Accounting as an affective technology: A study of circulation, agency and entrancement

Abstract

This paper argues that accounting is an affective technology. We show how people’s feelings and emotions are constructed through accounting practices and templates. Much research in accounting and economics is based on rationality assumptions that suggest that people act after working through cost–benefit calculations. Information may be imperfect and our cognitive abilities constrained but such modes of calculation and economic reasoning are assumed to drive action. Whilst not setting aside the significance of rationality and intelligibility, this study illustrates that it is affect and passion alongside cognitive calculation that generate movement and action in organisational networks. An in-depth case study of a very large and well known global American corporation spanning 4years illustrates how affect is engineered by corporate executives through accounting templates and targets. In local sites, periods of excitement and elation ensue but so do anxiety and sleepless nights as yet again, budgets are cut and stated targets rise. Productivity spreadsheets, planning pyramids and human resource programs all contribute to the circulation of affect in the global network as new identities (both individual and collective) are defined and underperforming employees managed out. The committed and devoted ‘Players’ of the organisation express love for the firm, tolerate inconsistent instructions and overlook what might (by outsiders) be conceived as breaches of trust. As such, they collaborate in their own entrancement. We conclude that accounting technologies play on people’s passions and emotions rather than purely on their intellectual and reasoning skills, and that it is this emotive edge to accounting that generates and sustains action in organisational networks.