This speech examines the mutually constitutive and reinforcing nature of accounting, organizing, and economizing. Drawing upon the paper by Miller and Power (2013) in The Academy of Management Annals, accounting is described as much more than an instrumental and purely technical activity. Four key roles of accounting are identified: first, territorializing, the recursive construction of the calculable spaces that actors inhabit within organizations and society; second, mediating, the ways in which accounting instruments and ideas link up distinct actors, aspirations, and arenas; third, adjudicating, how accounting plays a decisive role in evaluating the performance of individuals and organizations, and also in determining failings and failures; fourth, the roles of accounting as a subjectivizing practice, how it both subjects and individuals to control or regulate by another, while entailing the presumption of an individual free to choose. The interconnection or entanglement of these four roles, we suggest, is what gives the ‘accounting complex’ its productive force, such that it is perhaps the most powerful system for representing and intervening in social and economic life today in many national settings. Accounting is depicted as a mechanism by which the ever increasing economizing of organizational life becomes elaborated and institutionalized. In addition to addressing these four themes, brief examples drawn from historical and field studies will be examined.
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