How to Do Things With Words

Winner of the Management Accounting section of the American Accounting Association notable contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award Volume One of the Handbook of Management Accounting Research series sets the context for the Handbooks, with three chapters outlining the historical development of management accounting as a discipline and as a practice in three broad geographic settings. Volume Two provides insights into research on different management accounting practices. Volume Three features contributions from some of the most influential researchers in various areas of management accounting research, consolidates the content of volumes one and two, and concludes with examples of management accounting research from around the world. Volumes 1, 2 and 3 are also available as individual product. * ISBN Volume 1: 978-0-08-044564-9 * ISBN Volume 2: 978-0-08-044754-4 * ISBN Volume 3: 978-0-08-055450-1 * Three volumes of the popular Handbooks of Management Accounting Research series now available in one complete set * Examines particular management accounting practices and specific organizational contexts * Adopts a global perspective of management accounting practices Award: "Winner of the Management Accounting section of the American Accounting Association notable contribution to Management Accounting Literature Award."

Handbook of management accounting research

Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis

This article examines one of the most significant phenomena of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—the emergence of New Public Management (NPM). NPM has been widely adopted, internationally. However, its adoption is based on governments having faith in its deployment to transform their public sectors using private sector performance criteria. In this article, the case is advanced that the widespread use of NPM is often a cruel disappointment for governments. This is demonstrated by focusing on four key elements of NPM, as practised in the early twenty-first century—the role of management consultants, the development of e-government, the emergence of the ‘audit society’ and the increasing importance of risk management.

New Public Management: The Cruellest Invention of the Human Spirit?1

Abstract This ethnography of three Australian hospitals seeks to understand how and why new accounting systems are “experimented” with in organizations. Latour's sociology of translation is adapted to argue that accounting change emerged not because there was certain knowledge of positive economic outcomes but because an uncertain faith, fostered by expert-generated inscriptions and rhetorical strategies, was able to tie together shifting interests in an actor network. The paper also highlights how accounting may ironically be both real and a simulation.

Experts, networks and inscriptions in the fabrication of accounting images: A story of the

The paper’s aim is to examine the role of accounting in shaping corporate strategy. Our inquiry is built on a case-based ethnography. Drawing on Michel Callon’s generic notion of performativity, we show how accounting shapes the strategic options and the external economic conditions of the corporation. The analysis reveals how accounting devices rejects, defends, and changes corporate strategy by mobilizing lay people and concerned groups. We summarize our findings by emphasizing the active role of accounting in relation to strategy formulation, the configuration of the identity of the key strategic actor, and in constituting strategy and strategic change.

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The role of accounting devices in performing corporate strategy

Purpose – This paper aims to explain why public sector performance reporting that emphasises external accountability may turn out differently from the official stated aims.Design/methodology/approach – Using a comparative case method, two different accountability innovations are examined using framing and overflowing ideas.Findings – The accountability reports became bureaucratic communications between the reporting and central agencies. The reports were transformed because the performance reporting produced a number of overflows and reduced the importance of broad audiences (e.g. citizens). These overflows resulted from the central agency reformers' preoccupation with cost cutting opportunities and the reporting agencies' presumption of the reformers' real purpose. In the resulting interactions, the accountability purpose ended up being mostly reduced to disclosure of traditional input and output measures and some insignificant stories designed to avoid public criticism of the accountability reform but a...

Framing and overflowing of public sector accountability innovations: A comparative study of reporting practices

This paper examines how the National Audit Office of Denmark (NAOD) manoeuvred in making the Danish military receptive to a performance-accountability project in the period 1990–2007. Evidence is provided from a detailed case study, where the actions of the auditors have been followed in their efforts to make the military activities auditable by focusing on the multiple and dynamic interactions between them, the auditee and others. This study contributes to our understanding of how auditors manoeuvre with their performance audit devices in different ways to make efficiency auditable. It appears that as the auditee initiated the implementation of a new accounting system called DeMars a stream of overflows threatened to destabilise it. Groups within the auditee were eager to put heat into the overflowing. This study illuminates how the auditors, equipped with their devices of purification in the later stages of the project, helped at least provisionally to contain the overflows and stabilize the construction. Due to such different manoeuvres by the auditors, this paper demonstrates the problems that emerge when state auditors manoeuvre in performance auditing with identities both as ‘modernizers’, i.e., participating in providing the reasons for change and defining its designs and as ‘independent auditors’, i.e., to legitimize the construction in which they participated themselves. Many allies to the auditors worked hard in protecting the NAOD as the two identities conflicted with each other during the execution of the project.

Public sector auditor identities in making efficiency auditable: The National Audit Office of Denmark as independent auditor and modernizer

Consultancy is a phenomenon frequently referred to in the accounting literature. However, few studies have more intensively dealt with what consultancy activities and reports may mean in terms of stabilising accounting systems. In this article we provide detailed processual descriptions and characterizations of how consultancy outputs participate in the co-production of larger accounting systems in the public sector. From two case studies we demonstrate how consultancy companies become hired by change proponents to purify, i.e. how consultants can work to provide ‘faith’ to accounting systems and to settle controversies with sceptical and resisting groups that threaten to destabilize the innovations. By using Actor-Network Theory we demonstrate how consultancy outputs like consultancy project reports, seminars, briefings and the like are part of practices to cultivate social conflict. The article explains the forms of purification, their conditions and consequences and how they can be successful to stabilize accounting technologies.

Peter Skærbæk

Papers

The role of accounting devices in performing corporate strategy

The role of accounting devices in performing corporate strategy

Framing and overflowing of public sector accountability innovations: A comparative study of reporting practices

Public sector auditor identities in making efficiency auditable: The National Audit Office of Denmark as independent auditor and modernizer

Consultancy Outputs and the Purification of Accounting Technologies