Just when you thought it safe to enter the water: Accountability, language games and multiple control technologies

Abstract

Current theories of control draw on the concept of “visibility” to theorise the potential for “action at a distance” and so explain the use of control technologies in organizations. However, theorising action at a distance should not itself be reliant on researchers viewing actors from a distance. For example, Boland (1993) argues that some theorists, in viewing the actor from a distance, tend to portray management accounting as a “monolithic set of structuring properties”. This is no small difficulty, but represents a failure to date for institutional analysis to accommodate the “strategic conduct” (Giddens, 1984) of actors within conditions of distanciation. In overlooking strategic conduct, current theories overlook a transmutation of control techniques into communication practices and fail to explain the existence of a multiplicity of control technologies. The thesis of this paper is that members of organizations consume control technologies for “moves” within language games (Lyotard, 1984) with, for example, managers moving from production numbers to accounting numbers in order to sustain a position of domination over subordinates. The contribution of the paper is not aimed at overthrowing the thesis of action at a distance, rather it is intended to illustrate how this thesis may require extension to reconcile with the everyday strategic conduct of actors.