Accounting, Organizing, and Economizing: Connecting Accounting Research and Organization Theory

This paper encourages scholars of management to pay attention to the mutually constitutive nature of accounting, organizing, and economizing. This means viewing accounting as much more than an instrumental and purely technical activity. We identify four key roles of accounting: first, territorializing, the recursive construction of the calculable spaces that actors inhabit within organizations and society; second, mediating, that much of what accounting instruments and ideas do is to link up distinct actors, aspiration, and arenas; third, adjudicating, that accounting plays a decisive role in evaluating the performance of individuals and organizations, and also in determining failings and failures; and fourth, that accounting is a subjectivizing practice par excellence, that it both subjects individuals to control or regulation by another, while entailing the presumption of an individual free to choose. ∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] The Academy of Management Annals, 2013 Vol. 7, No. 1, 557–605, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2013.783668 # 2013 Academy of Management