The Influence of Michel Foucault on Accounting Research

Abstract

Abstract During the past few years, some of the most challenging work on the history and sociology of accounting has been inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. Following a recent intervention by Neimark (1990), this paper attempts an appraisal of the achievements and potential of this body of work. The paper argues that the application to accounting of Foucault's concept of disciplinary power has been misleading in important respects. in Foucault's portrayal, disciplinary regimes involves a continuous and comprehensive surveillance of individual conduct. In contrast, a key feature of accounting systems is that they shift emphasis away from behavioural details and onto economic outcomes. Foucault also depicts disciplinary regimes as operating primarily through a discursive constitution of the subject. Besides making it difficult to see how the constituted individual can ever resist accounting controls, this involves the dubious assumption that the disciplinary effect of accounting information is independent of physical and material sanctions. In Foucault's work, the concept of disciplinary power was intended to encapsulate the characteristic exercise of power in modernity. The use of such a high-level concept in accounting research naturally tends to suppress detail. In consequence, the approach offers little purchase on such everyday phenomena as change accounting systems, the relationships between accounting and other means of managerial control and the differences between accounting systems in different contexts. A second generation of Foucauldian research has drawn its inspiration from his studies of governmentality rather than of disciplinary regimes. In this approach, accounting is seen as a form of action at a distance and attention is focused on the processes of translation whereby the discursive conditions of possibility of particular uses of accounting come into being. This is a theoretical advance in that an account is offered of the diffusion and change of accounting technique. On the other hand, there are theoretical difficulties involved in attempting to specify the discursive conditions of forms of accounting control. On the methodological front, both Foucauldian genealogy and its extension via the sociology of translation pose questions of validity which have received little attention in their accounting application. Both appear to call for much the same kind of evidence as the methods of traditional history. The paper suggests some possible lines of advance. Most of the difficulties of the power-knowledge approach stem from the theoretical enclosure of motive perception within the concept of discourse. Whilst this might be tackled by the introduction of a concept of real interests, or simply by opening up motive to empirical investigation, both moves would call for a radical rethink of the treatment of subjectivity and disciplinary power. The governmentality approach would be strengthened by allowing material circumstances into the analysis, along side the discursive conditions of possibility.