The concern of the paper is historical. It addresses one familiar event within the literature of the history of accounting—the construction of theories of standard costing and budgeting in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A different interpretation of this event is offered from that commonly found. This is seen to have significant implications for the relevance of historical investigation to the understanding of contemporary accounting practices. Instead of an interpretation of standard costing and budgeting as one stage in the advance in accuracy and refinement of accounting concepts and techniques, it is viewed as an important calculative practice which is part of a much wider modern apparatus of power which emerges conspicuously in the early years of this century. The concern of this form of power is seen to be the construction of the individual person as a more manageable and efficient entity. This argument is explored through an examination of the connections of standard costing and budgeting with scientific management and industrial psychology. These knowledges are then related to others which, more or less simultaneously, were emerging beyond the confines of the firm to address questions of the efficiency and manageability of the individual. The more general aim of the paper is to suggest some elements of a theoretical understanding of accounting which would locate it in its interrelation with other projects for the social and organisational management of individual lives.

Accounting and the construction of the governable person.

Advanced liberal democracies are currently witnessing a bewildering variety of developments inregimes of control. These range from demands for execution or preventive detention of implacablydangerous or risky individuals—sexual predators, paedophiles, persistent violent offenders—to thedevelopment of dispersed, designed in-control regimes for the continual, silent and largely invisiblework of the assessment, management, communication and control of risk. Political programmes ofcrime control appear to have little stability, cycling rapidly through all the alternatives from ‘prisonworks’, ‘short, sharp shocks’ and ‘boot camps’, through ‘community corrections’ and ‘reintegrativeshaming’ via ‘therapeutic rehabilitation’ to ‘nothing works’ and ‘three strikes and you’re out’.Of course, programmes of crime control have always had less to do with control of crime than theyhave to do with more general concerns with the government of the moral order. And concerns aboutillegality and crime have been articulated as much, if not more, by institutions and practices whicharenotpartofthecriminaljusticesystemthanbythosethatareconventionallyconsideredtobepartofsuch a ‘system’. Nonetheless, even at this more general level, things seem confusing. Despite claimsthatweliveinapost-disciplinarysociety(Simon),thatdangerousnesshasgivenwaytorisk(Castel),that control in now continuous, immanent and cybernetic rather than discontinuous, localized andindividualizing (Deleuze), there appears to be little strategic coherence about these developments attheleveloftheirrationalities,andmuchdiversityandcontingencyattheleveloftheirtechnologies.This paper will attempt to explore this complexity along a number of dimensions. It will considerthewaysinwhichparticular‘regimesofillegalities’havebeenindividuatedandproblematized,andsuggest that, although these are diverse, some at least can be understood as infractions of freedom,that is to say, as problematic because they throw into question the very presuppositions of moralconsciousness, self-control and self-advancement through legitimate consumption upon whichgovernmental regimes of freedom depend. It will consider the ‘conceptions of the criminal’ thatcirculate within practices for the government of illegality, and suggest that, despite the apparentdiversity of these conceptions—where biological arguments about inherited tendencies cohabit withcommunitarian arguments about the virtues—the pervasive image of the perpetrator of crime is notone of the juridical subject of the rule of law, nor that of the bio-psychological subject of positivistcriminology, but of the responsible subject of moral community guided—or misguided—by ethicalself-steering mechanisms. And it will consider the forms of knowledge and modes of expertise that areimplicated in these new techniques and rationalities of control.Governing Conduct

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Government and Control

In the face of the world's disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. Didier Fassin draws on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. He traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices - what he terms "humanitarian reason" - and shows in vivid examples how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence. Deftly illuminating the tensions and contradictions in humanitarian government, he reveals the ambiguities confronting states and organizations as they struggle to deal with the intolerable. His critique of humanitarian reason, respectful of the participants involved but lucid about the stakes they disregard, offers theoretical and empirical foundations for a political and moral anthropology.

Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present

I speak neither as an historian nor as an historian of sport, and so I appear as an amateur among professionals and can only ask you, as the phrase goes, to be ’good sports’... But I think that the innocence which comes from not being a specialist can sometimes lead one to ask questions which specialists tend to forget, because they think they have answered them, because they have taken for granted a certain number of presuppositions which are perhaps fundamental to their discipline. The questions I shall raise come from outside; they are the questions of a sociologist who, among the objects he studies, encounters sporting activities and entertainments (les pratiques et les consommations sportives) in the form, for example, of the statistical distribution of sports activities by educational level, age, sex, and occupation, and who is led to ask himself questions not only about the relationship between the practices and the variables, but also about the meaning which the practices take on in those relationships.

Sport and social class

The encyclopedic efforts of Pierre Bourdieu, the prolific directeur d'etudes at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, are beginning to reach readers in the Anglo-Saxon world. Two of Bourdieu's most important works-Outline of a Theory of Practice (hereafter, Outline) and Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (hereafter, Reproduction)-have recently been translated into English; an early work, The Algerians, was published in the 1960s; and a fourth volume, The Inheritors (Bourdieu 1979), is due out soon. Add to this the availability in translation of at least 15 of his articles as well as references to his writing in a growing number of British and American works, and it is clear that American sociologists now have access to a prodigious and promising theoretical and empirical enterprise. Bourdieu is best known in this country for his work, with Jean-Claude Passeron and others, on French education, particularly higher education, and its role in the reproduction of class relations. Their argument bears a strong, if superficial, resemblance to the one that Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have advanced about education in the United States (Bowles 1971; Bowles and Gintis 1972-73, 1976). Bourdieu's writing on education, however, is but one thrust of a larger effort-beginning with his study of the transition to modernity of Algerian peasant communities in the 1950s (Bourdieu 1962)-to delineate the mechanisms of symbolic domination and control by which the existing social order is maintained in both preindustrial and modern social systems. He has further aimed to construct a generally applicable sociological practice which unmasks the legitimations, misrecognitions of power, and \"symbolic violence\" inherent, so he believes, in the functioning of any social system. In so doing, he has outlined an elegantly systematic, if not entirely satisfactory, revisionist approach to the

On Pierre Bourdieu

Marie Therese Join Lambert et Mireille Elbaum rendent compte de leurs decouvertes sur l'histoire de la question sociale, a travers la lecture des « metamorphoses » qui sont l'expression des contradictions, des transformations de la societe elle-meme. De cette histoire, dont certains themes sont familiers parce que toujours d'actualite, elles attendent beaucoup : la comprehension des politiques sociales d'aujourd'hui et de leurs echecs, et sont parfois decues. Robert Castel leur repond, point par point. La fresque sociale qu'il a peinte eclaire sans nul doute le present. Les solutions sont cependant encore a construire, collectivement, et l'ouvrage de R. Castel ne peut que stimuler l'imagination

Les métamorphoses de la question sociale : une chronique du salariat

L'insécurité sociale : qu'est-ce qu'être protégé ?

Asiles : études sur la condition sociale des malades mentaux et autres reclus

Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage : eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit

In this monumental book, sociologist Robert Castel reconstructs the history of what he calls "the social question," or the ways in which both labor and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onward to contemporary industrial society. Throughout, the author identifies two constants bearing directly on the question of who is entitled to relief and who can be excluded: the degree of embeddedness in any given community and the ability to work. Along this dual axis the author locates virtually the entire history of social welfare in early-modern and contemporary Europe. This work is a systematic defense of the meaningfulness of the category of "the social," written in the tradition of Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx. Castel imaginatively builds on Durkheim's insight into the essentially social basis of work and welfare. Castel populates his sociological framework with vivid characterizations of the transient lives of the "disaffiliated": those colorful itinerants whose very existence proved such a threat to the social fabric of early-modern Europe. Not surprisingly, he discovers that the cruel and punitive measures often directed against these marginal figures are deeply implicated in the techniques and institutions of power and social control. The author also treats the flipside of the problem of social assistance: namely, matters of work and wage-labor. Castel brilliantly reveals how the seemingly objective line of demarcation between able-bodied beggars-those who are capable of work but who chose not to do so-and those who are truly disabled becomes stretched in modernity to make room for the category of the "working poor." It is the novel crisis posed by those masses of population who are unable to maintain themselves by their labor alone that most deeply challenges modern societies and forges recognizably modern policies of social assistance. The author's gloss on the social question also offers us valuable perspectives on contemporary debates over who should receive social assistance and whether this entitlement should be linked to the obligation to work. Castel's rich insights and brilliant generalizations are invaluable for anyone concerned with what he describes as the "new social question" of work and social welfare in contemporary society.

Robert Castel

Papers

Les métamorphoses de la question sociale : une chronique du salariat

L'insécurité sociale : qu'est-ce qu'être protégé ?

Asiles : études sur la condition sociale des malades mentaux et autres reclus

Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage : eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit

From manual workers to wage laborers : transformation of the social question