Images of accounting

I've spent much of my career arguing that accounting and budgeting are different things that require different skills, but out in the wild the two fields converge much of the time.  People run the two ideas together into one thing. A lot of budget directors are trained as accountants, and the budget office frequently sits with the vice president for finance, along with the controller and pure accounting shops.  And it looks like if you want research that deals with the technical details of budgeting, a bunch is in scholarship on accounting. 

Czarniawska cited a bunch of interesting things on accounting in Narrating the Organization. One of these was an article by Richard Boland, who applies Gareth Morgan's images of organizations to accounting.  Images like organization as machine, organism and brain apply pretty directly to accounting as a system for organizing financial information. Organization as culture works well too--accounting information always tells a story, which is the realm of culture.  In my classes on nonprofit financial management, I try to teach students how to read financial audits to draw out a story of the organization in the numbers and in the notes--not just the one the issuers of the audit are trying to tell, but the story that comes out by connecting elements across categories and years that can tell a different story.  

Morgan's schema then offers organization as: political systems; psychic prison; flux and transformation; and instruments of domination. In all of these cases, the primary thing the image tells you about accounting is how upholds existing hierarchical power relationships within the organization and an undemocratic status quo. The accounting system is "the written record of false consciousness induced by participation in modern organizations" and it can "silence economic representation from those political positions outside the main power structure." 

It is hard to argue with these characterizations of accounting.  It is nothing if not conservative and regulatory. Its structures depend utterly on hierarchy.

Stepping next door into budgeting, it is still easiest to see the status quo preserving qualities of budgets. Budgets are built up (or rolled out) hierarchically.  Control over the most important planning parameters is a jealously guarded prerogative of specialists, and control over the budget is a mode of power within the organization and over others in the organization.  

Boland's application of these concepts to accounting seems to leave little room for accounting to take on a positive role.  But then it seems strange than any aspect of an organization would exist only as a negative force. Here's where it makes sense to step next door to budgeting.  Budgeting can silence representation, and does all the time, but it also has fairly reasonable ways to open up representation. One can open up space in the budget process that gives more people in the organization a chance to voice their concerns, needs and perspectives.  It is one of my hypotheses that as demands for equity-based budgets and budgeting become more insistent, people will realize that the response is not just to put money in different places, but that much rides on how decisions are made and how people participate in the conversation.  If the organization is created through conversations, the character of the conversations matters deeply. 

This is not easy work--the pressures on the budget process usually have the result that gestures towards participation get limited to hollow tokenism.  If you really open up to the many perspectives in an organization, the polyvocality can become overwhelming.  I have been in the position of inviting people to bring to the table all of their narratives about their programs and their passions in the budget process, but was honest about hard it would be to absorb all of that, give it full voice, and integrate it. But I think you have to try to do this if you want to depart significantly from mindlessly reinforcing power structures.  Dealing with embedded structural racism is going to add urgency to change the terms of participation and to figuring out a way to deal with these information challenges. 

As a starting point, the frameworks or organizational images of political system, psychic prison, and domination point out problems we spend a lot of energy suppressing. The simple exercise of imagining how you might do something "not negative" gets the mind running in interesting directions.  Even for true accounting, I think there are speculative forms and adjustments that could make accounting more democratizing.  Even liberating?  I'm not sure.   

Richard J. Boland, Jr. (1989)  "Beyond the objectivist and the subjectivist: learning to read accounting as text." Accounting, Organizations and Society 14:5/6, 591-604

Gareth Morgan ((1986)  Images of Organization