Abstract
This article sheds light on the relationship between quantification and calculative practices of accounting and moderate feminism. Drawing on a case of gender budgeting in Austria and the literature on social studies of accounting, I show how gender equality initiatives are translated into practice and come to codify the governance of gender relations through calculative practices that further the logic of neoliberal governmentality, rather than fundamentally challenging it. As such, this article provides an account of one site of the neoliberal recuperation of feminist critique through technologies of quantification and accountability.
Highlights
Numbers are one of the dominant modes of information used in organization, decision making and politics
This paper provides an account of one such site of the neoliberal recuperation of feminist critique through technologies of quantification and accountability: gender budgeting in Austria drawing upon empirical research conducted between 2009 – 2012 on the problematization and operationalization of gender budgeting in Austria
After a description of my methods I will examine how budgets became a ‘feminist concern’ in Austria: how the way of doing budgeting, the language of quantification, and forms of knowledge and expertise were problematized from different feminist perspectives, and how performance indicators became the solution to the problem of gender inequality despite the earlier feminist critiques of quantification and management accounting techniques
Summary
Numbers are one of the dominant modes of information used in organization, decision making and politics. The emergence of neoliberal feminism is analysed for example, by Rottenberg (2014) who understands discourses of ‘lean in’ as symptomatic of a larger cultural phenomenon in which neoliberal feminism is displacing liberal feminism and as a consequence seems perfectly in line with the evolving neoliberal order where feminist subjects accept full responsibility for their own well-being and self-care based on a cost-benefit calculus While this literature looked into the individualization of equality issues and the responsibilization of women for their own well-being, less attention has been paid to the role of accounting and related technologies in the management of gender equality. In order to understand how gender budgeting is problematized, imagined, translated into strategies in Austria, operationalised and therewith transformed into something it was not, the section of the paper introduces social studies of accounting as a field that has extensively studied the limitations of quantification and calculation as modes of political intervention
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