Description
The publication of ‘‘Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe, D., & Alawattage,
C. (2007). Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives. London, New York: Routledge) provides an
occasion for considering the extent to which management accounting has become a normal social science.
Management accounting as normal social science
q
Hendrik Vollmer
University of Bielefeld, Faculty for Sociology, P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
Abstract
The publication of ‘‘Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe, D., & Alawat-
tage, C. (2007). Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives. London, New York: Routledge) provides an
occasion for considering the extent to which management accounting has become a normal social science. This review
essay argues that management accounting is a social science de?ned by a pluralism of approaches, and it identi?es the gen-
eralization of social perspectives on management accounting, and particularly their ability to transcend technical and eco-
nomic aspects of accounting practice, as crucial components in reproducing this speci?c form of expertise. Contrary to
Kuhnian expectations, this social science hosts a multiplicity of paradigms, and its scientists are not exclusively concerned
with the subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the phenomena under study. Instead, as social scientists management accoun-
tants are generalists as much as they are specialists.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘When the individual scientist can take a para-
digm for granted, he need no longer, in his major
works, attempt to build his ?eld anew, starting from
?rst principles and justifying the use of each concept
introduced. That can be left to the writers of text-
books. Given a textbook, however, the creative sci-
entist can begin his research where it leaves o? and
thus concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and
most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena that
concern his group.” (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 19–20)
Over the last four decades, a remarkable set of
institutions and institutionalized events, publica-
tions and networks perpetuating the collective
enterprise of social research in accounting has been
established. However, among scholars in this ?eld,
the lack of textbooks articulating the perspective
peculiar to their emerging scienti?c community has
remained an unremedied cause of lament. Maybe
scholars have privately believed that, as far as the
publication of books is concerned, ‘‘the scientist
who writes one is more likely to ?nd his professional
reputation impaired than enhanced” (Kuhn, 1962,
p. 20), and such attitudes may have been forti?ed
by the economized paper production brought about
by research assessment exercises. More fundamen-
tally though, the very existence of a sustainable
position from which accounting as a social science
could have been articulated in textbook form may
have been uncertain, and projecting such a position
may have been too shaky a foundation for consider-
ing to invest in a major publishing e?ort.
The release of ‘‘Management accounting change:
Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe &
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.06.004
q
A review essay of Wickramasinghe & Alawattage (2007).
Anthony Hopwood and Andrea Mennicken provided helpful
comments on earlier drafts.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
Alawattage, 2007) is signi?cant not only because it
o?ers an alternative to classic texts in instructing
management accounting students, but also because
it covers some distance towards projecting manage-
ment accounting as a regular social science associ-
ated with a distinct set of problems and research
interests shared by a collective of scholars. While
there have been some notable attempts at represent-
ing the state of the art within social research in
accounting in edited volumes (Cooper & Hopper,
1990; Hopper, Scapens, & Northcott, 2007; Hop-
wood & Miller, 1994) and occasional book-length
essays (Macintosh, 2002; Roslender, 1992), the
book by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage clearly
presents the most ambitious attempt to date at com-
prehensively delineating management accounting as
a collective project in social science, a project set to
grow towards some state of maturity.
Management accounting technology cannot be
altogether marginal to this project, and there is at
present no other book negotiating between aca-
demic research and technical education as consis-
tently as Wickramasinghe and Alawattage proceed
throughout their ?ve hundred pages constituting
an accounting textbook in the full sense of the term.
Given the temporal gap between the emergence of
the social research community in accounting, the
institutionalization of crucial means of sustaining
and reproducing this community (journals, net-
works, institutions), and the present ?rst attempt
to represent this collective enterprise authoritatively
in one publication, this books provides an opportu-
nity to consider the extent to which management
accounting has by now indeed reached a state of
normal science amenable to textbook representa-
tion, encompassing academic, pedagogical and
practical, epistemological, historical and technical
aspects of the expert practices associated with it.
If the rifts separating the di?erent perspectives
among social researchers and practitioners in man-
agement accounting can be bracketed for the sake
of mapping the territory this epistemic community
has come to inhabit, does this map represent an ade-
quate knowledge base for future practitioners and
researchers? What are the crucial moves in project-
ing and sustaining management accounting as a
social science, in maintaining its scienti?c integrity,
and in defending it against domination by one or
the other of the more established scienti?c disci-
plines? And given some sustainable development
with textbooks like the present one providing stu-
dents and researchers with sets of rati?ed concepts,
approaches, problems and theories, where will the
creative social scientist in management accounting
be left to begin her future research ‘‘on the subtlest
and most esoteric aspects” of the phenomena under
study, concern with which would constitute the
Kuhnian hallmark of a mature science? What would
these subtle aspects be? Or would management
accounting research practiced as a normal and
mature social science still be fundamentally di?erent
from the kind of cumulative knowledge production
visualized by Thomas Kuhn?
Historicizing management accounting
The primary move of Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage in bracketing the variety of activities
and positions associated with practicing and inves-
tigating management accounting is to contextual-
ize them in a broad sociohistorical narrative.
This is why the authors have made the observa-
tion of historical change the organizing principle
of their text. This text discusses management
accounting change not merely as a historical fact,
but introduces the study of change as a didacti-
cally superior point of access to management
accounting knowledge and practice: ‘‘As a learn-
ing methodology, change can broaden our under-
standing of management accounting. It leads us to
realize that management accounting is a social sci-
ence rather than a mere set of technical tools
available for practice”. (Wickramasinghe & Ala-
wattage, 2007, pp. 10–11)
1
In fact, the authors go as far as claiming to
include all possible perspectives on o?er for
investigating management accounting change from
this outlook (p. xviii). The structure of their nar-
rative is constituted by contextualizing accounting
technologies and perspectives, practices and
investigations historically, and particularly by
referring technical developments to ‘‘evolution in
socio-economic systems” (p. 1). While there is
no ?rm de?nition of accounting to guide the
reader, and di?erent world views on the subject
(rather than a single paradigmatic one) are
acknowledged to compete (pp. 4–10), the authors
expect their historical reframing of management
accounting approaches and perspectives to give
‘‘a complete pedagogical approach” (p. 11). From
1
Subsequently, page numbers will refer to this book unless
otherwise noted.
142 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
an educational perspective, this text leaves nothing
to be desired, signposting its narrative consis-
tently with boxes for learning objectives, key
terms, short summaries, each chapter ending with
a set of questions allowing to test for reproductive
as well as critical reading. As far as the overall
approach to presenting the material is concerned,
such historical framing of approaches and
perspectives may be considered a proven method,
familiar from management textbooks and
prominent with the few among them aspiring to
articulate management specializations as applica-
tions of social science (e.g. Legge, 2005, pp. 44–
100).
The historization of management accounting
allows Wickramasinghe and Alawattage to
recount a heterogeneous cast of organizations,
technologies, researchers and practitioners within
a single narrative, and it allows them to attribute
distinct epistemological categories to speci?c his-
torical constitutions of management accounting.
In this narrative, singling out certain practices
and approaches as representing the traditional,
managerial, normative and in any case, more nar-
row view need not contradict, but can e?ectively
support the kind of pluralistic reprocessing of
practices and approaches, technologies and per-
spectives performed by the authors. Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage have been careful not to
overstate the di?erences between what might be
considered a ‘‘traditional” textbook view of man-
agement accounting and the social science outlook
they would like to o?er. There is no identi?cation
of the technical with the managerial, of the nor-
mative with the economic, neither is there a cate-
gorical segregation of traditional (conventional,
‘‘hard”, economic, technical, etc.) and nontradi-
tional (alternative, ‘‘soft”, social, critical, etc.)
approaches. Instead, the overall historical theme
is to di?erentiate mechanistic from post-mechanis-
tic approaches by contextualizing them histori-
cally, while various technical, social,
organizational, cultural, ideological or theoretical
aspects reappear across the times and spaces
covered.
Still, this kind of history turns out to be partial
to reconstructing management accounting as a
social science transcending narrower projects of
providing technical ?xes, and it appears to frus-
trate making management accounting the domin-
ion of a particular scienti?c discipline or school
of thought. Associating the historical transcen-
dence of management accounting and its dis-
courses with a pluralization of approaches and
perspectives is the authors’ implicit theme. In their
portrayal of historical management accounting
change, social scientists have been engaging other
experts without superseding or displacing them,
and without themselves being superseded or dis-
placed. Social scientists have always been there
alongside others in observing, commenting on,
and contributing to management accounting prac-
tice. This kind of competitive coexistence is mani-
fest during the mechanistic period of management
accounting, embedded in Taylorist, Fordist and
bureaucratic regimes of production and gover-
nance, as well as their various discourses, just as
it persists under the historical conditions associated
with what the authors term post-mechanistic man-
agement accounting. Wickramasinghe and Alawat-
tage demonstrate how both of these most general
historical constitutions of management accounting
can be embraced from economic as well as from
critical or from interpretive perspectives (which is
the broadest di?erentiation of perspectives used
in the book).
The authors thus demonstrate the historically
pervasive multiplicity of approaches for the
embedding of management accounting in the
‘‘mechanistic type of organizational form” (pp.
46–50), but also for the ‘‘multilayered” and ‘‘mul-
tifaceted” historical conditions of more recent
developments (pp. 211–218). Social scientists talk-
ing about the uncertainties and ambiguities of
postmodernity are placed in a common arena with
practitioners and economists talking about the
need to transcend the ?nancial towards the strate-
gic, the local towards the global, or about govern-
ing enterprises across spatially dispersed
organizational networks. While indeed more and
more social science appears to become necessary
in trying to keep pace with management account-
ing change, narrower economic approaches like
transaction-costs and principal-agent models still
turn up comparatively late in the historical narra-
tive (p. 365 et seqq.). The latter approaches are
not treated as intrinsically alien to the growth of
management accounting as a social science, but
as integral to it, and particularly so in contempo-
rary post-mechanistic, post-bureaucratic condi-
tions (pp. 373–378).
This is a transcendent, if not cooptive perspec-
tive identifying several overarching historical
trends within management accounting constitu-
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 143
tions.
2
For example, the authors see an increasing
emphasis on the choice of managerial intentions
(p. 282) and a trend towards post-bureaucratic
organizational forms requiring ‘‘governing by rela-
tions” (pp. 316–319). As far as historical continu-
ities are concerned, crises of control repeatedly
appear as causes of management accounting change
(e.g. pp. 324–328), and trouble persists for research
in management accounting in keeping up with the
speed of changes in their areas of expertise (p.
344). The overall historical picture that the reader
is left with by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage is
one in which historical developments have opened
up an epistemically generous space in which social
research both of a more economic and managerial
as well as of a more critical and interpretive outlook
becomes associated with management accounting
change without approaches and perspectives com-
ing to substitute one another.
The social and the technical
Readers more closely associated with one or the
other approach to management accounting dis-
cussed by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage may
perhaps ?nd their representation of approaches
and perspectives as historically coexisting some-
what complacent. Researchers with a distinctively
sociological outlook may, for example, feel that
the claims of utilitarian approaches to de?ning
accounting technologies as instruments are worth
challenging immediately. Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage seem well aware of the contestable dis-
ciplinary and epistemological issues underlying
their narrative, and the attentive reader will not
fail to notice which side they are on. The authors
use the term ‘‘calculative practice” to refer to tech-
nical aspects of management accounting through-
out their text, and they demonstrate early on that
costing is a social process (pp. 53–56). Still, the
textbook form of presentation may have discour-
aged Wickramasinghe and Alawattage from fully
unpacking the broader issues associated with the
competition of di?erent forms of scienti?c expertise
in investigating, understanding, criticizing, gradu-
ally de?ning and rede?ning management account-
ing technologies. In favour of representing
adequately the coexistence of di?erent research tra-
ditions, the degree of discretion implied in project-
ing management accounting as a social science to
be extended in one way or another remains some-
what underarticulated in their text. Didactically,
this supports the appreciation of the intrinsic mer-
its of approaches competing in the ?eld, as much
as it fosters a pleasantly invitational style of pre-
senting an open ?eld of practices and re?ections.
Strategically though, one might wonder if the
coherence of management accounting as a social
science can ultimately be sustained on the basis
of juxtaposing approaches and perspectives.
Reproducing management accounting as social sci-
ence might in some form or the other bring about
integrative processes more powerful than the com-
petition of various forms of expertise represented
in this textbook.
Even if these authors themselves do not
attempt to bring such closer integration about,
their e?ort to represent the ?eld in textbook
encourages speculation about where potential
bases for integration are likely to be found. Locat-
ing these bases does not call for a mere apprecia-
tion of the variety of current approaches and
perspectives. From the present state of the art,
it, on the one hand, has to be a matter of inven-
tive imagination rather than of identi?cation, of
building rather than ?nding the positions around
which social research might for some time coa-
lesce. On the other hand, respective ambitions
are not altogether alien to some of the competing
approaches and perspective. In any case, with
integration being either a process intrinsic to the
growth of a science, or an explicit goal of more
ambitious attempts at theory-building, current
approaches and perspectives might have to be
evaluated more strategically as potential allies or
adversaries in reconstructing the ?eld in one or
the other way, and picking alliances cannot be
e?ected without privileging some approaches and
marginalizing others. While staying clear of
enunciating such choices, the text by Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage does indicate some crite-
ria how to generate and defend positions of
strength within the ?eld, positions from which
stronger claims at reconstruction could be
articulated.
2
It should be noted that, as broadly as the authors set up their
sociohistorical narrative programmatically, substantively it turns
out to largely concentrate on Anglo-American business organi-
zations. This adequately re?ects the regional origins of that
particular discourse which might now claim some license to be
considered the global academic accounting discourse, but it is
regrettable that the authors have not made this bias more explicit,
if only in order to re?exively locate their own narrative
sociohistorically.
144 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
Firstly, the authors appear to suggest that the
ability to translate results of academic research into
applicable knowledge is a crucial asset which com-
peting approaches, and ‘‘critical” ones in particular,
will need to develop and cultivate (p. 131). Sec-
ondly, they indicate that becoming involved in the
formulation and implementation of corporate strat-
egy is an increasingly critical step in gaining recog-
nition of technical skills, in reproducing the
demand for these skills and improving their stand-
ing with respect to other forms of expertise (pp.
239–270). Both intuitions appear to inform the
authors’ appraisal and criticism of the Balanced
Score Card and its academic discourse (pp. 271–
278) which concludes by calling for a broader
appreciation of the political character of strategy
formulation (p. 278), and both intuitions resonate
with placing the trend towards strategy in the con-
text of post-mechanistic accounting (pp. 233–235).
After having discussed the BSC as well as activity-
based costing (pp. 288–305), this section of the book
culminates in proclaiming a post-mechanistic con-
?guration of cost accounting (p. 314). Thus thirdly,
as a common denominator of the ?rst two intu-
itions, the proper direction in which to elaborate
management accounting as a social science appears
to be resting well in investigating accounting
technologies in ever broader appreciations of social
contexts. And bringing such expertise at contextual-
ization to bear on problems of formulating, imple-
menting, criticizing and recalibrating corporate
strategy will in this view provide ample future
opportunities for transforming it into a skill that
is both marketable and to be regularly updated by
social research (cf. Jo¨ nsson, 1998).
Somewhat ironically, the post-mechanistic con-
?guration of accounting may therefore not only be
the era in which a more ‘‘social” understanding of
management technologies gains recognition, but
also the one in which technical expertise increasingly
becomes social expertise. As picking, implementing,
and practicing technologies becomes involved in
sustaining and supporting, if not gradually de?ning
corporate strategy, the organizational embedding of
management accounting becomes a key issue not
only for accounting academics, but also for
accounting practitioners. The management accoun-
tant becomes a social engineer, if not a social scien-
tist (cf. Ahrens & Chapman, 2007, pp. 21–23). That
it becomes harder and harder to dissociate the social
from the technical, up to the point where the two
are almost indistinguishable, is amply re?ected in
an academic literature which has been embracing
concepts and approaches from science and technol-
ogy studies (e.g. Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller &
O’Leary, 1996; Robson, 1992). It might also be a
prime reason why management accounting appears
to drift towards reconstruction as a social science.
The approaches best suited for such a reconstruc-
tion may be the ones that a?ord a rearticulation
of technology as an intrinsically social phenome-
non, and this is one of the more forceful messages
implicit in the textbook by Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage.
The social and the economic
The merging of social and technical aspects of
accounting practices correlates with extensive aca-
demic and organizational discourse about their co-
constitution, and it opens up spaces for competing
experts and approaches of various backgrounds.
Among the competitors, there are those dominant
contenders in reconstructing the ?eld of manage-
ment accounting which appear set to more force-
fully try to make it the dominion of one or the
other social science franchise. As already men-
tioned, alongside social scientists practicing various
theoretical and empirical approaches, Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage place the e?orts of those rear-
ticulating management accounting as a potential
branch of that particular social science called
economics.
On the one hand, the chances for these experts to
make their science, models, formulas and calculative
practices obligatory passage points for reconstruct-
ing the ?eld of management accounting do not
appear to di?er categorically from those of more
ambitious approaches at formulating and applying
other variants of general social theory. Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage draw a clear distinction
between established accounting techniques and their
economic modelling (pp. 159–161). This allows
them to specify the contribution of neo-classical
economics to management accounting in providing
decision-making tools (pp. 161–163) or informing
capital budgeting (pp. 190–199). But rather than
treating economic reasoning as generally intrinsic
to accounting practice (as some utilitarian
approaches would have it), the authors subse-
quently draw attention to the idea that historically
it might just have been the other way around, with
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 145
accounting providing a meta-theory, or at least a
master-metaphor of economics (p. 203).
3
On the other hand, economics has undoubtedly
had some success in establishing its models and
methods as points of reference for designing and
marketing accounting technologies. While Wickra-
masinghe and Alawattage are not concerned with
the merits of what has been called positive account-
ing theory (which is not even mentioned in the
book), they discuss both principal-agent theory
and transaction-cost economics in a general chapter
on ‘‘neo-classical theories of management account-
ing change”. Still, this part of the book on ‘‘rational
perspectives on management accounting change”
does not conclude with a celebration of neo-classi-
cism, but instead culminates in an appraisal of con-
tingency-theoretical research. The reason for giving
contingency theory such a high pro?le is the recog-
nition of its dual role in serving both academic and
managerial interests, in providing both descriptions
of accounting systems and practical guidance to
managing them (pp. 391–392). The authors illus-
trate this with respect to how degrees of environ-
mental uncertainty have been found to correlate
with the formalization of management accounting
systems (p. 406). And again, history turns out to
be kind to approaches that contextualize accounting
more broadly in organizational and social environ-
ments, while neo-classical economics ends up being
somewhat academically sterile. The future standing
of economic rationality under post-mechanistic,
post-bureaucratic, overall more uncertain and inse-
cure conditions might then be considered to be sub-
ject to the extent of its permeability to considering
realities less clean than formal modelling would
have them. In such a perspective, economic
approaches would increasingly be successful only
to the extent that economics becomes more like
other social sciences in appreciating embeddedness,
context, practices, etc. Quite aptly then, this part of
the book is not titled ‘‘economic” but ‘‘rational
perspectives”.
That this slight impertinence with regards to neo-
classical scholarship remains tacit in the text again
manifests the overall tolerant appreciation of coex-
isting approaches characteristic for the authors’ nar-
rative, and it might implicitly attribute a willingness
to coexist to neo-classical scholarship that in fact it
does not cherish. One may thus ask if social scien-
tists would in the long term not need to more proac-
tively defend the pluralistic articulation of di?erent
research paradigms against attempts at remapping
the territory of management accounting in terms
of one or the other set of models. Principal-agent
and transaction-cost approaches might have helped
to make economic reasoning more sensitive to
empirical problems, but they also allow it to make
a greater share of social reality subject to economic
modelling. If neo-classical economics makes its sub-
stantial contributions to management accounting as
a social science by taking on the pretenses of a gen-
eral social theory, does this not create the risk that
the emerging social science of management account-
ing may in the end become much like economics – if
economic modelling was not more persistently
challenged?
This is a risk other social sciences like sociology
have been confronted with for some time. The reac-
tions have ranged from wholesale enthusiastic pro-
motion (Becker, 1976), controlled adoption of
speci?c elements of neo-classical economics (Cole-
man, 1990, pp. 18–19) to o?ering alternative, social
economics (Lebaron, 2003), while the outright rejec-
tion of economic reasoning has remained, perhaps
surprisingly, somewhat marginal. The possibilities
of and limits to generalizing neo-classical economics
towards a general social theory have been little dis-
cussed (Za?rovski, 2000), and while di?erences of
disciplinary cultures across sociology and econom-
ics have been emphasized (e.g. Hirsch, Michaels,
& Friedman, 1990), there have also been high hopes
for reciprocal enrichments (Smelser & Swedberg,
1994). In very general terms, the last three decades
have seen increasing contact between economics
and sociology, be it in terms of competition, argu-
ment, cooperation, appreciation or rejection. And
perhaps it is after all not surprising, that right
now some more sustained interest in accounting
gradually appears to emerge from such contacts. If
sociologists for the time being continue to lag
behind in engaging accounting issues, it is surely
interesting that the more persistent attempts in
investigating calculative practices and the role of
numbers in economic life have taken place in the
context of attempts to sociologically reconstruct
the working of economics as a science (e.g. Breslau,
2003; Callon, 1999; MacKenzie & Millo, 2003). If
one reaction of sociology to the challenge of eco-
nomics is understanding economics as a social phe-
nomenon, accounting scholars may have something
3
Cf. Chiapello (2007) for a recent elaboration of this general
idea with respect to Marxist economics.
146 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
to o?er as much as something to gain: some skill at
reconstructing economics, its concepts, models and
practices sociologically.
If in management accounting practice and
research, the social and the economic intermingle
as much as the social and the technical, it will
become increasingly important to demonstrate the
social within the economic, particularly for those
accounting scholars defending their a?nities to
sociological inquiry. The latter will need to defend
their approaches, concepts, theories, investigations
and results against economic reconstruction as
much as they have in the past set them apart suc-
cessfully from the technical-utilitarian articulation
of accounting issues. But unlike the social under-
standing of accounting technology, the social recon-
struction of accounting economics has yet to
become a pervasive current in academic discourse,
as the sociology of technology has yet to be accom-
panied by an equally robust sociology of economics.
Generalizing the social
To some extent, this challenge to social inquiry
might be re?ected in the authors’ prominent place-
ment of political economy – perhaps the historically
most prominent research tradition aiming to pro-
vide an alternative sociological form of economic
analysis – as a general approach for investigating
management accounting change. But notions like
‘‘labor process” and ‘‘mode of production” do not
by themselves make an issue of how economic phe-
nomena are socially constituted, and sometimes
using these concepts might even tempt to take an
economic character of social phenomena for
granted, while political, ideological or other ‘‘social
aspects” end up being add-ons. Investigating the
social and political implications of economic activi-
ties does remain an important project, but in the
face of economistic challenges the very substance
of these activities may need to be more thoroughly
addressed as socially constituted. While taking on
this task may today be asking too much from a
management accounting textbook arguing from a
position of established wisdom, is it too much to
ask from management accounting as a social sci-
ence? Wickramasinghe and Alawattage give clear
indication it is not.
They do not stop at traditional concepts of polit-
ical economy, but conclude their text with a chapter
that urges the reader to move ‘‘beyond political
economy of management accounting change”. After
14 chapters the titles of which almost invariably
direct the reader ‘‘towards. . .”, ?nally, it is time to
move from instruction to practice, time for the
authors to discharge their students, addressing them
directly in this ‘‘?nal phase of this text, which could
be your starting point for going beyond this book
and researching the changing world of management
accounting” (p. 442).
Some of the authors’ preceding choices in catego-
rizing sociological approaches as falling into either
‘‘interpretive” or ‘‘critical political economy” are
contestable. Work in the actor-network-theory tra-
dition, placed by the authors in the ‘‘interpretive”
current of social research, for example, originally
had a strong tendency to deny being altogether
interested in knowledge as belief, meaning or inter-
pretation (cf. Latour, 1988, pp. 218–228). The treat-
ment of Foucauldian research as a welcome
extension of political economy passes over the his-
torical disa?ection of these strands of accounting
scholarship (cf. Hoskin, 1994; Neimark, 1990),
which continues to be interesting to explore for stu-
dents and scholars alike. Also, the order of presen-
tation from interpretive to political economy
approaches somewhat obstructs the possibility that
interpretive could supplement and possible extend
‘‘critical” approaches, for example that political
economy might itself be treated as a set of interpre-
tive microstructures (cf. Brown, 1978). Yet the
authors do mention microsociological criticisms of
macrostructural approaches (pp. 475–476) and
explore possibilities of moving management
accounting research towards adopting more general
sociological approaches, for example in combining
Foucauldian and Habermasian perspectives (p.
500). Why consider setting up such odd couples if
not in order to establish more general theoretical
positions which would allow researchers to move
from micro- to macro-analyses, from political to
interpretive practices, practices to structures, insti-
tutions to participants, technologies to discourses,
and back again?
The conclusion of this textbook narrative there-
fore reiterates that the most fundamental issue in
reproducing management accounting as a social sci-
ence is establishing and maintaining multiple posi-
tions from which the full range of social phenomena
associated with accounting practices can be recon-
structed. This calls for projecting positions from
which the social can be generalized as transcending
technical and economic, cultural and institutional
aspects of accounting practice, and this pluralistic
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 147
narrative suggests that rather than one, a multitude
of such positions is desirable. While Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage locate such positions ‘‘beyond”
established wisdom, in one very crucial respect man-
agement accounting has by then already been pro-
ven to be up to the level of contemporary social
science. After all, the hallmark of contemporary
social science might just be its ability to pluralistical-
ly switch between positions of potential universality,
if of Marxist, Foucauldian, constructivist or Hab-
ermasian provenance. This characteristic might not
sit well with imagining a state of normal social sci-
ence conforming to Kuhnian standards of mature
sciences uni?ed by single paradigms. Nevertheless,
the pluralism of approaches and perspectives de?nes
a state of the art which for social sciences has empir-
ically become normal and which most of its
researchers will actually ?nd worth preserving.
Defending this normality against one or the other
pretender claiming to reconstruct the social in the
image of a particular theory or model of reality does
not merely call for analytical criticism. It calls for
inventing and sustaining a multiplicity of general
theories able to articulate the social in transcending
diverse technologies, practices, economies, cultures
and institutions. In this sense, generalizing the
social, identifying it in its multiple facets where it
has not been identi?ed before might de?ne the
intrinsic momentum of establishing and extending,
reproducing and defending management accounting
as a social science. And one cannot help to hope
that the present as well as subsequent textbooks pre-
mised on maintaining this momentum will success-
fully encourage their readers to move ‘‘beyond”.
Which is another way of saying that management
accountants should as social scientists ultimately
aspire to be generalists at least as much as they
claim to be specialists.
Beyond textbook performances
The book by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage
thus in many respects impressively demonstrates
the extent to which management accounting already
has become a normal social science. This social sci-
ence, like all the others, struggles with competing
e?orts at de?ning positions from which to investi-
gate the constitution of social phenomena and
reconstruct theories, methods and applications
accordingly. This social science has, perhaps more
obtrusively than most others, been confronted with
the social character of technological changes, partic-
ularly those claimed to be based on its very own
kind of expertise, as much as with the inextricable
involvement of economic reasoning, its models
and practices in the constitution of contemporary
social life. In both respects, management accounting
stands out from other social sciences rather than
being a marginal contender among other kinds of
social expertise. With respect to the normal charac-
ter of this social science, Wickramasinghe and Alla-
watage have been extraordinarily careful in
packaging the least normal version compatible with
a textbook presentation, which, perhaps paradoxi-
cally, most e?ectively illustrates just how much of
a normal social science management accounting
has become. The multi-paradigm character of pres-
ent-day social science is re?ected in the authors’
projection of management accounting change as
opening up a space for a variety of divergent
approaches, rather than being associated with a
‘‘process of normalization” which Thomas Kuhn
saw as de?ning the route to normal science (Kuhn,
1962, p. 17).
One might then be tempted to draw a distinction
between normal social science and normal normal
science. Serious doubts about taking the progress
of natural science as a blueprint have always been
common among social scientists,
4
and knowledge
cumulation in the social sciences often appears to
follow a rather di?erent pattern than the one envis-
aged by Kuhn (e.g. Alexander & Colomy, 1998, pp.
31–36). Normal social science is likely to remain a
battleground contested by multiple approaches
and perspectives trying win ground upon each
other’s territories. For the social scientist, the most
‘‘subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural
phenomena” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 20) might remain the
most general ones, de?ned by a quest for better the-
ories allowing for an increasingly broad and permis-
sive understanding of social reality rather than by a
quest for better data on ever more speci?ed and cat-
egorized phenomena. As much as management
accountants as social scientists will be generalists
and specialists simultaneously, their ‘‘subtlest and
most esoteric” concerns will also be their most gen-
eral and mundane.
The pluralistic perspective o?ered by Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage therefore is not at all based
on complacency, but rests on an appropriate under-
4
Cf. Fuller (1999) for a brief illustration of the associated
disputes in the context of the so-called ‘‘science wars”.
148 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
standing of what it means to practice social science
in the 21st century. In some parts of the book, the
pluralism of multiple paradigms could have been
argued more aggressively, since upholding it might
not only require to appreciate the variety of
approaches and perspectives, but also to be able
to deconstruct those universally ambitious positions
which, left to their own devices, would not settle
anywhere short of enforcing their general under-
standing of social reality as a standard of wisdom.
But identifying the limits beyond which pluralism
becomes too permissive in inviting and appreciating
the presence of its enemies might be as hard in social
science as it is in political life.
As things stand, normal social science in manage-
ment accounting as anywhere else o?ers its scholars
and students plentiful opportunities to marvel at,
exploit, replenish and reopen the cracks within
social life and across its academic and everyday dis-
courses. Future social science textbooks on account-
ing may possible explore these cracks more
extensively than Wickramasinghe and Alawattage,
and one could, for example, imagine them to
include chapters on gaming, cheating and beating
the numbers, highlighting further the epistemologi-
cal and practical bene?ts of a broad and transcen-
dent understanding of accounting technologies,
calculative practices and discourses. In this sense,
one will hope for the notorious gap between text-
books and realities to remain a gap never to close.
Maybe future researchers will look back at early
attempts to represent the social science of manage-
ment accounting in textbooks with a gaze as critical
as researchers of this generation have brought it to
bear on traditional accounting handbooks (e.g.
Hopper, Storey, & Willmott, 1987), or will dissect
the particular textual methods used by the authors
in convincing their readers about the bene?ts of
practicing management accounting as social science
(cf. Quattrone, 2008). From the perspective of per-
petuating management accounting as a normal
social science, this would spell success indeed.
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doc_943022537.pdf
The publication of ‘‘Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe, D., & Alawattage,
C. (2007). Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives. London, New York: Routledge) provides an
occasion for considering the extent to which management accounting has become a normal social science.
Management accounting as normal social science
q
Hendrik Vollmer
University of Bielefeld, Faculty for Sociology, P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
Abstract
The publication of ‘‘Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe, D., & Alawat-
tage, C. (2007). Management accounting change: Approaches and perspectives. London, New York: Routledge) provides an
occasion for considering the extent to which management accounting has become a normal social science. This review
essay argues that management accounting is a social science de?ned by a pluralism of approaches, and it identi?es the gen-
eralization of social perspectives on management accounting, and particularly their ability to transcend technical and eco-
nomic aspects of accounting practice, as crucial components in reproducing this speci?c form of expertise. Contrary to
Kuhnian expectations, this social science hosts a multiplicity of paradigms, and its scientists are not exclusively concerned
with the subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the phenomena under study. Instead, as social scientists management accoun-
tants are generalists as much as they are specialists.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘When the individual scientist can take a para-
digm for granted, he need no longer, in his major
works, attempt to build his ?eld anew, starting from
?rst principles and justifying the use of each concept
introduced. That can be left to the writers of text-
books. Given a textbook, however, the creative sci-
entist can begin his research where it leaves o? and
thus concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and
most esoteric aspects of the natural phenomena that
concern his group.” (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 19–20)
Over the last four decades, a remarkable set of
institutions and institutionalized events, publica-
tions and networks perpetuating the collective
enterprise of social research in accounting has been
established. However, among scholars in this ?eld,
the lack of textbooks articulating the perspective
peculiar to their emerging scienti?c community has
remained an unremedied cause of lament. Maybe
scholars have privately believed that, as far as the
publication of books is concerned, ‘‘the scientist
who writes one is more likely to ?nd his professional
reputation impaired than enhanced” (Kuhn, 1962,
p. 20), and such attitudes may have been forti?ed
by the economized paper production brought about
by research assessment exercises. More fundamen-
tally though, the very existence of a sustainable
position from which accounting as a social science
could have been articulated in textbook form may
have been uncertain, and projecting such a position
may have been too shaky a foundation for consider-
ing to invest in a major publishing e?ort.
The release of ‘‘Management accounting change:
Approaches and perspectives” (Wickramasinghe &
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.06.004
q
A review essay of Wickramasinghe & Alawattage (2007).
Anthony Hopwood and Andrea Mennicken provided helpful
comments on earlier drafts.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
Alawattage, 2007) is signi?cant not only because it
o?ers an alternative to classic texts in instructing
management accounting students, but also because
it covers some distance towards projecting manage-
ment accounting as a regular social science associ-
ated with a distinct set of problems and research
interests shared by a collective of scholars. While
there have been some notable attempts at represent-
ing the state of the art within social research in
accounting in edited volumes (Cooper & Hopper,
1990; Hopper, Scapens, & Northcott, 2007; Hop-
wood & Miller, 1994) and occasional book-length
essays (Macintosh, 2002; Roslender, 1992), the
book by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage clearly
presents the most ambitious attempt to date at com-
prehensively delineating management accounting as
a collective project in social science, a project set to
grow towards some state of maturity.
Management accounting technology cannot be
altogether marginal to this project, and there is at
present no other book negotiating between aca-
demic research and technical education as consis-
tently as Wickramasinghe and Alawattage proceed
throughout their ?ve hundred pages constituting
an accounting textbook in the full sense of the term.
Given the temporal gap between the emergence of
the social research community in accounting, the
institutionalization of crucial means of sustaining
and reproducing this community (journals, net-
works, institutions), and the present ?rst attempt
to represent this collective enterprise authoritatively
in one publication, this books provides an opportu-
nity to consider the extent to which management
accounting has by now indeed reached a state of
normal science amenable to textbook representa-
tion, encompassing academic, pedagogical and
practical, epistemological, historical and technical
aspects of the expert practices associated with it.
If the rifts separating the di?erent perspectives
among social researchers and practitioners in man-
agement accounting can be bracketed for the sake
of mapping the territory this epistemic community
has come to inhabit, does this map represent an ade-
quate knowledge base for future practitioners and
researchers? What are the crucial moves in project-
ing and sustaining management accounting as a
social science, in maintaining its scienti?c integrity,
and in defending it against domination by one or
the other of the more established scienti?c disci-
plines? And given some sustainable development
with textbooks like the present one providing stu-
dents and researchers with sets of rati?ed concepts,
approaches, problems and theories, where will the
creative social scientist in management accounting
be left to begin her future research ‘‘on the subtlest
and most esoteric aspects” of the phenomena under
study, concern with which would constitute the
Kuhnian hallmark of a mature science? What would
these subtle aspects be? Or would management
accounting research practiced as a normal and
mature social science still be fundamentally di?erent
from the kind of cumulative knowledge production
visualized by Thomas Kuhn?
Historicizing management accounting
The primary move of Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage in bracketing the variety of activities
and positions associated with practicing and inves-
tigating management accounting is to contextual-
ize them in a broad sociohistorical narrative.
This is why the authors have made the observa-
tion of historical change the organizing principle
of their text. This text discusses management
accounting change not merely as a historical fact,
but introduces the study of change as a didacti-
cally superior point of access to management
accounting knowledge and practice: ‘‘As a learn-
ing methodology, change can broaden our under-
standing of management accounting. It leads us to
realize that management accounting is a social sci-
ence rather than a mere set of technical tools
available for practice”. (Wickramasinghe & Ala-
wattage, 2007, pp. 10–11)
1
In fact, the authors go as far as claiming to
include all possible perspectives on o?er for
investigating management accounting change from
this outlook (p. xviii). The structure of their nar-
rative is constituted by contextualizing accounting
technologies and perspectives, practices and
investigations historically, and particularly by
referring technical developments to ‘‘evolution in
socio-economic systems” (p. 1). While there is
no ?rm de?nition of accounting to guide the
reader, and di?erent world views on the subject
(rather than a single paradigmatic one) are
acknowledged to compete (pp. 4–10), the authors
expect their historical reframing of management
accounting approaches and perspectives to give
‘‘a complete pedagogical approach” (p. 11). From
1
Subsequently, page numbers will refer to this book unless
otherwise noted.
142 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
an educational perspective, this text leaves nothing
to be desired, signposting its narrative consis-
tently with boxes for learning objectives, key
terms, short summaries, each chapter ending with
a set of questions allowing to test for reproductive
as well as critical reading. As far as the overall
approach to presenting the material is concerned,
such historical framing of approaches and
perspectives may be considered a proven method,
familiar from management textbooks and
prominent with the few among them aspiring to
articulate management specializations as applica-
tions of social science (e.g. Legge, 2005, pp. 44–
100).
The historization of management accounting
allows Wickramasinghe and Alawattage to
recount a heterogeneous cast of organizations,
technologies, researchers and practitioners within
a single narrative, and it allows them to attribute
distinct epistemological categories to speci?c his-
torical constitutions of management accounting.
In this narrative, singling out certain practices
and approaches as representing the traditional,
managerial, normative and in any case, more nar-
row view need not contradict, but can e?ectively
support the kind of pluralistic reprocessing of
practices and approaches, technologies and per-
spectives performed by the authors. Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage have been careful not to
overstate the di?erences between what might be
considered a ‘‘traditional” textbook view of man-
agement accounting and the social science outlook
they would like to o?er. There is no identi?cation
of the technical with the managerial, of the nor-
mative with the economic, neither is there a cate-
gorical segregation of traditional (conventional,
‘‘hard”, economic, technical, etc.) and nontradi-
tional (alternative, ‘‘soft”, social, critical, etc.)
approaches. Instead, the overall historical theme
is to di?erentiate mechanistic from post-mechanis-
tic approaches by contextualizing them histori-
cally, while various technical, social,
organizational, cultural, ideological or theoretical
aspects reappear across the times and spaces
covered.
Still, this kind of history turns out to be partial
to reconstructing management accounting as a
social science transcending narrower projects of
providing technical ?xes, and it appears to frus-
trate making management accounting the domin-
ion of a particular scienti?c discipline or school
of thought. Associating the historical transcen-
dence of management accounting and its dis-
courses with a pluralization of approaches and
perspectives is the authors’ implicit theme. In their
portrayal of historical management accounting
change, social scientists have been engaging other
experts without superseding or displacing them,
and without themselves being superseded or dis-
placed. Social scientists have always been there
alongside others in observing, commenting on,
and contributing to management accounting prac-
tice. This kind of competitive coexistence is mani-
fest during the mechanistic period of management
accounting, embedded in Taylorist, Fordist and
bureaucratic regimes of production and gover-
nance, as well as their various discourses, just as
it persists under the historical conditions associated
with what the authors term post-mechanistic man-
agement accounting. Wickramasinghe and Alawat-
tage demonstrate how both of these most general
historical constitutions of management accounting
can be embraced from economic as well as from
critical or from interpretive perspectives (which is
the broadest di?erentiation of perspectives used
in the book).
The authors thus demonstrate the historically
pervasive multiplicity of approaches for the
embedding of management accounting in the
‘‘mechanistic type of organizational form” (pp.
46–50), but also for the ‘‘multilayered” and ‘‘mul-
tifaceted” historical conditions of more recent
developments (pp. 211–218). Social scientists talk-
ing about the uncertainties and ambiguities of
postmodernity are placed in a common arena with
practitioners and economists talking about the
need to transcend the ?nancial towards the strate-
gic, the local towards the global, or about govern-
ing enterprises across spatially dispersed
organizational networks. While indeed more and
more social science appears to become necessary
in trying to keep pace with management account-
ing change, narrower economic approaches like
transaction-costs and principal-agent models still
turn up comparatively late in the historical narra-
tive (p. 365 et seqq.). The latter approaches are
not treated as intrinsically alien to the growth of
management accounting as a social science, but
as integral to it, and particularly so in contempo-
rary post-mechanistic, post-bureaucratic condi-
tions (pp. 373–378).
This is a transcendent, if not cooptive perspec-
tive identifying several overarching historical
trends within management accounting constitu-
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 143
tions.
2
For example, the authors see an increasing
emphasis on the choice of managerial intentions
(p. 282) and a trend towards post-bureaucratic
organizational forms requiring ‘‘governing by rela-
tions” (pp. 316–319). As far as historical continu-
ities are concerned, crises of control repeatedly
appear as causes of management accounting change
(e.g. pp. 324–328), and trouble persists for research
in management accounting in keeping up with the
speed of changes in their areas of expertise (p.
344). The overall historical picture that the reader
is left with by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage is
one in which historical developments have opened
up an epistemically generous space in which social
research both of a more economic and managerial
as well as of a more critical and interpretive outlook
becomes associated with management accounting
change without approaches and perspectives com-
ing to substitute one another.
The social and the technical
Readers more closely associated with one or the
other approach to management accounting dis-
cussed by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage may
perhaps ?nd their representation of approaches
and perspectives as historically coexisting some-
what complacent. Researchers with a distinctively
sociological outlook may, for example, feel that
the claims of utilitarian approaches to de?ning
accounting technologies as instruments are worth
challenging immediately. Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage seem well aware of the contestable dis-
ciplinary and epistemological issues underlying
their narrative, and the attentive reader will not
fail to notice which side they are on. The authors
use the term ‘‘calculative practice” to refer to tech-
nical aspects of management accounting through-
out their text, and they demonstrate early on that
costing is a social process (pp. 53–56). Still, the
textbook form of presentation may have discour-
aged Wickramasinghe and Alawattage from fully
unpacking the broader issues associated with the
competition of di?erent forms of scienti?c expertise
in investigating, understanding, criticizing, gradu-
ally de?ning and rede?ning management account-
ing technologies. In favour of representing
adequately the coexistence of di?erent research tra-
ditions, the degree of discretion implied in project-
ing management accounting as a social science to
be extended in one way or another remains some-
what underarticulated in their text. Didactically,
this supports the appreciation of the intrinsic mer-
its of approaches competing in the ?eld, as much
as it fosters a pleasantly invitational style of pre-
senting an open ?eld of practices and re?ections.
Strategically though, one might wonder if the
coherence of management accounting as a social
science can ultimately be sustained on the basis
of juxtaposing approaches and perspectives.
Reproducing management accounting as social sci-
ence might in some form or the other bring about
integrative processes more powerful than the com-
petition of various forms of expertise represented
in this textbook.
Even if these authors themselves do not
attempt to bring such closer integration about,
their e?ort to represent the ?eld in textbook
encourages speculation about where potential
bases for integration are likely to be found. Locat-
ing these bases does not call for a mere apprecia-
tion of the variety of current approaches and
perspectives. From the present state of the art,
it, on the one hand, has to be a matter of inven-
tive imagination rather than of identi?cation, of
building rather than ?nding the positions around
which social research might for some time coa-
lesce. On the other hand, respective ambitions
are not altogether alien to some of the competing
approaches and perspective. In any case, with
integration being either a process intrinsic to the
growth of a science, or an explicit goal of more
ambitious attempts at theory-building, current
approaches and perspectives might have to be
evaluated more strategically as potential allies or
adversaries in reconstructing the ?eld in one or
the other way, and picking alliances cannot be
e?ected without privileging some approaches and
marginalizing others. While staying clear of
enunciating such choices, the text by Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage does indicate some crite-
ria how to generate and defend positions of
strength within the ?eld, positions from which
stronger claims at reconstruction could be
articulated.
2
It should be noted that, as broadly as the authors set up their
sociohistorical narrative programmatically, substantively it turns
out to largely concentrate on Anglo-American business organi-
zations. This adequately re?ects the regional origins of that
particular discourse which might now claim some license to be
considered the global academic accounting discourse, but it is
regrettable that the authors have not made this bias more explicit,
if only in order to re?exively locate their own narrative
sociohistorically.
144 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
Firstly, the authors appear to suggest that the
ability to translate results of academic research into
applicable knowledge is a crucial asset which com-
peting approaches, and ‘‘critical” ones in particular,
will need to develop and cultivate (p. 131). Sec-
ondly, they indicate that becoming involved in the
formulation and implementation of corporate strat-
egy is an increasingly critical step in gaining recog-
nition of technical skills, in reproducing the
demand for these skills and improving their stand-
ing with respect to other forms of expertise (pp.
239–270). Both intuitions appear to inform the
authors’ appraisal and criticism of the Balanced
Score Card and its academic discourse (pp. 271–
278) which concludes by calling for a broader
appreciation of the political character of strategy
formulation (p. 278), and both intuitions resonate
with placing the trend towards strategy in the con-
text of post-mechanistic accounting (pp. 233–235).
After having discussed the BSC as well as activity-
based costing (pp. 288–305), this section of the book
culminates in proclaiming a post-mechanistic con-
?guration of cost accounting (p. 314). Thus thirdly,
as a common denominator of the ?rst two intu-
itions, the proper direction in which to elaborate
management accounting as a social science appears
to be resting well in investigating accounting
technologies in ever broader appreciations of social
contexts. And bringing such expertise at contextual-
ization to bear on problems of formulating, imple-
menting, criticizing and recalibrating corporate
strategy will in this view provide ample future
opportunities for transforming it into a skill that
is both marketable and to be regularly updated by
social research (cf. Jo¨ nsson, 1998).
Somewhat ironically, the post-mechanistic con-
?guration of accounting may therefore not only be
the era in which a more ‘‘social” understanding of
management technologies gains recognition, but
also the one in which technical expertise increasingly
becomes social expertise. As picking, implementing,
and practicing technologies becomes involved in
sustaining and supporting, if not gradually de?ning
corporate strategy, the organizational embedding of
management accounting becomes a key issue not
only for accounting academics, but also for
accounting practitioners. The management accoun-
tant becomes a social engineer, if not a social scien-
tist (cf. Ahrens & Chapman, 2007, pp. 21–23). That
it becomes harder and harder to dissociate the social
from the technical, up to the point where the two
are almost indistinguishable, is amply re?ected in
an academic literature which has been embracing
concepts and approaches from science and technol-
ogy studies (e.g. Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller &
O’Leary, 1996; Robson, 1992). It might also be a
prime reason why management accounting appears
to drift towards reconstruction as a social science.
The approaches best suited for such a reconstruc-
tion may be the ones that a?ord a rearticulation
of technology as an intrinsically social phenome-
non, and this is one of the more forceful messages
implicit in the textbook by Wickramasinghe and
Alawattage.
The social and the economic
The merging of social and technical aspects of
accounting practices correlates with extensive aca-
demic and organizational discourse about their co-
constitution, and it opens up spaces for competing
experts and approaches of various backgrounds.
Among the competitors, there are those dominant
contenders in reconstructing the ?eld of manage-
ment accounting which appear set to more force-
fully try to make it the dominion of one or the
other social science franchise. As already men-
tioned, alongside social scientists practicing various
theoretical and empirical approaches, Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage place the e?orts of those rear-
ticulating management accounting as a potential
branch of that particular social science called
economics.
On the one hand, the chances for these experts to
make their science, models, formulas and calculative
practices obligatory passage points for reconstruct-
ing the ?eld of management accounting do not
appear to di?er categorically from those of more
ambitious approaches at formulating and applying
other variants of general social theory. Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage draw a clear distinction
between established accounting techniques and their
economic modelling (pp. 159–161). This allows
them to specify the contribution of neo-classical
economics to management accounting in providing
decision-making tools (pp. 161–163) or informing
capital budgeting (pp. 190–199). But rather than
treating economic reasoning as generally intrinsic
to accounting practice (as some utilitarian
approaches would have it), the authors subse-
quently draw attention to the idea that historically
it might just have been the other way around, with
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 145
accounting providing a meta-theory, or at least a
master-metaphor of economics (p. 203).
3
On the other hand, economics has undoubtedly
had some success in establishing its models and
methods as points of reference for designing and
marketing accounting technologies. While Wickra-
masinghe and Alawattage are not concerned with
the merits of what has been called positive account-
ing theory (which is not even mentioned in the
book), they discuss both principal-agent theory
and transaction-cost economics in a general chapter
on ‘‘neo-classical theories of management account-
ing change”. Still, this part of the book on ‘‘rational
perspectives on management accounting change”
does not conclude with a celebration of neo-classi-
cism, but instead culminates in an appraisal of con-
tingency-theoretical research. The reason for giving
contingency theory such a high pro?le is the recog-
nition of its dual role in serving both academic and
managerial interests, in providing both descriptions
of accounting systems and practical guidance to
managing them (pp. 391–392). The authors illus-
trate this with respect to how degrees of environ-
mental uncertainty have been found to correlate
with the formalization of management accounting
systems (p. 406). And again, history turns out to
be kind to approaches that contextualize accounting
more broadly in organizational and social environ-
ments, while neo-classical economics ends up being
somewhat academically sterile. The future standing
of economic rationality under post-mechanistic,
post-bureaucratic, overall more uncertain and inse-
cure conditions might then be considered to be sub-
ject to the extent of its permeability to considering
realities less clean than formal modelling would
have them. In such a perspective, economic
approaches would increasingly be successful only
to the extent that economics becomes more like
other social sciences in appreciating embeddedness,
context, practices, etc. Quite aptly then, this part of
the book is not titled ‘‘economic” but ‘‘rational
perspectives”.
That this slight impertinence with regards to neo-
classical scholarship remains tacit in the text again
manifests the overall tolerant appreciation of coex-
isting approaches characteristic for the authors’ nar-
rative, and it might implicitly attribute a willingness
to coexist to neo-classical scholarship that in fact it
does not cherish. One may thus ask if social scien-
tists would in the long term not need to more proac-
tively defend the pluralistic articulation of di?erent
research paradigms against attempts at remapping
the territory of management accounting in terms
of one or the other set of models. Principal-agent
and transaction-cost approaches might have helped
to make economic reasoning more sensitive to
empirical problems, but they also allow it to make
a greater share of social reality subject to economic
modelling. If neo-classical economics makes its sub-
stantial contributions to management accounting as
a social science by taking on the pretenses of a gen-
eral social theory, does this not create the risk that
the emerging social science of management account-
ing may in the end become much like economics – if
economic modelling was not more persistently
challenged?
This is a risk other social sciences like sociology
have been confronted with for some time. The reac-
tions have ranged from wholesale enthusiastic pro-
motion (Becker, 1976), controlled adoption of
speci?c elements of neo-classical economics (Cole-
man, 1990, pp. 18–19) to o?ering alternative, social
economics (Lebaron, 2003), while the outright rejec-
tion of economic reasoning has remained, perhaps
surprisingly, somewhat marginal. The possibilities
of and limits to generalizing neo-classical economics
towards a general social theory have been little dis-
cussed (Za?rovski, 2000), and while di?erences of
disciplinary cultures across sociology and econom-
ics have been emphasized (e.g. Hirsch, Michaels,
& Friedman, 1990), there have also been high hopes
for reciprocal enrichments (Smelser & Swedberg,
1994). In very general terms, the last three decades
have seen increasing contact between economics
and sociology, be it in terms of competition, argu-
ment, cooperation, appreciation or rejection. And
perhaps it is after all not surprising, that right
now some more sustained interest in accounting
gradually appears to emerge from such contacts. If
sociologists for the time being continue to lag
behind in engaging accounting issues, it is surely
interesting that the more persistent attempts in
investigating calculative practices and the role of
numbers in economic life have taken place in the
context of attempts to sociologically reconstruct
the working of economics as a science (e.g. Breslau,
2003; Callon, 1999; MacKenzie & Millo, 2003). If
one reaction of sociology to the challenge of eco-
nomics is understanding economics as a social phe-
nomenon, accounting scholars may have something
3
Cf. Chiapello (2007) for a recent elaboration of this general
idea with respect to Marxist economics.
146 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
to o?er as much as something to gain: some skill at
reconstructing economics, its concepts, models and
practices sociologically.
If in management accounting practice and
research, the social and the economic intermingle
as much as the social and the technical, it will
become increasingly important to demonstrate the
social within the economic, particularly for those
accounting scholars defending their a?nities to
sociological inquiry. The latter will need to defend
their approaches, concepts, theories, investigations
and results against economic reconstruction as
much as they have in the past set them apart suc-
cessfully from the technical-utilitarian articulation
of accounting issues. But unlike the social under-
standing of accounting technology, the social recon-
struction of accounting economics has yet to
become a pervasive current in academic discourse,
as the sociology of technology has yet to be accom-
panied by an equally robust sociology of economics.
Generalizing the social
To some extent, this challenge to social inquiry
might be re?ected in the authors’ prominent place-
ment of political economy – perhaps the historically
most prominent research tradition aiming to pro-
vide an alternative sociological form of economic
analysis – as a general approach for investigating
management accounting change. But notions like
‘‘labor process” and ‘‘mode of production” do not
by themselves make an issue of how economic phe-
nomena are socially constituted, and sometimes
using these concepts might even tempt to take an
economic character of social phenomena for
granted, while political, ideological or other ‘‘social
aspects” end up being add-ons. Investigating the
social and political implications of economic activi-
ties does remain an important project, but in the
face of economistic challenges the very substance
of these activities may need to be more thoroughly
addressed as socially constituted. While taking on
this task may today be asking too much from a
management accounting textbook arguing from a
position of established wisdom, is it too much to
ask from management accounting as a social sci-
ence? Wickramasinghe and Alawattage give clear
indication it is not.
They do not stop at traditional concepts of polit-
ical economy, but conclude their text with a chapter
that urges the reader to move ‘‘beyond political
economy of management accounting change”. After
14 chapters the titles of which almost invariably
direct the reader ‘‘towards. . .”, ?nally, it is time to
move from instruction to practice, time for the
authors to discharge their students, addressing them
directly in this ‘‘?nal phase of this text, which could
be your starting point for going beyond this book
and researching the changing world of management
accounting” (p. 442).
Some of the authors’ preceding choices in catego-
rizing sociological approaches as falling into either
‘‘interpretive” or ‘‘critical political economy” are
contestable. Work in the actor-network-theory tra-
dition, placed by the authors in the ‘‘interpretive”
current of social research, for example, originally
had a strong tendency to deny being altogether
interested in knowledge as belief, meaning or inter-
pretation (cf. Latour, 1988, pp. 218–228). The treat-
ment of Foucauldian research as a welcome
extension of political economy passes over the his-
torical disa?ection of these strands of accounting
scholarship (cf. Hoskin, 1994; Neimark, 1990),
which continues to be interesting to explore for stu-
dents and scholars alike. Also, the order of presen-
tation from interpretive to political economy
approaches somewhat obstructs the possibility that
interpretive could supplement and possible extend
‘‘critical” approaches, for example that political
economy might itself be treated as a set of interpre-
tive microstructures (cf. Brown, 1978). Yet the
authors do mention microsociological criticisms of
macrostructural approaches (pp. 475–476) and
explore possibilities of moving management
accounting research towards adopting more general
sociological approaches, for example in combining
Foucauldian and Habermasian perspectives (p.
500). Why consider setting up such odd couples if
not in order to establish more general theoretical
positions which would allow researchers to move
from micro- to macro-analyses, from political to
interpretive practices, practices to structures, insti-
tutions to participants, technologies to discourses,
and back again?
The conclusion of this textbook narrative there-
fore reiterates that the most fundamental issue in
reproducing management accounting as a social sci-
ence is establishing and maintaining multiple posi-
tions from which the full range of social phenomena
associated with accounting practices can be recon-
structed. This calls for projecting positions from
which the social can be generalized as transcending
technical and economic, cultural and institutional
aspects of accounting practice, and this pluralistic
H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150 147
narrative suggests that rather than one, a multitude
of such positions is desirable. While Wickramasin-
ghe and Alawattage locate such positions ‘‘beyond”
established wisdom, in one very crucial respect man-
agement accounting has by then already been pro-
ven to be up to the level of contemporary social
science. After all, the hallmark of contemporary
social science might just be its ability to pluralistical-
ly switch between positions of potential universality,
if of Marxist, Foucauldian, constructivist or Hab-
ermasian provenance. This characteristic might not
sit well with imagining a state of normal social sci-
ence conforming to Kuhnian standards of mature
sciences uni?ed by single paradigms. Nevertheless,
the pluralism of approaches and perspectives de?nes
a state of the art which for social sciences has empir-
ically become normal and which most of its
researchers will actually ?nd worth preserving.
Defending this normality against one or the other
pretender claiming to reconstruct the social in the
image of a particular theory or model of reality does
not merely call for analytical criticism. It calls for
inventing and sustaining a multiplicity of general
theories able to articulate the social in transcending
diverse technologies, practices, economies, cultures
and institutions. In this sense, generalizing the
social, identifying it in its multiple facets where it
has not been identi?ed before might de?ne the
intrinsic momentum of establishing and extending,
reproducing and defending management accounting
as a social science. And one cannot help to hope
that the present as well as subsequent textbooks pre-
mised on maintaining this momentum will success-
fully encourage their readers to move ‘‘beyond”.
Which is another way of saying that management
accountants should as social scientists ultimately
aspire to be generalists at least as much as they
claim to be specialists.
Beyond textbook performances
The book by Wickramasinghe and Alawattage
thus in many respects impressively demonstrates
the extent to which management accounting already
has become a normal social science. This social sci-
ence, like all the others, struggles with competing
e?orts at de?ning positions from which to investi-
gate the constitution of social phenomena and
reconstruct theories, methods and applications
accordingly. This social science has, perhaps more
obtrusively than most others, been confronted with
the social character of technological changes, partic-
ularly those claimed to be based on its very own
kind of expertise, as much as with the inextricable
involvement of economic reasoning, its models
and practices in the constitution of contemporary
social life. In both respects, management accounting
stands out from other social sciences rather than
being a marginal contender among other kinds of
social expertise. With respect to the normal charac-
ter of this social science, Wickramasinghe and Alla-
watage have been extraordinarily careful in
packaging the least normal version compatible with
a textbook presentation, which, perhaps paradoxi-
cally, most e?ectively illustrates just how much of
a normal social science management accounting
has become. The multi-paradigm character of pres-
ent-day social science is re?ected in the authors’
projection of management accounting change as
opening up a space for a variety of divergent
approaches, rather than being associated with a
‘‘process of normalization” which Thomas Kuhn
saw as de?ning the route to normal science (Kuhn,
1962, p. 17).
One might then be tempted to draw a distinction
between normal social science and normal normal
science. Serious doubts about taking the progress
of natural science as a blueprint have always been
common among social scientists,
4
and knowledge
cumulation in the social sciences often appears to
follow a rather di?erent pattern than the one envis-
aged by Kuhn (e.g. Alexander & Colomy, 1998, pp.
31–36). Normal social science is likely to remain a
battleground contested by multiple approaches
and perspectives trying win ground upon each
other’s territories. For the social scientist, the most
‘‘subtlest and most esoteric aspects of the natural
phenomena” (Kuhn, 1962, p. 20) might remain the
most general ones, de?ned by a quest for better the-
ories allowing for an increasingly broad and permis-
sive understanding of social reality rather than by a
quest for better data on ever more speci?ed and cat-
egorized phenomena. As much as management
accountants as social scientists will be generalists
and specialists simultaneously, their ‘‘subtlest and
most esoteric” concerns will also be their most gen-
eral and mundane.
The pluralistic perspective o?ered by Wickrama-
singhe and Alawattage therefore is not at all based
on complacency, but rests on an appropriate under-
4
Cf. Fuller (1999) for a brief illustration of the associated
disputes in the context of the so-called ‘‘science wars”.
148 H. Vollmer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 141–150
standing of what it means to practice social science
in the 21st century. In some parts of the book, the
pluralism of multiple paradigms could have been
argued more aggressively, since upholding it might
not only require to appreciate the variety of
approaches and perspectives, but also to be able
to deconstruct those universally ambitious positions
which, left to their own devices, would not settle
anywhere short of enforcing their general under-
standing of social reality as a standard of wisdom.
But identifying the limits beyond which pluralism
becomes too permissive in inviting and appreciating
the presence of its enemies might be as hard in social
science as it is in political life.
As things stand, normal social science in manage-
ment accounting as anywhere else o?ers its scholars
and students plentiful opportunities to marvel at,
exploit, replenish and reopen the cracks within
social life and across its academic and everyday dis-
courses. Future social science textbooks on account-
ing may possible explore these cracks more
extensively than Wickramasinghe and Alawattage,
and one could, for example, imagine them to
include chapters on gaming, cheating and beating
the numbers, highlighting further the epistemologi-
cal and practical bene?ts of a broad and transcen-
dent understanding of accounting technologies,
calculative practices and discourses. In this sense,
one will hope for the notorious gap between text-
books and realities to remain a gap never to close.
Maybe future researchers will look back at early
attempts to represent the social science of manage-
ment accounting in textbooks with a gaze as critical
as researchers of this generation have brought it to
bear on traditional accounting handbooks (e.g.
Hopper, Storey, & Willmott, 1987), or will dissect
the particular textual methods used by the authors
in convincing their readers about the bene?ts of
practicing management accounting as social science
(cf. Quattrone, 2008). From the perspective of per-
petuating management accounting as a normal
social science, this would spell success indeed.
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