MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING RESEARCH 297
and spread of rationality and, in turn, the manner in which this rationality
impacts the power and politics in organizational functioning (Weber 1947). These
organizational and sociological theories – often referred to as interpretive perspec-
tives – also draw from the organizational decision-making perspective (Simon
1957; March and Simon 1958), thus sharing intellectual heritage with contingency
theory. We also see, however, the influence of more interpretive sociological
traditions beginning with the work of Weber (1947) and his concerns for the
‘‘politics of rationality,’’ as well as the work of Berger and Luckmann (1967) (see
also Garfinkel 1967) and their work on the social construction (the development
of cognitive processes) and the manner which subjective meaning becomes objec-
tive facts. Specifically, we examine the relevance of interpretive perspectives by
considering a number of organizational and social theories including institutional
theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), resource dependency
theories (Pfeffer 1981), political perspectives (Edelman 1977; Wildavsky 1964), and
the sociology of professions (Abbott 1988; Freidson 1986).
The third section of this paper examines the critical organizational and soci-
ological perspectives which provide an even more direct explanation of power
and politics. Perhaps the most important attribute of critical perspectives is its
attention to issues of conflict, domination and power – an attention motivated
by a theoretical backdrop of capitalist social relations, and premised upon an
irreducible conflict between capital and labor which ensures perpetual antago-
nistic relations between the classes. Despite theoretical differences within critical
perspectives regarding the manner and form in which to conceptualize power, a
common attribute is that they eschew a consensus view of society. These critical
perspectives argue that functionalist and interpretive views of power stipulate
that individual interests mesh into a harmony at the societal level which contrasts
with the critical perspectives’ focus on presumed perpetual antagonistic relations
between the classes. More specifically, whether through general equilibrium in
economics (e.g., the functionalist concern for market value) or the public good in
politics (the interpretive concerns for the negotiation and bargaining), the social
interest is assumed to emerge from the interaction of individual interests. In sharp
contrast, critical perspectives deal explicitly with the role that accounting plays in
relation to issues of conflict, domination and power as defined by the presumed
irreducible conflict between capital and labor (Cooper and Sherer 1984). Here
we will confine our attention to two major research strands of the many critical
perspectives that have illuminated our understanding of managerial accounting:
labor process theory which is concerned with the extraction of surplus from
laborers (e.g., Hopperet al.1987; Hopper and Armstrong 1991), and the Fou-
caultian perspective which is concerned with the methods by which the actions
of individuals are made visible and susceptible to discipline and control, thereby
rendering the individual to be governed (e.g., Miller and O’Leary 1987; Walsh and
Stewart 1993).
The fourth section of the paper offers concluding remarks in which we con-
sider the relationship among the three dominant organizational and sociological
perspectives considered in this paper, as well as their relationship to more
orthodox, neoclassical, and social and organizational psychology perspectives of