Unpacking the Fluidity of Management Accounting Concepts: An Ethnographic Social Site Analysis of Enterprise Risk Management

Abstract

This study offers new insights into what renders management accounting concepts (MACs) fluid. Extant literature depicts how fluidity is an effect of heterogeneous associations among actors, which translate and mobilize them in situated and variegated forms. This focus on heterogeneous arrangements, however, tends to neglect the role of practices and how these practices render MACs fluid. Hence, the study investigates how practices, together with arrangements, which Schatzki (2002. The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press) refers to as ‘site’ (i.e. a mesh-work of practice-arrangement bundles), are implicated in MACs’ fluidity. To do so, an ethnography of the MAC ‘Enterprise Risk Management’ (ERM) at the largest division of a multi-national manufacturer was conducted. By analyzing attended risk meetings, the paper shows the ways in which the ERM site prefigures multitudinous paths for carrying on and carrying out risk management activities, which in turn, render the ERM site into a fluid space of intelligibility. These findings indicate that MACs’ fluidity is associated with multidimensional prefigurements that the site produces. With these insights, the paper contributes to understanding how the situated functionality of management accounting comes about, and reveals nuances and multiplicities amid the enabling and constraining space for actions that practiced MACs as mesh-work engender.