MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING RESEARCH 317
Foucault’s work has, as already been stated, sparked much attention in the
critical accounting tradition. In a recent paper, Walsh and Stewart (1993) explored
the history of managerial accounting practices from a rigorously Foucaultian
perspective. In comparing ‘‘two assemblages of people making things,’’ one from
the 1700s and the other from the 1800s, they find support for one of Foucault’s most
provocative theses. By asserting that ‘‘the individual’’ was the result of disciplinary
mechanisms, Foucault also is implying that prior to the late eighteenth century
individuals could not be known and therefore controlled since they lay below the
threshold of description. Accordingly, what we consider axiomatic in managerial
accounting – namely the linking of accounting calculations and measures to the
work of individuals and groups – must not have been prevalent prior to the late
eighteenth century. Indeed, this is precisely what Walsh and Stewart (1993) find
when they compare the New Mills Woolen Manufactory (1681 – 1703) with the
New Lanark Cotton Factory (1800 – 1812). Some features which characterized the
manufactory of the late seventeenth century include: master-servant relationships
between the managers and workers; customary rather than market driven rates
of profit, calculations of selling prices and wages; use of the pillory and the
prison as threats of retribution to workers for pilferage or shortages in piece work;
bookkeeping as a ‘‘physical memory of the real proceedings of each day and each
week to be certified by the masters’’ (Walsh and Stewart 1993, 786).
While Walsh and Stewart (1993) focused on the early days of the factory system
to provide some solid evidence and support for Foucault’s thesis, Miller and
O’Leary (1994) studied another time period to examine the rising popularity of
standard costing and budgetary practices in the U.S. during the turn of the century.
Again, using a Foucaultian perspective, they illuminated dimensions of that much
studied period that have hitherto escaped attention. Miller and O’Leary (1994, 99)
argued that such accounting practices as standard costing and budgeting should
be understood ‘‘as a technology of government,’’ where the latter is understood
as ‘‘the ensemble of rationalities and technologies’’ by which ‘‘authorities attempt
to act on the conduct of others, to shape their beliefs and behavior in directions
deemed desirable.’’ Accordingly, the widespread emergence of standard costing
and budgetary techniques by the 1930s in both the U.K. and the U.S. are seen as
indicative of a new modality in the governance of economic life. This emergence
was linked not only to the scientific management movement associated with
Taylor and the spread of industrial psychology but also to the concern with
national efficiency in the U.K. and the ‘‘efficiency craze’’ in the U.S. The term
efficiency was deployed in a wide range of contexts from individual performance
on the factory floor to articulation the social responsibilities of the state in correcting
the ills of society, and subsumed under itself a host of financial and nonfinancial
techniques. Linkages were also forged between the scientific management of
industrial enterprises and the rational and orderly planning of society as a whole.
A host of such social sciences as public administration, engineering, and sociology
as well as a slew of such experts as accountants, urban planners and economists
sought to ‘‘normalize and govern populations of individuals’’ (Miller and O’Leary
1994, 111). It is this new modality of governing economic life that forms a context