174 ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS
approach). In the UK, contingency theory and neo-human relations approaches
were abandoned for more sociological and political approaches that drew from
European social theory and were influenced by Scandinavian case-based research.
Burchellet al.(1980) argued:
What is accounted for can shape organizational participants’ views of what
is important, with the categories of dominant economic discourse and orga-
nizational functioning that are implicit within the accounting framework
helping to create a particular conception of organizational reality. (p. 5)Similarly, Miller (1994) argued that accounting was a social and institutional
practice. Accounting is not a neutral device that merely reports ‘facts’ but a set
of practices that affects the type of world in which we live, the way in which we
understand the choices able to be made by individuals and organizations, and the
way in which we manage activities. Miller argued that ‘to calculate and record the
costs of an activity is to alter the way in which it can be thought about and acted
upon’ (p. 2).
Cooperet al.(1981) reflected that accounting systems are a significant component
of power in organizations:
Internal accounting systems by what they measure, how they measure and
who they report to can effectively delimit the kind of issues addressed and
the ways in which they are addressed. (p. 182)Various published research studies have adopted an interpretive or critical per-
spective in understanding the link between accounting systems, organizational
change and the behaviour of people in organizations as a result of culture and
power (see Chapter 5 for the theoretical framework of these subjects).
The interpretive perspective has provided a numberof interesting studies. The
study of an area of the National Coal Board by Berryet al.(1985) emphasized
a dominant operational culture and the extent to which accounting reports were
‘ignored, trivialised and/or misunderstood’ (p. 16). The accounting system was:
consistent with the values of the dominant managerial culture, and being
malleable and ambiguous it reflected and helped coping with the uncertain-
ties inherent with the physical task of coal extraction and its socioeconomic
environment. (p. 22)Dent (1991) carried out a longitudinal field study of accounting change in EuroRail
(which is one of the readings in this book), in which organizations were portrayed
as cultures, i.e. systems of knowledge, belief and values. Prior to the study
the dominant culture was engineering and production, in which accounting
was incidental. This was displaced by economic and accounting concerns that
constructed the railway as a profit-seeking enterprise. New accounts:
were coupled to organizational activities to reconstitute interpretations of
organizational endeavour. Accounting actively shaped the dominant mean-
ings given to organizational life...[in which a] new set of symbols, rituals
and language emerged. (p. 708)