Accounting change as relational drifting: A field study of experiments with performance measurement

Abstract

This paper narrates attempts to manufacture performance measures, including a balanced scorecard (BSC). Throughout the field encounter with a business unit of an Australasian telecommunications organisation, various performance measurement approaches were trialled in an effort to obtain a stable suite of metrics. However, in spite of management's desire to improve performance through measurement, the considerable amount of time and resources committed to this project, as well as the intermittent assistance of ‘experts’, such desires remained unfulfilled. Instead, the performance agenda retained an unsettled quality. This unsettledness is argued to be a product of the relationally-dependent and experimental nature of accounting change. Through this account of performance measures ‘in the making’, we engage with recent debates about the nature of accounting change and augment the concept of ‘drift’ introduced by Quattrone and Hopper [Quattrone, P., Hopper, T., 2001. What does organizational change mean? Speculations on a taken for granted category. Manage. Acc. Res. 12(4), 403–435]. We offer the notion of ‘relational drifting’, thus highlighting the situated and experimental means through which accounting inscriptions are fabricated. We also highlight the inherent unsettledness of accounting as a ‘knowledge object’—an object which reflects partial and changing ‘ontologies’, (re)shaped by the variegated and shifting collectives of elements tied to it.