254 ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS
Dent’s case study of EuroRail is a highly regarded field study of accounting
change in which organizations are portrayed as cultures, i.e. systems of knowl-
edge, belief and values. Prior to the study, the dominant culture in EuroRail was
engineering and production, but this culture was displaced by economic and
accounting concerns that constructed the railway as a profit-seeking enterprise.
Dent traced the introduction of a revised corporate planning system, the amend-
ment of capital expenditure approval procedures and the revision of budgeting
systems, each of which gave power to business managers. Dent describes how
accounting played a role ‘in constructing specific knowledges’ (p. 727).
Taken together, these readings provide a practical critique of traditional costing
methods, several theoretical perspectives from which accounting can be viewed
and a field study of how accounting changed the reality in one organization.