Justification, Evaluation and Critique in the Study of Organizations by Lounsbury Michael;Cloutier Charlotte;Gond Jean-Pascal;Leca Bernard;

Author:Lounsbury, Michael;Cloutier, Charlotte;Gond, Jean-Pascal;Leca, Bernard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

INTRODUCTION

As far back as 1494, Pacioli (accounting’s seminal contributor) commented on the judgments and moral choices that must be made when valuing inventories of trade and the associated assets that contributed to generating owner’s wealth. Jacob Soll, in his recent treatise The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the rise and fall of Nations, indeed goes so far as to suggest that financial accountability functioned better when accounting was seen not simply as part of a financial transaction but also as part of a moral and cultural framework (2014, p. xvi). Over time, accounting judgment has extended to the attribution of values to intangible assets including assets not owned or controlled by the organization, such as society and ecosystems, previously considered externalities. New accounting developments encourage not only the articulation of financial performance but also the acknowledgment of manufactured, intellectual, human, natural, social and relationship capitals in value creation activities (IIRC, 2013). These expanded accounts are now expected to include diversity in valuation and performance metrics underpinned by increasingly complex technical devices and expertise, that serve to rank, order, classify, standardize, and frequently (but not always) to quantify. This process of valuing brings into question the underlying assumptions, and choices about what is to be included, what is valuable and how well the accounts represent corporate reality. This is so much so that, rather than being statements of fact, accounting constructions are recognized as “constructions of fact” with values expected to follow considered processes of evaluation (Mouritsen & Kriener, 2016; Quattrone, 2015). Rather than merely providing answers to questions, such as What level of profit is expected? Is there enough cash available to support strategy? What return to owners will the strategies provide?, accounting valuations, far from being neutral statements of fact, instead serve to entwine economic, moral, and social values. In fact, it has been argued that carefully designed performance measurement systems contribute to advancing “soft capitalism,” a version of capitalism with a “supposedly sharing, caring ethos,” where the weapons of the weak are exploited to make those in power more powerful (Thrift, 1995, p. 11). Accounting, in its varying guises, is now considered a theater of representation where objects, people, or things are seen as being made valuable (Kornberger, Justensen, Madsen, & Mouritsen, 2015, p. 16).

This understanding of accounting is broadly referred to as the “sociology of accounting,” or the intersection between technology and society. In advancing the sociology of accounting, Anthony Hopwood (1976) challenged researchers to explore the overlap between accounting and information processing views of organizations and the ways in which accounting influences and is influenced by organizational practice. The sociology of accounting has only just begun to take on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991, 2006) Economies of worth (EW) theoretic (Annisette & Richardson, 2011; Annisette & Trivedi, 2013; Chenhall, Hall, & Smith, 2013). As a theoretical scheme whose starting point is an acknowledgment that there is a variety of moral orders underpinning the assignment of value (worth) to individuals and objects in our social world, there is an

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