Bradley Bowden and Peta Stevenson-Clarke
Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other…
Abstract
Purpose
Postmodernist ideas – most particularly those of Foucault but also those of Latour, Derrida and Barthes – have had a much longer presence in accounting research than in other business disciplines. However, in large part, the debates in accounting history and management history, have moved in parallel but separate universes. The purpose of this study is therefore one of exploring not only critical accounting understandings that are significant for management history but also one of highlighting conceptual flaws that are common to the postmodernist literature in both accounting and management history.
Design/methodology/approach
Foucault has been seminal to the critical traditions that have emerged in both accounting research and management history. In exploring the usage of Foucault’s ideas, this paper argues that an over-reliance on a set of Foucauldian concepts – governmentality, “disciplinary society,” neo-liberalism – that were never conceived with an eye to the problems of accounting and management has resulted in not only in the drawing of some very longbows from Foucault’s formulations but also misrepresentations of the French philosophers’ ideas.
Findings
Many, if not most, of the intellectual positions associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History – that knowledge is inherently subjective, that management involves exercising power at distance, that history is a social construct that is used to legitimate capitalism and management – were argued in the critical accounting literature long before Clark and Rowlinson’s (2004) oft cited call. Indeed, the “call” for a “New Accounting History” issued by Miller et al. (1991) played a remarkably similar role to that made by Clark and Rowlinson in management and organizational studies more than a decade later.
Originality/value
This is the first study to explore the marked similarities between the critical accounting literature, most particularly that related to the “New Accounting History” and that associated with the “Historic Turn” and ANTi-History in management and organizational studies.
Details
Keywords
Robert Burrell and Chris Mac Arthur
The nature of the courses offered by Southampton Institute and the consequential variety of in‐house databases available meant that power and sophistication in information…
Abstract
The nature of the courses offered by Southampton Institute and the consequential variety of in‐house databases available meant that power and sophistication in information retrieval was a priority in the selection of an automated library management system. The solution was the purchase and installation of the Danish Supermax system which combines library housekeeping with powerful information retrieval: the background to the choice is described and the facilities offered outlined. The Institute is the first UK user of Supermax; there are, however, many installations throughout Europe.
Albert James Mills, Milorad Miodr Novicevic and Foster Roberts
This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important contribution of March to the development of the field of OT, the authors set out to understand the role that he played in establishing the oft-quoted development of founding a behavioral facet of the functionalist paradigm of management theory.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on ANTi-History to study some of the key factors that contributed to the challenges associated with the creation of a functionalist paradigm of OT. ANTi-History is an amodernist method drawing attention to how history is produced, differing from a modernist method for identifying the single-most truth of a series of past events and from a postmodernist method for revealing the relativity of accounts of the past. To that end, the method of ANTi-History is to explore the intersections of a series of human (e.g. scholars), non-human (e.g. a textbook) and non-corporeal (e.g. paradigms) actors to assess their role in producing a version of the past (e.g. a unified field of OT).
Findings
The authors reveal how the history, producing the paradigmatic idea of OT as a supposed field of inquiry, is not an account of an actual field of inquiry as much as it is the outcome of the shared and conflicted worldviews of multiple actors.
Originality/value
The unique and original contribution is in the tracking over time of the relationship between a known and important actor James March and the formation of a specific paradigm of OT. In particular, the authors focus on the factors and activities that formed or failed to form OT at points in time and James March’s role in this. In the process, the authors set out to learn not simply what James March achieved but how he achieved it.
Details
Keywords
John Hassard and Julie Wolfram Cox
The premise for this volume is that there is “a need to develop a Handbook that takes scholars and practitioners through the paradigm change going on in the field of management…
Abstract
The premise for this volume is that there is “a need to develop a Handbook that takes scholars and practitioners through the paradigm change going on in the field of management and organizational inquiry.” In their invitation to contributors, the editors suggested we should comment on this transition and inform readers of theoretical and philosophical changes that have occurred in recent times. In this chapter, we attempt to do this by revisiting the influential concept of paradigm from the philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962, 1970) and explore its relation to recent contributions to postmodern social theory in organizational analysis. In particular, the influential paradigm model of Burrell and Morgan (1979) is revisited through meta-theoretical analysis of the major intellectual movement to emerge in organization theory in recent decades, post-structuralism and more broadly postmodernism. Proposing a retrospective paradigm for this movement we suggest that its research can be characterized as ontologically relativist, epistemologically relationist, and methodologically reflexive; this also represents research that can be termed deconstructionist in its view of human nature. Consequently we demonstrate not only that organizational knowledge stands on meta-theoretical grounds, but also how recent intellectual developments rest on a qualitatively different set of meta-theoretical assumptions than established traditions of agency and structure.
Details
Keywords
David Austen-Smith and Jeffery C. Burrell
In July 2010 Robert Drake, senior director at Micawber Capital, one of India's largest microfinance organizations, needed to recommend a corporate structure and organization for…
Abstract
In July 2010 Robert Drake, senior director at Micawber Capital, one of India's largest microfinance organizations, needed to recommend a corporate structure and organization for Micawber after its scheduled IPO in August 2010.
The IPO would bring to Micawber new stakeholders, primarily financial institutions. Drake was skeptical that the new investors shared Micawber's commitment to help alleviate poverty in rural India through microcredit loans; he assumed their primary interest was a good return on their investments. The two objectives–increasing ROI and meeting the financial needs of the poor–seemed at odds with each other.
Drake had to consider how the interests of clients and investors would be represented in strategic decisions so that they balanced the conflicting values of the stakeholders.
Balance stakeholder commitments to business objectives and social mission
Understand the expectations of both commercial investors and mission-conscious investors in social enterprises
Discuss the challenges and opportunities of structuring an organization and key partnerships based on a long-term values strategy
Identify organizational policies and business processes that can be changed to encourage an appropriate balance of values-based and financial-based decisions
Balance stakeholder commitments to business objectives and social mission
Understand the expectations of both commercial investors and mission-conscious investors in social enterprises
Discuss the challenges and opportunities of structuring an organization and key partnerships based on a long-term values strategy
Identify organizational policies and business processes that can be changed to encourage an appropriate balance of values-based and financial-based decisions
Details
![Kellogg School of Management](/insight/static/img/kellogg-school-of-management-logo.png)
Keywords
Jess K. Alberts, Brian L. Heisterkamp and Robert M. McPhee
This study examines the impact of mediator style, mediation outcome, and mediator background variables on community mediation participant satisfaction and fairness perceptions…
Abstract
This study examines the impact of mediator style, mediation outcome, and mediator background variables on community mediation participant satisfaction and fairness perceptions along several dimensions. Our data were collected from a community mediation program located in a justice court in the Southwestern United States. During a twelve‐month period, 40 mediation sessions, each involving a single mediator, were videotaped. The 108 mediation participants completed surveys assessing their perceptions of and satisfaction with their specific mediation experiences. The findings indicate important impacts of mediator facilitativeness on all perceptions and of conflict resolution success on satisfaction. Mediator experience impacted perceptions of the mediator; mediator gender and law background had no impacts.