On trying to study accounting in the contexts in which it operates

TLDR: In many cases the forms taken by decision processes, the structuring of organizational activities and even the specification of an organizational boundary are not independent of the accounting representation of them as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: Accounting has come to be seen as playing a key role in organizational functioning. Concerned, as it now is, with such activities as assessing the costs and benefits of organizational actions, the setting of financial standards and norms, the representation and reporting of organizational performance, and financial planning and control, accounting has been used to cast important aspects of the functioning of the modern organization into economic terms. By offering particular economic representations of organizational activities and outcomes to both internal participants and interested external parties, it has come to be involved in the creation of a quite specific organizational order and mission. Accounting is now associated with particular ways of seeing and trying to shape organizational processes and actions, with the maintenance of certain forms of organizational segmentation, hierarchy and control, and with the furtherance of an economic rationale for action (Batstone, 1979). Indeed in many cases the forms taken by decision processes, the structuring of organizational activities and even the specification of an organizational boundary are not independent of the accounting representation of them. Modes of accounting have become not only important and valued management practices but also ones whose existence and consequences are difficult to disentangle from the functioning of organizations as we know them. Accounting, in other words, has become centrally implicated in the modern form of organizing. With accounting so intertwined with organizational functioning it is surprising that so little is known of the organizational nature of accounting practice. That, however, is the case. Although early studies of accounting in action focused on trying to understand its organizational roles and consequences, many more recent investigations have detached accounting from its organizational setting, preferring instead to study the consequences which it has at the individual rather than the organizational level.’ Admittedly such studies are providing us with many interesting and useful insights into both the interpretation of accounting information and ways of trying to facilitate its use in decision making situations. Be that as it may, they do not explicitly aim to help us to understand what is at stake in the organizational