When calculative practices are no more: On the de‐accountingization of the operational level of a public sector agency

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12211
• Author: Linda Höglund,Mikael Holmgren Caicedo,Maria Mårtensson
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019

Received: 27 February2018 Revised: 31 January 2019 Accepted:11 April 2019

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12211

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

When calculative practices are no more: On the

de-accountingization of the operational level of a

public sector agency

Mikael Holmgren Caicedo1Linda Höglund2

Maria Mårtensson3,4

1Stockholm Business School (SBS), Stockholm

University, Stockholm, Sweden

2School of Business, Society and Engineering

(EST), Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

3School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus

University, Växjö, Sweden

4Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research

(SCORE), Stockholm University, Stockholm,

Sweden

Correspondence

MikaelHolmgren Caicedo, Stockholm Business

School(SBS), Stockholm University, Stockholm,

Sweden.

Email:mh@sbs.su.se

Abstract

This study reports on an attempt to remove management account-

ing’s calculative practicesat the operational level of a Swedish Public

Agency.Using a Habermasian perspective, the study shows how the

agency has attempted to replace the previous accounting practice,

which involved target setting, performance management and mea-

surement with a new leadership philosophy, and accounting prac-

tices that aim at generalizing the individual’s private interest toward

organizational interests. The result is interpreted as an attempt to

make the individual responsible for the welfare of the collective in

which, in its absence, the kind of validity that accounting’s calcula-

tive practices enable is very much present as a longing to soothe the

anxiety and uncertainty brought about by the responsibility to lead

oneself.

KEYWORDS

accountingization, calculative practices, colonization thesis, Haber-

mas, NPM

1INTRODUCTION

In terms of its “dominant role in the reforms of the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s” (Lapsley,1999, p. 201) and

its qualification as a global phenomenon (Hood, 2000; Lapsley,2009; Pollitt, 2007), the success of new public manage-

ment (NPM) is undeniable (Hyndman & Lapsley,2016; Pollitt, 2007). Nevertheless, as an “attempt to correct the short-

comings of traditional public organization in efficiency and service delivery to citizens” (Hood, 2000, p. 1), NPM has

shown signs of contradictions,paradoxes, and unintended consequences (Diefenbach, 2009; Hood & Peters, 2004). For

example, NPM-informed performance management and measurement has not necessarily led to increased efficiency,

quality, and motivation. Instead, studies have shown such practices to remain geared toward what has alwaysbeen

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-

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c

2019 The Authors. Financial Accountability & Management Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd.

Financial Acc & Man. 2019;35:373–389. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/faam 373

374 HOLMGREN CAICEDO ET AL.

measurable rather than what should be measured (Diefenbach, 2009; Pollitt, 1990) and to lead to increased control,

centralization and greater obligations for routine administration (Butterfield, Edwards, & Woodall, 2005), the infan-

tilization of the workforce (Hoggett, 1996), increased workload (Edwards & Robinson, 2001), and rising levelsof stress

(Kirkpatrick, Ackroyd, & Walker, 2005).

In this vein, NPM reforms havebeen characterized as processes of accountingization (Campanale & Cinquini, 2016;

Kurunmäki, Lapsley,& Melia, 2003; Power, Laughlin, & Cooper, 2003) or,as Power and Laughlin (1992) put it, the col-

onization of the public sector by financial imperativesand measures. Such colonization works by fragmenting and con-

trolling the definition of the problems that public organizations address both internally through management account-

ing, which steers the decisions of managers, and externally through financial accounting, which steers the decisions of

those external to the organization (Power et al., 2003). In effect, as Miller (1992, p. 76) writes, accounting brings forth

“waysof seeing, calculating and managing” and in doing so it directs attention, but it also subjectifies individuals as both

objects and relaysof calculation: individuals are made comparable, assessable, and governable in terms of performance

but also enabled as calculating selves to compare, assess, and regulate themselves and others (Miller,1992).

Hence, as a way of seeing, accounting maycurb our field of vision by redescribing reality, that is, organizational self-

understanding, into terms of calculable economic reason. It does so by “provid[ing] the very definitions of the areas

it regulates” (Power et al., 2003, p. 144) and giving ontological primacy to calculable and economic facts, ends, and

interests. In that sense, it can become a totalizing or colonizing force, as it were. A force that “may eclipse broader

questions of accountability” (Power & Laughlin, 1992, p. 133) and affect core values. This is in turn highly problematic

because economic value, especially in the public sector, is not the sole value of interest (Osborne, Radnor,Kinder, &

Vidal, 2015).

Against the backdrop of such outlook Power et al. (2003), p. 150) write: “what may be needed is therefore less

accounting in its traditional sense and a recoveryof the social and subjective dimensions of accountability that Arring-

ton and Puxty (1991) have articulated.” In effect, viewed as an interested pursuit, “accounting is always at least (1) a

meanstoward economic ends that (2) are the norm-governed ends of some particular polity and that (3) are consequen-

tial for individuals with unique needs and desires” (Arrington & Puxty, 1991, pp. 43–44). So, eventhough accounting

can fragment and reduce organizational self-understanding into its objective dimension, as in the case of accountin-

gization, it can always be contested from its social and/orsubjective dimensions through resistance and reform.

Plausibly, then, an alternative to contest the dominance of the objective dimension of organizational self-

understanding and recover the social and the subjective dimensions of accountability could tentatively be to, at least

partially or temporarily, remove accounting from the equation, pun intended, in what could be understood as the

opposite of accountingization, namely de-accountingization. Insofar as “accounting information […] determines how

certain aspects of a system […] should work” (Kurunmäki et al., 2003, p. 114), the question is then: how do those

“certain aspects” of a system work or what are they replaced with when accounting is removed and the system is de-

accountingisized, as it were. And, what does that say about accounting’s calculative practices?

In order to pursue such avenue of research, that is, the notion of de-accountingization, we turn in what follows

to the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES), which in an effort to renew itself started a reform that in its initial

steps has involved the removalof management accounting practices such as target-setting and performance manage-

ment and measurement from the field of vision of the agency’s operational level. In its stead, self-leadership has been

advanced as a means to steer oneself as an organizational member.The PES provides thus a setting where employees

at the operational level of the organization, who were previously exposed to targets, performance management and

measurement, now have to lead themselves, and where the absence of accounting’s calculative practices, giventheir

previous experiencesat the agency, is very much present.

Studying the removal of management accounting and the calculative practices it enables, in this case at the oper-

ational level of the PES, is of particular relevance in view of the widespread critique of NPM and its consequences

(Diefenbach, 2009; Lapsley, 2009), especially in relation to research on accounting as an infiltrating or colonizing

phenomenon (Broadbent, 1998; Broadbent, Laughlin, & Read, 1991; Campanale & Cinquini, 2016; Kurunmäki et al.,

2003; Lapsley, 2007; Oakes& Berry, 2009; Power et al., 2003) because through its absence, in this case the absence