete terms, delineate The
Quanti®ed Customer. To speed up matters, there
was little dwelling on what sort of technology and
what type of numbers would here be useful.
Within the company's Commercial function ``non-
®nancial measures'' were held in high esteem. In
the Commercial Director's opinion the introduc-
tion of non-®nancial measures was highly impor-
tant, since ``that is how the company should be
run'', he observed. LI-UK's Chief Accountant
commented for his part:
Non-®nancials are the things we ought to
manage. Traditional accounting has been a
good cover-up for many people. It has been
convenient to manage pounds.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 695
As a consequence, it was agreed that the suitable
measures for crafting The Quanti®ed Customer
were to be non-monetary in nature. These were
perceived as the most modern and most tangible
®gures that should represent The CustomerÐ
showing ``how the Customers would judge us'', as
a manager recalled. The Commercial Director
went even further on this point. ``The measures
came from Customers'', he maintained.
A pool of various non-®nancial numbers which
already existed at LI-UK was of considerable
value to the design team. Some of these existing
measures were ``local'' operational ®gures and had
a long history at LI-UK. Delivery's performance,
as well as stock levels, had always been measured
by their respective managers. A manager recalled
these measurements, which dated from the com-
pany's early days in the 1970's, and which were
now remobilized in the CSS:
People kept sometimes an eye on things like
speed of delivery and split orders, but it was
not systematic assessment and following.
For his part, LI-UK's Managing Director com-
mented further on the rediscovery of these now
valuable ``local'' measures:
The CSS contains some local information
that generations of managers have been
keeping. The information has been there. The
di?erence is that previously it was not con-
sidered as important. And it was not collected
in a systematic way. Now we say `Hey, this is
actually important!'.
Other existing measures which were also redis-
covered dated from earlier, more modest Total
Quality experiments which had, however, been
aborted. In these TQ-e?orts, the previous Mana-
ging Director of LI-UK, a TQ-enthusiast, had
required some corresponding non-®nancial mea-
surements that supported the TQ program. In these
somewhat unsystematic attempts of non-®nancial
calculus, LI-UK ``..started to tackle black holes by
internal measurements'', as a service manager
recalled. For example, non-®nancial measure-
ments on ®eld engineering's performance had been
reported to the previous Managing Director. Most
of these ``old'' but unorganized and dispersed TQ-
measures were still available. Another source of
non-®nancial data thus became identi®ed.
For the CSS, ®eld engineering would now be
monitored by ``uncompleted engineering contracts''
and by ``the percentage of breakdown response
within time speci®cations''. And the amount of
``customer complaints'', also an ``old'' TQ-mea-
sure, was now revitalized. A more focused mea-
sure, complaints concerning product quality in the
chemicals in particular, was re®ned from this
existing stream of quantitative data. Yet another
measure, ``new business opportunities'' was fur-
ther elaborated from the existing information
source. ``We also wanted to measure something
positive'', the Commercial Director explained.
Some new measurements were also needed for
The Customer's full quanti®cation. Product qual-
ity in the manufactured cleaning equipment was to
be monitored with a surrogate measure, ``the pro-
portion of delivered machines requiring service''. An
engineer from the machines department observed:
``It was really a stab in the dark for getting a mea-
sure of how things were looking. It was an entirely
new concept for us''. Finally, a recently installed
``query management system'' supplied data about
The Customer's invoice queriesÐthe result of an
invoicing ``failure''. Hence, the CSS would include
measures of ``received and resolved invoice queries''.
Most of these non-®nancial measurements could
be further analyzed to a certain degree and were
broken into ``sub measures'', showing especially
``performance by sales operation''. For instance,
``customer complaints'' graphics showed whether
the complaints were due to ``stock'', ``distribu-
tion'', ``processing'' or ``other'' problems. Com-
plaints could also be further analyzed by selling
operations. Thus, with this elaborate metrics once
compressed into the CSS's compact reporting for-
mat, The Quanti®ed Customer took its ®nal
shape. (See Appendix D for the CSS measures.)
2.4. Living with The Quanti®ed Customer:
``Customer Service meetings''
What The Quanti®ed Customer now needed was
an appropriate organizational arena where it
696 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
would be introduced and where it would operate.
This was created and declared the ``Customer
Service meeting''. These regular monthly gather-
ings were instituted and were meant to become
cross-functional in character, bringing together
key functional managers, all Sales Managers and
some expert sta?. They were chaired by the Com-
mercial Director. ``The Customer Service meetings
were very much commercially led meetings. It was
the commercial people trying to raise quality,'' a
manager noted.
Within these meetings The Quanti®ed Customer
became embedded in the necessary social platform
where its true potential would be discovered. In
the context of these rituals, the select ``critical''
organizational agents would ®rst listen to the
Commercial Director displaying the compiled
quantitative data of the summary. It should be
emphasized that the participants would then pro-
ceed by discussing the so called ``key issues'' which
The Quanti®ed Customer was most forcefully
pointing at. Emerging foremost from the month's
fresh quantitative materialÐand constituting the
agenda of the meetingsÐthese central themes were
selected by the Commercial Director. By high-
lighting a few ``key issues'', the Commercial Direc-
tor would guide the course of the CS meetings.
2.5. Establishing ``improvement''
As intended, ``improvement'' became a pre-
occupation of The Quanti®ed Customer. A moral
recalibration of the organization appeared to be
underwayÐThe Quanti®ed Customer had suc-
cessfully penetrated the selected locales at LI-UK,
rendering these calculable and remaining tightly
linked to them. The Field Engineering Manager,
for instance, emphasized:
I never discard my measurements. They are
highly important. They don't always address
the speci®c, but they showyou trends. Looking
at trends, often over the years, reveals interest-
ing developments which otherwise would be
forgotten in day-to-day ®re ®ghting.
The new standard measurementsÐpublicized
and celebrated within the companyÐwere
``..e?ective in bolting down some spirit and
important ideals'', the company's Chairman
explained. Encouraging hard numerical facts about
``improvement'' were exhibited in graphical for-
mat, some of them being elevated to ``key issues''
such as illustrated below:
Service response for company improved fur-
ther to 96% (Field Eng. sect., March 1992).
Delivery sizes improved particularly in Con-
tracts and Food & Beverage Hygiene. (Deliv-
ery of Orders section, April 1991.)
Service levels of 1.7 days average process time
is the best this year. (Delivery of Orders sec-
tion, September 1991.)
By building a record of achieved ``improve-
ment'', which allowed for comparisons in time and
also between various functional units, The Quan-
ti®ed Customer would, of course, not focus solely
on the positive. The ``trends'' of the measure-
ments, as they were called, could manifest such
negative developments within the company as in
the ``key issues'' that follow:
Quality complaints highest this year, mainly
in Industrial & Leisure. (Product Quality sec-
tion, September 1992.)
Damage complaints are increasing. (Custo-
mer complaints section, November 1991.)
Very quiet overall compared to previous
months.'' (New Business Opportunities sec-
tion, November 1992.)
Deviations from the normalizing targets and
standards, articulated with the speci®city of quan-
titative expression, would be revealed. Moreover,
they would become shared and widely publicized
within the organization. A new form of knowledge
based on numerical clarity was ®xing the expected
organizational virtues in the monitored areas of
``performance.'' As a consequence, a certain amount
of self-surveillance appeared in the followed activities
at LI-UK. Because of The Quanti®ed Customer's
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 697
persistent tracking it seems that ``improvement''
became internalized as a serious concern in many
functional locales. A manager from the engineer-
ing design department, for instance, observed:
With measurement we have an objective way
of looking at things. You cannot sweep hard
results under the carpet if you see the graph
slowly rising.
Much evidence suggested that the vocabulary
and the formal calculations of ``improvement'', as
well as the less pleasing technology of ``trends'',
were quite well received in the functional niches
where The Quanti®ed Customer became attached.
After further investigation, it appeared that a
practical defensive potential had been discovered
in The Customer's quanti®cation. Because of the
argumentative power of the formal measurements,
they were readily embraced by LI-UK's functional
managers. To them the measures constituted
insulating and much needed defensive formations
against negative rumors and attacksÐwhich often
emanated from the Sales domain. A Design Engi-
neer explained this further:
The measurements have helped us to squash
rumorsÐfor example about vacuum cleaners.
Rumors breed and magni®ed stories go
round. If one machine breaks, by the time it
has gone round the company, it's suddenly
twenty machines that went down. Now we
can ask which serial number it was and beat
a rumor by showing how many actually
failed.
The Sales Managers, in a functional manager's
words, often ``got emotional about problems that
happened yesterday'', in their frequent ``direct''
connections with the functional units. These
instances caused considerable resentment. The
novel measurements, it seemed, now provided the
rigorous facts for fending o? such unwarranted
criticism (see Earl & Hopwood, 1980, pp. 9±10).
The measurements protected established func-
tional privacies. They reduced the functional
dependency from the Sales-led business units.
The documented and accurate quantitative
knowledge would have the upper hand on the
often vaguely articulated and perhaps more
emotionally charged claims of the Sales Man-
agers. For instance the Quality Manager further
clari®ed:
Some people say that `We are having a pro-
blem with quality' and put the blame on
Quality people...When somebody exaggerates
and says `We are having dozens of quality
problems', you can grab the CSS and say
`NoÐwe didn't have dozens but only two last
month'.
2.6. Diagnosing the urgent
However, The Quanti®ed Customer also became
implicated with other, perhaps ®nally more
important mechanisms. These dealt with the
alleged ``ad hocracy'' at LI-UK. This investigation
was initially introduced to these issues, and to
other related questions which were soon to unfold,
by recurring comments from several interviewees
that stressed the ``diagnostic'' role of the CSS
measures. The company's Quality Manager, for
instance, characterized the measurements as
``information for identifying, in a diagnostic sense,
where a particular problem lies.'' He was echoed
by another manager, who described the measures
as ``focusing attention to key areas by bringing
them under the light''. And for his part, the Dis-
tribution and Customer Services Manager
observed bluntly: ``The measures made your mis-
takes appear.''
Hence, what gradually emerged was a deeper
understanding of The Customer as a calculable
space. The new measurements probed deep into
the workings of the studied organization, creating
an unprecedented urgency within it. In the
monthly Customer Service Meetings, more of The
Quanti®ed Customer's potential became realized.
Abrupt turns or large variances in the measured
variables would be crying for explanation. For-
tunately, measures could breed some new measures,
amplifying the e?ect of the original calculus. In the
company's jargon ``submeasures'' were at times
derived from the original ®gures. Factors ``standing
behind'' deviations of particular measures were
698 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
analyzed, dramatized and then discussed. ``Root
causes'' were identi®ed and held for examination.
The Commercial Director explained: ``If we found
important root causes they then became urgent
issues in the meetings''. The company's Field
Engineering Manager, recalling these purposes of
the meetings, also admitted: ``Some people felt
they were being put under the microscope''.
For instance in the practices of ®eld engineering,
a ``key issue'' that dominated the agenda of the CS
meeting in March 1991 concerned the company's
performance in responding to The Customer's
service calls. This was highlighted in the CSS in
the following terms:
Service response (breakdown calls) down to
78% this month. Work in hand to identify
causes. (Field engineering section, March
1991.)
In the same meeting, also invoice queries and
customer complaints had been identi®ed as objects
of attention. The new measurements indicated
clearly that The Customer was not satis®ed with
LI-UK's inaccurate invoicing routines. Incorrect
prices were being charged. And too many of the
company's products seemed to be out of stock
when The Customer needed them most. These
acute problems became exposed in the ``key
issues'' as follows:
Queries have continued at an average rate of
75 per day, adding to the backlog. (Invoice
queries section, March 1991.)
Stock outs improved at the start of the month
but fell away again towards the end. (Custo-
mer complaints section, March 1991.)
During 1991, invoice queries, ®eld engineering's
response to The Customer's technical problems
and The Customer's explicit complaints about
distribution and product quality continued to be
urgent problem areas. A ``diagnostic'' study of
these problems was pursued further at LI-UK, as
illustrated in the acknowledged ``key issues''
below:
56% of queries in July relate to price dis-
crepancies in Contracts, Industrial & Leisure,
and Promotional areas. (Invoice Queries sec-
tion, July 1991.)
Response to breakdowns fell below our target
of 90% for Food and Beverage Hygiene and
Industrial & Leisure. (Field engineering sec-
tion, July 1991.)
Distribution and product quality complaints
increased during October. (Customer Com-
plaints section, October 1991.)
But especially the systematic quanti®cation of
delivery's performance in The Customer's eyes
caused further alarm within the company in 1991;
some improvement was, however, registered
towards the end of the year. These operational
frictions became recognized and categorized as
``key issues'' in the following terms:
Delivery performance continues to be sig-
ni®cantly a?ected by stock shortages, although
all sectors except agricultural showed small
improvements. (Delivery of orders section,
June 1991.)
Average delivery size declined particularly in
Industrial and Leisure as a result of the high
number of splits [split orders]. (Delivery of
orders section, October 1991.)
Best delivery performance achieved this year.
(Delivery of orders section, November 1991.)
During 1992, the diagnostic investigation of the
urgent that concerned The Customer was pursued
with the same intensity at LI-UK. For example, The
Customer's continuing expressions of discontent
were again a central topic in the March 1992 meet-
ing. The ``key issue'' documented the hard facts:
Complaints overall increased by 59 over Feb-
ruaryÐstock shortages and damaged goods
predominate. Complaints for March repre-
sented 6.9% of orders received. (Customer
complaints section, March 1992.)
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 699
And in August 1992, for instance, product
quality in the manufactured equipment became
focused. The applied measures indicated that a
particular product category required six times
more service than other types of machines. The
``key issue'' was ®xed on the problem with these
words:
Scrubber Driers under guarantee continue to
show a much higher percentage of breakdown
than other groups of machines. (Product
quality section, August 1992.)
Moreover, in October 1992 the invoice queries
of The Customer would again become recognized
as a serious, acute problem-area. A ``root cause''
analysis yielded the following ``key issue'':
Damages & Pricing form the highest propor-
tion of invoice queries. (Invoice queries sec-
tion, October 1992.)
Nevertheless, by the year's end not much had
changed in The Customer's negative reactions
towards LI-UK, as presented in the CSS:
Areas of concern are short deliveries and
machine complaints. (Customer complaints
section, December 1992.)
Hence, because of The Customer's quanti®ca-
tion, such ``urgent issues'' as illustrated in the
examples above dominated the agenda of the CS
meetings. The urgent operational problems
became elevated into ocial ``key issues'' by the
Commercial DirectorÐon the basis of the evi-
dence of the novel calculus that had been installed
in the name of The Customer.
2.7. The making of a new order
With The Quanti®ed Customer's ``diagnostic''
knowledge, a restructured organizational order
could be introducedÐan order which would
replace the prevailing, incoherent ``ad hocracy''
around The Customer (Hopwood, 1986, pp. 17±
18). A new way of selecting which cues matter
and a new way of constructing the problematic
became established at LI-UK (Weick, 1995).
What were the most acute operational problems
which cried out for management attention?
Which urgent functional issues predominated
and demanded instant recognition? What organi-
zational initiatives were needed in speci®c activ-
ities? In the monthly meetings, the quantitative
knowledge of the CSS was used for ``seeing what
was going on in the business'', as an informant
observed. The Quanti®ed Customer now con-
stituted the systematic and ``objective'' assessment
of the urgently important. It would point out the
burning ``problems''Ðthe very ``key issues'' which
were to be acknowledged and acted upon at
LI-UK. And what the latest ``Customer Service''
measures focused on would naturally be
endowed with much organizational relevance.
Consequently, the measurements of LI-UK's
``failures'' in The Customer's eyes would give
prominence to certain types of operationally
signi®cant matters.
In the operational management process a new
order emerged. Because The Quanti®ed Customer
was fundamentally a Commercial initiative at LI-
UK, this knowledge embodied the values and
assumptions which emanated from accounting's
expert judgement. The Quanti®ed Customer was
an extension of accounting's arguably ``rational''
analysisÐan analysis that maintains a distance to
its objects. This quantitative knowledge reinforced
formal ways of seeing and reasoning (see Meyer,
1986). Hence, by following The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's guidance, the objects of organizational
attention had to ®t into the summarized, standar-
dized, and numerically documented format of the
CSS.
The operationally problematic became de®ned
with speci®c patterns of calculus. And within the
calculable categories of the CSS operational rea-
lity was constructed from computable units. With
The Customer's calculable space a more general
order would be established, overshadowing the
minutiae of concrete particularities. Re¯ecting on
this, the company's Customer Information Man-
ager, who regularly assisted the Commercial
Director in preparing the necessary quantitative
knowledge for the Customer Service Meetings,
noted the following:
700 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
You cannot rely on an emotional response.
You should quantify, try to be objective and
set realistic targets. You should measure.
Quite a number of objects which were not cal-
culable became, of course, marginalized. Or they
would not be included in The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's calculable model of LI-UK's acute reality in
the ®rst place (Robson, 1992, p. 688). Many oper-
ationally meaningful but elusive issues were not
captured by the quanti®cations of the CSS. Also,
the ®xed categories of The Quanti®ed Customer,
the identi®ed ``failures'' vis-aÁ -vis The Customer,
would often not conform with the exceptions and
individual ``cases'' of day-to-day business. Those
odd instances and more irregular ``failures'' which
had a qualitative, unique character, would not
become visible in The Customer's quanti®cation.
The idiosyncracies of The Customer, as will later
be shown, would go unnoticed.
However, the complexities of operational man-
agement were reduced. A more rigorous view of
necessary organizational actionsÐbased on the
calculative fundamentÐwas replacing the myopic
hunches and arbitrary gut feelings, the hallmarks
of ``ad hocracy''. A much needed simpli®cation of
the company's ambiguous world was underway.
With The Quanti®ed Customer, the heterogenous
elements of the environment and the irregularities
of the operations ®nally became neatly structured
into a more manageable space.
2.8. Reshaping action
It would, however, be hasty to assert that The
Quanti®ed Customer was only a matter of tran-
quilizing management consciousness, for much
more was at stake. In a short time The Quanti®ed
Customer reforged concrete organizational action.
With the CSS measurements pointing out the few
operationally critical problems, remedial ``actions''
were elaborated and ®nally initiated in the CS
meetings. Whilst chairing these meetings, several
accounts suggested that the Commercial Direc-
tor's role was central in the consideration of these
``actions''. The ``actions'' were subsequently dis-
cussed in the meetings and became then assigned
to concerned managers or other functional experts
for execution. ``About three hundred actions, of
which about twelve could be called major initia-
tives, were undertaken in 1991,'' for instance the
company's Customer Information Manager recal-
led the CS meetings.
What took shape was a rationale for reorganiz-
ing the most acute tasks. In the operational
``management of the urgent'', The Customer's
quanti®cation imposed a new discipline. The mea-
surements changed the organization's responses to
incidents that traditionally had belonged to the
dubious realm of the ``ad hoc''. A realignment was
underway, especially in how the company's func-
tional activities were responding to the often
abrupt turns and urgent demands of The Custo-
mer. A more formal script was now to be followed
in how the company's day-to-day processes of
operational action were arranged; in how the most
urgent organizational initiatives were acknowl-
edged, prioritized, and eventually launched. The
company's Customer Information Manager, for
instance, described the procedure of the CS meet-
ing along these lines:
The meetings went through in an orderly
fashion. We always started the discussion
from the measures, went through them, asked
questions and decided over the action part.
Whilst interpreting the pieces of evidence con-
cerning the Customer Service meetings, it
appeared as if ``hard'' quantitative data sustained
``cross-functional'' analysis of the company's
operational moves. Following the schedule of the
meetings, di?erent action alternatives were for-
mulated with the assistance of the quantitative
knowledge. These options and their consequences
were then evaluated in the context of the CS
meetings. Well-focused and synchronized actions
were considered and sometimes ®ercely debated;
``There was a lot of emotion in the meetings'', the
Commercial Director admitted. Internally con-
sistent e?orts were sought and di?erent opinions
on these were respected. Finally, an agreement
was usually reached. Co-ordinated actions were
launched for tackling the urgent and for removing
frictions in the now calculable areas of the
productive chain. Clearly assigned individual
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 701
responsibilities were imposed. The CS measures
®nally ``put people on the spot and created a
monitoring track'', as a manager observed. The
diverse ``ad hoc'' actions, it seems, yielded ground
for these more rationally managed e?orts.
For example, the previously illustrated ``key
issues'' in ®eld engineering and invoice queries of
March 1991 resulted in speci®c ``actions'' that
were documented in the CSS as follows:
Evelyn D. to analyze breakdown response.''
(Field Engineering section, March 1991.)
Implement short term measures to overcome
the backlog and reduce the outstanding
queries. Invite Rob O. [Chief Accountant] to
next meeting to discuss the e?ect of the high
query level on cash ¯ow. (Invoice queries
section, March 1991.)
In 1991 for instance the following actions were
also implemented, as a consequence to some of the
``key issues'' discussed earlier:
Organize pricing training. Present the next
meeting with reasons for the continued pricing
errors. (Invoice queries section, July 1991.)
Martin H. to be asked if the `60 duplicate
codes for Food and Beverage Hygiene equip-
ment can be changed at the next opportunity.
(Field Engineering section, July 1991.)
Compare order activity against complaints in
each Sales Operation. (Customer complaints
section, October 1991.)
De®ne core products for Industrial and Lei-
sure with G.W. (Delivery of orders section,
October 1991.)
And as a response to some problematized ``key
issues'' in 1992, for instance these ``actions'' below
were to be immediately executed:
Returned Persil damages to be inspected at
Lever Industrial Development Center. (Cus-
tomer Complaints section, March 1992.)
Clarify marketing policy to replacement of
machines under guarantee. (Product quality
section, August 1992.)
Investigate why it takes 5 days to process a
Food & Beverage 3rd party order from order
receipt to despatch. (Delivery of orders sec-
tion, September 1992.)
Review the marketing protocol that alerts the
pricing administrators of changes in packs.
(Invoice queries section, October 1992.)
Because the new calculable space suggested
novel forms of action, central parts of the organi-
zation now concentrated on ®nding concrete
answers to the particular problems which had
become highlighted by The Quanti®ed Customer.
Since organizational attention had become redir-
ected towards the ``key issues'', organizational e?ort
was forced into the much narrower alleys of the
proposed ``actions''. Instead of addressing other,
perhaps equally pressing concerns, the most urgent
action was reallocated to meet the problematized
and ocially acknowledged ``key issues''Ðwhich
were backed by the ``more objective'' numerical
data. Many rules of operational practice, in func-
tional areas like ®eld engineering and the compa-
ny's invoicing routines, were reshaped by this
formal knowledge. The widely practiced ``ad hoc
approaches'' for managing the organization's
dealings with The Customer had to make room
for a more disciplined and much more centralized
organizational endeavor.
2.9. The power in The Quanti®ed Customer
Because of these developments important
dependencies were rearranged. Also, the new knowl-
edge of The Customer exposed its intimate links with
power (Armstrong, 1994; Clegg, 1989; Ezzamel,
1994b; Foucault, 1980; Hoskin, 1994; Markus &
Pfe?er, 1983). With The Quanti®ed Customer, rela-
tive in¯uence in the organization's operational a?airs
was about to be concentrated to Commercial man-
agement. The accounting logic of approaching
operations and Commercial management's ten-
dency of acting on the advice of numbers could
702 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
now be extended into the innermost a?airs of the
functional units. The Quanti®ed Customer enabled
Commercial intervention into an array of activities.
With the CS measurements the Commercial
domain could in¯uence organizational incidents
deep inside the functional units. Commenting on
the Commercial Director's central role in the CS
meetings and his management style, the com-
pany's Logistics Manager, for instance, observed:
It was a numbers-person [The Commercial
Director] driving a basically qualitative activity
with an obvious quantitative bias.
Another manager had this to say:
The Customer Service meetings were very
much commercially led meetings. It was the
commercial people trying to raise quality.
A new and much stronger dependency between
Commercial management and the functional units
was becoming establishedÐat the expense of the
Sales domain. With the removal of what had been
termed ``ad hocracy'', Sales management's estab-
lished in¯uence over the functional units was
challenged. With the new calculative practiceÐ
extending commercial in¯uence and providing
functional management with ``defenses'' against
SalesÐan uncoupling of unocial horizontal
relays between Sales and the functional units was
about to take place. A Sales Manager commented,
with considerable reserve:
The meetings were very much the commercial
people doing their own thing. . .we were won-
dering what was going on.
2.10. The emergence of The Sales Customer
But in this particular setting the quanti®cation
of The Customer would not take place in a linear
fashion and without a contest. It can be argued, of
course, that organizations are locales where dif-
ferent knowledges emerge and co-exist in relative
harmony. However, it also seems that organiza-
tions are terrains where knowledges collide and
where resistance against a particular knowledge
can occur. Hence, what this investigation further
uncovered was the mobilization of a challenging
knowledge of The Customer. This knowledge was
not formalized in any way. It remained outside the
``ocial'' edi®ce of management systems and was
lacking in analytic sophistication. By contrast, this
competing knowledge was more practically rooted
and was articulated in other than quantitative
terms. The rival knowledge would have its own
particular ways to undermine The Quanti®ed
Customer. It would become the basis for the
resistance against The Customer's calculability,
setting a new trajectory for events.
The rise of the rival knowledge, its discursive
forms, as well as its disciplinary implications are
here discussed as the emergence of The Sales Cus-
tomer. The notion of The Sales Customer serves
as a useful abstraction and poses a contrast. For
The Sales Customer was ``owned'' by the compa-
ny's Sales Managers. This local interpretation of
The Customer was a central pilar of Sales' exper-
tise. It contained the subtle codes of manoeuvre
for the dynamic interplay between LI-UK's key
functional activities and the sudden jumps of the
market. Trying to understand the studied events,
one cannot avoid the picture of The Sales Custo-
mer as comprising something tacit and mundane.
In comparison with the programmatic rhetoric
behind The Quanti®ed Customer, The Sales Cus-
tomer was built upon ``little'' and, prima facie,
uninteresting local knowledge.
This ``little'', practical knowledge of The Custo-
mer came from the niches of the Sales organiza-
tion. In Sales the notion of The Customer was
based on a myriad of minor business practices, on
intrinsic market conventions, and on the needs of
a ``common'' and perhaps less glorious trade.
Instead of an arguably ``hard'' calculative basis,
the roots of The Sales Customer were elsewhere.
The Sales Customer had been made during the
countless days that Sales Managers had spent
``out'' in the ®eld. From an apprehension of the
detailed ``hygiene problems'', from being familiar
with the peculiar productive environments where
The Customer operated, and from the bonds to
the individuals that regularly dealt with LI-UK, a
detailed local knowledge of The Customer had
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 703
been constructed. This seemed to go beyond ana-
lytic exercises or surface impressions of ``the mar-
ket''. The Sales Customer represented understanding
about the varying needs and the unique operating
logics of all those enterprises and institutions that
had some business with the company.
In Sales, The Customer was constructed from
practical know-howÐfrom an unformalized,
``qualitative'' base material. The ``little'' knowl-
edge of The Sales Customer was an almost prosaic
part of the investigated context. It was, for exam-
ple, detailed knowledge of how the dosage pumps
of a food manufacturer should be calibrated for
liquid washers. It was knowledge about the
delivery problems to The Customer that could be
avoided if a reorder was soon issued to High
Wycombe. It was knowledge about when The
Customer in north London was ®nally having
enough about damaged soap packages or stock
outs in critical products.
Having been ignored in The Quanti®ed Custo-
mer's introduction and having to face its rapid
implementation, The Sales Customer took a di?er-
ent role. Instead of remaining an ordinary building
block in the Sales' claims of expertise, it stood up
on the organizational scene as a discursive entity.
It became externalized and articulated by the Sales
Managers (Nonaka & Konno, 1998, pp. 43±44). It
started to in¯uence the organizational debate
through a number of discursive elements. The
knowledge components of The Sales Customer
were identi®ed and were knitted into a vocabulary.
This critical vocabulary gradually took the shape
of an organizational discourse, widely dissemin-
ated throughout the organization by the Sales
Managers. The Sales Customer, another local
form of power/knowledge within the explored
context, would oppose The Quanti®ed Customer's
commercially-led expansion (Clegg, 1989; see
Ezzamel, 1994b, pp. 219±220; Foucault, 1980).
Whilst examining the Sales Managers' reactions
and their often harsh judgements on The Quanti-
®ed Customer's advance, something central to The
Sales Customer's discourse surfaced. These are
revelations about the substance in this rival
knowledge. They concern the alternative order
which was maintained by it. And they shed light
on the Sales domain's logic of actionÐhow the
Sales Managers handled the operationally urgent
in terms of ``ad hocracy''. Naturally, these judge-
ments should also be attached to the prevailing
organizational power arrangements and the dis-
cipline that were sustained by The Sales Custo-
mer's knowledge.
2.11. Mobilizing complexity and ``the speci®cs''
The core in the Sales Customer's knowledge
could be traced to LI-U.K.'s complexity. Because
the Sales Managers soon discovered the discursive
value of this complexity, they underlined how the
company had to operate in multiple market seg-
ments, in a heterogenous and dynamic environ-
ment. The Customer was not a clear-cut matter,
but was covered in ambiguity. As the Sales Man-
agers emphasized, The Customer was not one but
many. And The Customer was rarely a predictable
and stable entity. The Customer had shifting pre-
ferences, odd tastes and sudden whims. In this
light, the standardization and systematization of
The Customer's variable pro®le seemed a futile
e?ort. The Sales Customer remained embedded in
the complexity of the business. In a representative
comment on the quanti®cation of The Customer,
a Sales Manager maintained:
Measurement, in this business, is extremely
dicult because of the complexity. Customer
needs are all di?erent. . .When you make a
plastic bottle it is easy to measure. But our
product is complexÐnot simple at all. It is
dicult to measure for example your service
quality. What does it really mean to some
speci®c customers?
By ®rst dramatizing LI-UK's complexity, the
Sales Managers regained the organizational
initiative. They refocused attention on ``the spe-
ci®cs'' that mattered to The Sales Customer. ``The
speci®cs'' would, henceforth, appear as a dis-
cursive category. In the Sales jargon, ``the spe-
ci®cs'' implied critical knowledge of all the
relevant details and practices concerning The
Customer. Moreover, ``the speci®cs'' contained
the rules for coupling The Customer's wants to
internal processes at LI-UK with precision. An
704 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
understanding of The Sales Customer's most
recent problems and often idiosyncratic needs was
hardly possible without professional experience of
``the speci®cs''. This practical knowledge of ``the
speci®cs'', it was claimed, was always up-to-date.
And this knowledge would of course combine with
the Sales Managers' know-how on how to mix the
company's products and services into comprehen-
sive ``Total Hygiene Systems''. Thus, ``the spe-
ci®cs'' now gained a new signi®cance within the
debate around The Quanti®ed Customer.
The practical knowledge of ``the speci®cs'' was
often built upon tacit individual understandings
(Leonard & Sensiper, 1998; Polanyi, 1966). In the
organization's everyday speech it would some-
times be verbalized as idiosyncratic ``touches'',
``hunches'' and ``rules of thumb''. This knowledge
represented the intellectual capital of the Sales
ManagersÐthe gain from ®eld exposure. It con-
tained fragmented pieces of detail and cues of
what mattered in the ®eldÐmaintaining cognitive
models on how to make sense of The Customer's
problems (Weick, 1995). It sustained codes of
conduct on how to match The Customer's exi-
gencies with the relevant functional processes. The
knowledge of ``the speci®cs'' was a binding ele-
ment in the daily routines of the business. Just
what would be the safest remedy for the con-
tamination problems that had appeared in the
Northampton fast-food outlet? Or how is one to
deliver all of the 54 di?erent goods on time to the
Lancashire brewery which had altered its normal
purchasing schedule? And what should be done
about the hotel chain that once again complained
about damaged packages of Persil?
But the mundane knowledge of ``the speci®cs''
that provided the answers to such questions was not
to be calculated. It was not to be compressed into
quanti®ed categories. As a combination of indivi-
dually gathered ``soft'' facts and professional intui-
tion, the Sales Managers' knowledge of ``the
speci®cs'' would now stand against the attempt to
inject ``hard numbers'' into the organization in The
Customer's name. A Sales Manager, for instance,
criticized The Quanti®ed Customer along these lines:
What I always wanted was the analysis that
would show us the speci®c. Which complaints
were from which customers and so on. We
ought to have picked select areas that were
problems to us.
Another Sales Manager added:
I want to know speci®cs about why one of
our customers is not, for example, receiving a
product. This information was not helping
me much.
The calculable space of The Customer came
under assault. Instead of being welcomed as
``objective'' pieces of knowledge, the numbers that
represented The Customer became dubious prox-
ies for something more subtle that could not
meaningfully be quanti®ed. And furthermore, The
Quanti®ed Customer's knowledge could be
attacked by the Sales Managers as being too
monolithic. The CSS measures, it was claimed,
were too aggregated. The ``new'' measurements
were devoid of critical detail. At their worst, they
overshadowed the relevant ``speci®cs'' behind
summarized calculus. Crucial distinctions could
not be captured by The Quanti®ed Customer's
formalizations. With misplaced measurements one
would ``loose sight of individual customers'', the
Sales Customer's discourse warned. In a repre-
sentative comment, the company's Sales and
Marketing Director bluntly observed:
Details were lost in the total mix. The meet-
ings never brought to the surface the indivi-
dual items. If you measure too much things
get lost.
Another Marketing Manager, for his part,
recalled events in these terms:
It wasn't focused enough for the Sales Man-
agers. People were trying to get into the nitty-
gritty, but the detail wasn't there.
2.12. The order of ``real problems''
The order of The Sales Customer was a contrast
to what The Customer's quanti®cation suggested.
In the Sales vocabulary that became a central
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 705
object of this investigation, this order revolved
around ``real problems''. These ``real problems''
were now introduced by the Sales Managers as the
relevant issues that the organization should focus
on in day-to-day operations. From practical
knowledge of ``the speci®cs'', the ``real problems''
concerning The Customer would be extracted,
re¯ecting the Sales Managers' experience and tacit
sense of the de facto operational priorities in the
market. ``Real problems'' were directly connected
with The Customer's operationsÐwith the speci®c
needs where LI-UK's products and services yiel-
ded bene®ts and, ®nally, economic value for The
Customer.
As a result of the Sales' delicate ``touch'' of what
was going on with The Customer, ``real problems''
would stand out from the ¯ow of acute phenom-
ena. ``Real problems'' were the critical cues which
constituted ``the urgent'' (Weick, 1995). As an
informant recounted, the Sales Managers ``want
to know what they are doing todayÐnot what
happened yesterday''. They concentrate on their
personal sense of the most imminent and ®nan-
cially important. The emerging ``real problems''
are the building blocks that bring order into their
hectic, at times chaotic professional worlds. In
their experience of everyday business various
``problems'' appear in abundance. But it seemed
that The Sales Managers' perception of the most
pressing problems, their sense of the ``real pro-
blems'', constructs the Sales organization's view of
the operationally urgent. The ``real problems''Ð
arising from the ¯ux of ``the speci®cs''Ðare the
ones that matter in Sales. And what is acknowl-
edged as a ``real problem'' gets full recognition,
crying loudest for a solution. A ``real problem''
stands out as something which is coupled with
rapid action. One of the Sales Managers, for
instance, assured in a typical comment:
We are interested in real problems that we have
with customers and cost us a lot of money.
The Sales Managers would now claim that The
Quanti®ed Customer discarded the ``real pro-
blems'', producing operational inertia. In more
diplomatic terms, a Sales Manager observed: ``Of
course you may need some measures, but the key
thing is to solve the problem.'' The calculative
mechanism for ®xing the urgently relevant with
``new'' non-®nancial monitors was criticized. The
aggregated CSS measurements highlighted decon-
textualized and irrelevant ``key issues'', which
would lead the organization astray. With The
Sales' expert knowledge of The Customer, the
organization would instead concentrate on the
``real problems''. These would not emanate from
calculable sources but would be suggested by the
Sales Managers' judgement. The formal analysis
of numerical data or ``diagnostic'' studies of
abstract measurements and ``statistics'', as expres-
sed in the Sales vocabulary, were not the way for
capturing the urgently relevant. This organiza-
tional exercise in quantifying The Customer, the
Sales' discourse emphasized, had done enough
damage by confusing priorities. For instance one
of the Sales Managers maintained:
Some customer complaints are more impor-
tant than others, but this does not show in the
statistics.
Other typical reactions, critical of the CSS mea-
surements, went on as follows:
I attended as few Customer Service Meetings
as possible. Most of the time was spent
showing and analyzing these wonderful
charts. (Sales Manager.)
The concept of the Customer Service Meet-
ings was good, but we got too hung up with
the statistics. (Sales Manager.)
2.13. The logic of ``ad hoc'' action
The Sales Customer's knowledge also suggested
an alternative logic of organizational action. Also,
the Sales Managers would now argue for this
competing logic, as nothing less than the everyday
management of the company was under dispute.
How would the operationally urgent be dealt
with? The Sales Customer's logic of producing
action vis-aÁ -vis The Customer was something
di?erent than what the ``Customer focused''
measurements were initiating.
706 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
Facing The Customer as a calculable space, the
Sales Managers would stress their intricate knowl-
edge of the market and their ability to identify the
``real problems''. And the Sales Managers would
stress their competence to proceed immediately
into ¯exible ``ad hoc'' operational action, a super-
ior code of conduct in the fragmented and hetero-
genous market. ``Ah hoc'' actionÐso harshly
treated in The Customer's quanti®cationÐwould
follow unocial lateral linkages between the Sales
Managers and the concerned functional agents.
This form of action, it was maintained by the Sales
Managers, would connect without friction func-
tional expertise with those ``real problems'' which
caused The Customer's dissatisfaction. The Sales
managers stressed, for instance, how direct con-
tacts to the delivery function had been established.
If problems appeared ``you just communicate with
them on a daily basis'', a Sales Manager explained.
Another Sales Manager added in a critical tone: ``I
prefer to address Customer Service problems in
speci®c meetings with the relevant people involved.
Direct contacts are often more useful [than CS
meetings].''
``Ad hoc'' action remained in place as informal
horizontal management, giving de facto opera-
tional initiative into the hands of the Sales Man-
agers. As a mode of operating, it seemed to re¯ect
LI-UK's complexity and the pace of its markets. It
was inevitably unsystematic and was not based on
any ``hard'' data. The Sales Customer's opera-
tional knowledge showed little respect for formal
analysis, bypassing wider organizational discus-
sion in formal management meetings. It avoided
time-consuming decision processes. The Sales
Customer's vocabulary could produce an image of
unbureaucratic, focused actionЮrmly led by the
Sales Managers. Within Sales, it seemed, rational
processes of decision-making were deemed too
cumbersome for tackling the unpredictable opera-
tional situations that Sales Managers had to face.
The Sales Customer's resistance to The Customer's
quanti®cation can thus be interpreted as originating
in the ``irrational''management processes that pre-
vailed in the Sales territory (Brunsson, 1982, 1990).
During the incidents that soon followed the
introduction of the CSS measurements, The Sales
Customer's competing logic of action would resist
The Quanti®ed Customer. A critical discourse
would circulate again and again within the orga-
nization. It would underline the advantages of The
Sales Customer's ¯exible responses to the urgent.
At the same time, much emphasis was given to the
weaknesses of the new calculus that turned The
Customer into a calculable space. In the widely
circulating Sales jargon, the CSS measures
appeared as ``too historical for the sharp line of
the business'', as a Sales Manager explained. And
the gloomy consequences of the quantitative ana-
lysis were emphasized, as re¯ected in a comment
by a Sales Manager:
They spent too much time analyzing the situa-
tion to death. It produced paralysis by analysis.
Another Sales Manager added his opinion on
the ``new monitors'':
We can become obsessed by monitoring, but
in the end of the day you must show how it
helps the business.
By the force of The Sales Customer's dis-
cursively powerful logic, The Quanti®ed Customer
became portrayed as something quite di?erent
than what Commercial management had intended.
It became a backward-oriented, ``historical'' entity
instead of a space that could be better managed
here and now. For initiating rapid operational
action, it could not be relied upon. As a calculable
space, The Customer appeared as a bureaucratic
experiment and was reduced to an unpractical
accounting ideal. The Quanti®ed Customer was
further criticized as a creation which was detached
from the hectic rhythm of the business. In a typi-
cal observation, a Sales Manager maintained:
It was not pro-active enough. The measures
encouraged a too passive instead of an active
attitude.
2.14. The organizational discipline in The Sales
Customer
It should, of course, be emphasized that The
Sales Customer's knowledge, the order it sustained,
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 707
as well as its logic of action also legitimized a part
of the organizational discipline. The Sales Custo-
mer was linked with the persistent structures of
power at LI-UK (Clegg, 1989, pp. 190±193), since
this local knowledge held in place particular
arrangements of the ``proper'' organizational traf-
®c between the functional units and the Sales
Managers. It regulated important operational
processes. To a substantial extent, the ``little'' local
knowledge of The Sales Customer secured the
Sales Managers' relative positioning, as well as
much of their de facto organizational initiative
and executive power within the investigated
context.
Many of the company's operational decisions
and the speci®c forms of its day-to-day function-
ing depended on The Sales Customer's legitimacy
and authority. This local knowledge of The Cus-
tomer consolidated existing access channelsÐthe
``direct contacts'' into the functional domain. It
maintained the numerous relays and dependencies
between the functional activities and Sales. It was
in many ways entwined with the normal practices
of everyday business, with the recurring ``matrix-
type'' connections that took place between Sales
and functional activities, as for instance in what
concerned ``real problems'' in delivery and ®eld
engineering. Thus, The Sales Customer's resistant
counter-discourse should be interpreted as an
attempt to preserve existing organizational power
formations at LI-UK. These quite sedimented
micro-structures, lying behind the taken-for-gran-
ted appearance of how things were normally con-
ducted, had been disrupted by The Quanti®ed
Customer's emergence onto the studied site.
2.15. The ®nal act: restructuring along The Sales
Customer and the performance review
By mobilizing the operational advantages of
The Sales Customer discursivelyÐand by later
enhancing this locally grounded knowledge and
the related discourse with further negative argu-
ments concerning, for instance, the standards of
the CSS measures as well as the uncertain rela-
tionship between the measures and traditional
®nancial variablesÐthe Sales Managers would
prevent The Quanti®ed Customer from reshaping
the operational processes of this locale. Poignant
arguments from the Sales Managers, as illustrated
below, would give more strength to The Sales
Customer's mobilization at LI-UK:
You can make anything out of these statistics
and feel comfortable. But we cannot aim at
95% of the target. What we need is 100%.
Zero defects is what we really should aim at,
like they do in Japan.
There is of course a correlation between for
example deliveries and sales. But it is a sup-
posed thing, not a clear one.
Furthermore, the Sales Managers would also
move against The Quanti®ed Customer on a non-
discursive level by rarely attending the CS meet-
ings. ``The Sales representatives were missing'', for
instance the Field Engineering Manager observed.
This isolated the CS meeting into an e?ort domi-
nated by Commercial management, undermining
its organizational support and its credibility in
addressing ``Customer Service'' matters. It should
also be noted that the Sales Managers' explicit
criticism and their passive resistance in what con-
cerned the meetings were further ampli®ed by the
fact that the Customer Service measures, after
some initial successes at launch, did not show a
remarkably positive development. As the Com-
mercial Director admitted, the measures ``started
to plateau''.
As a consequence of the controversy between
these rival knowledges of The Customer, Com-
mercial management was forced to re-evaluate its
position and the entire structure of the organi-
zation from the beginning of 1993. The era of
The Quanti®ed Customer had lasted for almost 2
years. The Customer Service meetings were
abolished. They were replaced by ®ve separate,
minor ``new style'' Customer Service meetings, as
they were called. These business unit-speci®c
monthly meetings were each chaired by respec-
tive Sales Managers. The meetings involved the
company's key functional managers and addres-
sed the acute operational problems of the ®ve
business units. The CSS measures did not play a
signi®cant role in these gatherings. As it could be
708 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
observed, the most pressing operational matters
would now be discussed on a more ``qualitative''
basis, following The Sales Customer's ``little''
knowledge and logic of action. ``The Sales are
now judge and jury'', a key manager commented.
The Sales and Marketing Director, for his part,
observed:
Now the meetings have a very short term focus,
because they are led by the Sales people.
The Commercial Director commented on this
turn of events:
It was important for me to let go and start
moving responsibility. We recognized the
importance of di?erent customer groups.
More was soon to follow, however. The com-
pany's board tackled the issue of an organiza-
tional restructuring. From July 1994 a new
organization was adopted, reshu?ing the compa-
ny's structure and dissolving the extended in¯u-
ence of Commercial management vis-aÁ -vis The
Customer (see Appendix B). The Sales Managers
became ``Customer Sector Managers'', holding
under their authority the critical service resources
that previously were placed under Commercial
management. These resources are now managed
by each business unit's ``Customer Care Man-
ager,'' who handles ``any interface where The
Customer requires a service''. They accept an
``ownership of The Customer'', as one of these
managers explained. Commenting on this, the
Commercial Director admitted how essential it
was that LI-UK had taken ``another look at the
way we were organizing''.
But despite the contest between these two
knowledges of The Customer and the ®nal turn of
events, The Quanti®ed Customer would still not
be buried and put to rest. It would be somewhat
re®ned technically, becoming a more reduced cal-
culable space which did not interfere with the
processes of operational management. This served
the organization's need for a diplomatic solution.
In practice, a refashioned reporting system was
instituted. Previously, the monthly budget report
had contained only ®nancial data. Now, a
reshaped ``Performance Review'' would accom-
modate also some of the non-®nancial calculus
which initially had built The Quanti®ed Customer.
Hence, the more passive and unintrusive monitor-
ing by Commercial management of ``improve-
ment'', initially rather well-received by the
organization, ocially continued. All concerned
organizational parties seemed to accept this out-
come. The Quanti®ed Customer had been granted
an honorable retreat at LI-UK.
3. Conclusions and discussion
The paper has provided a detailed account of
how The Customer is transformed into a quanti-
tative knowledge. A real-life setting was explored
to cast light on The Quanti®ed Customer's intro-
duction, de facto workings, and reception within a
speci®c organizational site. Non-®nancial man-
agement accounting measures created a new cal-
culable space within the organization. This space
reshaped traditional segmentations of responsibility.
It made visible new dimensions of performance.
And it restructured the patterns of dependency and
power between organizational agents.
The paper's interpretation of events in this par-
ticular empirical context is, of course, partial and
subjective, restricted by a limited set of data, per-
ceptual biases, and certain theoretically informed
choices. As any piece of ®eld research which is
grounded in the events of one empirical site, the
study does not allow for generalizations across
organizations. Transforming The Customer into a
calculable space remains a complex task, which is
in many ways dependent on the unique organiza-
tional circumstances and other contextual factors
that surround this e?ort. The paper's theoretical
implications, however, point elsewhere than to
empirical generalizations across di?erent contexts.
Although caution is needed in drawing conclu-
sions from a single case with its own idiosyncracies,
the study suggests a number of propositions con-
cerning ``new'' quanti®ed entitiesÐsuch as The
Quanti®ed Customer. These propositions should
serve further investigations in this important ®eld
of management accounting enquiry and will assist
the conceptualization of the explored phenomena.
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 709
The events at LI-UK suggest that calculable
spaces like The Quanti®ed Customer will change
conventional management accounting and the
familiar tasks of the controller, bringing them
much closer to the complexities of everyday man-
agement. The ``new'' management accounting is
tightly coupled with the practical side of the
organization's acute concerns. Management
accounting now moves beyond the constraints of
®nancial analysis and the passive monitoring of
economic aggregates. It becomes a more active
management craft, addressing directly what it
deems urgent. Instead of controlling the major
courses of events at a distance, the new manage-
ment accounting is implicated with the day-to-day
issues, decisions and actions of a business. By
``owning'' a ¯exible calculable space that probes
deeply into the necessary operational details with
non-®nancial measures, management accounting
can expand its organizational in¯uence.
It seems, however, that this ``new'' calculable
space transforms organizational power relations
and is ®lled with controversy. The evidence of this
study suggests that the new calculable space focu-
ses interventions sharply into ``root causes'' of
operational instances. And in these interventions,
boundaries shift between accounting and other
organizational expertiseÐas between production
specialists and controllers in cost management
programs (Lukka & Granlund, 1997; Cooper,
1996). Management accounting takes more initia-
tive and becomes involved with intricate questions
that preoccupy other organizational ``experts''.
Controllers can take a more active role in these
decision making processes around speci®c opera-
tional issues. As between the Commercial Director
and the Sales Managers at LI-UK, tensions arise.
Organizational power formations are destabilized.
The new calculable space can become a space for
encounters between controllers and rival profes-
sional expertise.
The events at LI-UK especially illustrate how a
calculable space meets resistance built upon local
knowledge. As a calculable space, The Customer
was opposed by practical knowledge that initially
took tacit forms. But as soon as The Quanti®ed
Customer entered the territory of the rival organi-
zational expertise, this tacit knowledge became
externalized. It became mobilized as a critical
vocabulary, emphasizing what could not be cap-
tured by the new numbers. This resistant knowl-
edge and counter-discourse of ``the speci®cs'',
``real problems'', and ``ad hoc'' action, is sugges-
tive of what forms resistance to new calculable
spaces can take.
However, on a more general level this resistance
at LI-UK is also suggestive of what may under-
mine the new quanti®ed entities which are called
for in so many normative pronouncements.
Extending ever deeper into the organization's
operational dimension, the new non-®nancial
measures will probably meet the limits of what can
be expected from the increasing quanti®cation of
organizational life and prevailing management
practices. Systematic quanti®cation, even with
focused non-®nancial measurements, tends to
aggregate and standardize within the spaces where
it is being injected. Quanti®cation pays little
attention to the complexity of detail. But the
resistance that surfaced at LI-UK suggests that in
the domain of operational management detail
maintains critical signi®cance.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments
and suggestions of Thomas Ahrens, Anthony
Hopwood, Eamonn Walsh, John Burns, Kari
Lukka, Teemu Malmi, Eero Kasanen and two
anonymous referees on earlier versions of the
paper. Many thanks are also due to Ingrid Jeacle,
Sue Llewellyn, Jan Mouritsen, Peter Armstrong,
and Trevor Hopper who participated in the Fifth
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting
Conference in Manchester, UK, July 1997.
710 J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715
Appendix A
J
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t
y
2
4
(
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Appendix B
7
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Appendix C
Interviews
Person Interviewed Date Duration (min)
Marketing Services Manager LII 23.10.1992 140
Marketing Services Manager LII 3.11.1992 90
Marketing Services Manager LII 9.11.1992 120
Marketing Services Manager LII 18.11.1992 60
Controller LII 24.11.1992 60
Commercial Accountant LI-UK 25.11.1992 60
Chairman/Managing Director LI-UK 25.11.1992 60
Sales and Marketing Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 30
Personnel Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 70
Technical Director LI-UK 27.11.1992 45
Marketing Services Manager LII 5.1.1993 30
Customer Info Manager LI-UK 6.1.1993 100
Commercial Accountant LI-UK 14.1.1993 45
Distribution & Cust. Serv. Manager LI-UK 14.1.1993 90
Cust. Engineering Serv. Manager LI-UK 18.1.1993 100
Quality Manager LI-UK 18.1.1993 70
Commercial Director LI-UK 20.1.1993 60
Chief Accountant LI-UK 20.1.1993 45
Sales Managers 4 & 5 LI-UK 1.3.1993 75
Customer Engineering Serv. Manager LI-UK 4.3.1993 75
Sales Correspondents' Team Leader LI-UK 4.3.1993 120
Sales Manager 1 LI-UK 4.3.1993 70
Sales and Marketing Director LI-UK 9.3.1993 60
Sales Manager 2 LI-UK 10.3.1993 70
Corporate Marketing Manager LI-UK 10.3.1993 80
Logistics Manager LI-UK 10.3.1993 70
Senior Technical Manager LI-UK 11.3.1993 70
Customer Services Manager LI-UK 12.3.1993 90
Customer Info Manager LI-UK 16.3.1993 130
Sales Manager 3 LI-UK 18.3.1993 80
Credit Control Manager LI-UK 18.3.1993 60
Distribution & Cust. Serv. Manager LI-UK 18.3.1993 30
Design Engineer LI-UK 19.3.1993 75
Chairman/Managing Director LI-UK 23.3.1993 60
Chief Accountant LI-UK 23.3.1993 45
Commercial Director LI-UK 23.3.1993 70
Marketing Services Manager LII 25.3.1993 120
Technical Director LI-UK 1.4.1993 45
Controller LII 15.4.1993 45
Commercial Director LI-UK 7.7.1995 60
Marketing Services Manager LII (Telephone) 15.8.1995 30
Customer Care Manager LI-UK (Telephone) 17.8.1995 20
J. Vaivio / Accounting, Organizations and Society 24 (1999) 689±715 713
Appendix D
The measures of the ``customer service summary''
1. Product quality
Quality complaints (total and per sales
operation).
Proportion of serviced machines (total and
per machine type).
2. Delivery and stocks
Average drop size (total in tonnes).
Deliveries out of speci®cations (% of all
deliveries and per sales operation).
Orders without stock restraint (as % of all
ordersÐmonthly snapshot).
3. Field engineering service
Breakdown response in speci®cations (total
% and % per sales operation).
Field engineering jobs not completed (total).
4. Invoicing
Recorded invoice queries (total and per sales
operation).
Resolved invoice queries (total and per sales
operation).
5. Customer complaints
Total customer complaints (broken into
``stock'', ``distribution'', ``processing'', and
``other'' causes).
Customer complaints per sales operation
(broken into ``stock'', ``distribution'', ``pro-
cessing'', and ``other'' causes).
6. New business opportunities
Recieved business enquiries (total and per
sales operation).
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