310 ACCOUNTING FOR MANAGERS
such as accounting. Abbott’s (1988, 226 – 235) findings suggest that in the early
twentieth century, U.S. engineers battled accountants for professional jurisdiction
over the growing volume of quantitative work associated with corporations; a
battle won by the accountants who won control and established a professional
monopoly (Loft 1986; see also Armstrong 1985).
In summary, interpretive perspectives of managerial accounting and organi-
zations take issue with the assumption of an objective reality, arguing that the
implementation of such apparently rational, bureaucratic mechanisms as manage-
rial accounting systems is one manner in which the social world flows through
organizations and changes them. These theorists have begun to see managerial
accounting practices and information as socially constructed phenomena with
the full implications of the power and politics of social construction rather than
as a technically rational function driven by and serving the internal opera-
tions of organizations. Furthermore, these interpretive perspectives recognize that
once managerial accounting practices and information are implemented, what it
accounts for shapes organizational members’ views of what is important and,
more radically, what constitutes reality. Managerial accounting, then, is seen as
being implicated in the social construction of reality rather than as being passively
reflective of the reality as depicted in contingency theory and its predecessors.
Although the thrust of the interpretive perspectives in general and institutional
theory in particular have received a growing amount of empirical support, a num-
ber of useful criticisms of them have been offered. DiMaggio (1988), for example,
suggested that an apparent paradox resides in the two senses in which theorists
have used the term ‘‘institutionalization.’’ Institutionalization as anoutcomeplaces
societal expectations and organizational structures and practices beyond the reach
of power and self-interest; expectations of acceptable practice merely exist and are
taken for granted (Perrow 1985; Powell 1985). By contrast, institutionalization as
aprocessmay be profoundly political and reflects the relative power of organized
interests (see also Tolbert 1988; DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Within this concern
for institutionalization as a process, the major problem in institutionalized settings
can be defined in terms of finding some mechanism that can be mobilized by
interested actors to change an overly stable social system (DiMaggio 1988), or
in terms of finding some process wherein social order is produced in a system
where organizations are constantly eroding (Zucker 1988). Regarding power and
group interest, DiMaggio (1988) has observed that institutional and interest-based
explanations of organizational practices are not necessarily antagonistic to one
another, but combined, may yield a more comprehensive theoretical apparatus
for gaining insight into the social dynamics of organizations. He concluded that
allusions to power and group interests tend to be smuggled into the institutional
perspective rather than provide the focus of a sustained theoretical analysis.
Critical perspectives
Since the early 1980s an increasing number of researchers have begun to adopt
diverse critical perspectives to explore and investigate the roles of accounting