Re-reading Foucault as Theorist of Accounting and Management as Such

Paper Submitted for the 2012 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference,

Cardiff

Keith Hoskin

Visiting Professor, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Colchester, England

[Please do not cite without permission of the author]

Re-reading Foucault as Theorist of Accounting and Management as Such

Abstract

The recent and continuing publication of Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures from

the 1970s and 80s enable a significant re-reading of the analytical and historical scope of his

work, with particular significance for its potential seeding of readings of accounting and

management in both past and present which diverge from even those critical approaches

which draw to greater or lesser degree on Foucauldian ideas. Most significantly, the re-

reading now possible reveals him as an analyst and historian of accounting and management

as such, something hardly recognised (if at all) in previous work drawing on his ideas in

these fields of analysis, or indeed more widely. Furthermore he can be seen as articulating,

via an analytics grounded in accounting and management, a new way of understanding the

genesis and maintenance of modern macro-level entities such as the state and corporation

which has not been systematically followed as yet. This is a a bottom-up level of analysis,

which begins from a focus how humans, historically situated in their given era, think, and so

act, thus negating the frequently adopted ‘critical’ move of grounding of analysis at the

institutional, sociological or anthropological levels. These twin moves suggest two

consequences. First accounting and management analyses may come to engage (or perhaps

re-engage) with Foucault in new ways which have hardly been recognised as feasible as yet,

thus perhaps reversing, certainly in critical accounting work, a move redolent of French

philosophy in the 1980s, where we do not ‘need’ Foucault any more since we have gone

beyond him (as for instance in much work under the sign of ‘governmentality’). Second,

accounting and management may (and certainly on the basis of this re-reading should)

become comprehended as far more central to more general analytics of modern power and

knowledge relations, whether undertaken under the governmentality sign or through more

conventional modes of political-economic, social or institutional analysis.

1. Introduction:

‘What are we to understand by “security”? …The third modulation…will be governed

by the following kind of questions. For example: What is the average rate of

criminality for this type? How can we predict statistically the number of thefts at a

given moment…in a given town…? …How much does this criminality cost society,

what damage does it cause, or loss of earnings?...What is the cost of repressing these

thefts? Does severe and strict repression cost more than one that is more permissive.

…What therefore is the comparative cost of the theft and of its repression, and what is

more worthwhile? …Th(is) third form is…typical…of the apparatus (dispositif) of

security. …(T)he apparatus of security inserts the phenomenon in question, namely

theft, within a series of probable events. Second, the reactions of power to this

phenomenon are inserted in a calculation of cost. Finally, third, instead of a binary

division between the permitted and the prohibited, one establishes an average

considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the

acceptable that must not be exceeded.’ (Foucault, 2009: 4-6)

‘To say that population is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed by decree

does not mean, however, that is an inaccessible and impenetrable nature, quite the

contrary. …(For) the naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly

accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents

and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected (réfléchis),analytical, calculated, and

calculating.’ (Foucault, 2009: 71)

‘In short, the transition from an art of government to a political science, the transition

in the eighteenth century from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to a

regime dominated by techniques of government, revolves around population and

consequently around the birth of political economy. I am not saying that sovereignty

ceased to play a role when the art of government becomes political science. …As for

discipline that is not eliminated either. …(D)iscipline was never more important or

more valued than when the attempt was made to manage the population: managing

the population does not mean just managing the collective mass of phenomena or

managing them simply at the level of their overall results; managing the population

means managing it in depth, [managing it] in all its fine points and [managing its]

details. …So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty

by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of

government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline and governmental

management, [a governmental management] which has population as its main target

and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism. (Foucault, 2009: 107-8,

emphases and phrases in brackets added)

I have prefaced what follows with three passages taken from the set of thirteen lectures

Michel Foucault delivered between January and April 1978 as his required annual lecture

series as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. The

versions I have given are derived from the versions now available in book form, and which

were published initially in French as Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de

France, 1977-78 (Foucault, 2004), and more recently in the generally excellent translation by

Graham Burchell, as Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,

1977-78 (Foucault, 2009).1 [However one should note that the phrases in brackets in the last

passage are in the original French but omitted from the English version. One argument here is

that those omissions are significant, particularly if we are to understand the significance of

accounting and management in the type of analytics of power and knowledge relations that

Foucault is developing in this text. Hence Foucault’s original words need to be restored in

full, to get the full tenor of his argument.]

That argument, I shall argue (and as the above passages may at least begin to hint), revolves

around a fundamental change or shift in the way power was exercised that Foucault sees as

taking shape from the sixteenth century on – a shift that also entailed a new relation between

the exercise of power and particular forms of knowledge, in particular accounting, and those

who were expert agents (i.e. calculated and calculating) in the exercise of such forms of

knowledge. More specifically Foucault lays out, particularly across the first four lectures of

his series, an analytics of the new exercise of power which gets embodied in the new

‘apparatus (dispositif) of security’ referred to in the first passage – a passage that comes from

1 One should note that the French text is, like the English translation, based mainly on the cassette tapes of

Foucault’s lectures made by attendees, supplemented, as the editors Ewald and Fontana observe, by access to

the ‘often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures’ and now in the possession of Daniel

Defert (Foucault, 2004: p. x; 2009: p. xvi). The lecture tape used here is available in the University of

California, Berkeley archive of Foucault tapes at http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/videodir/foucault/stp780201.mp3.

the very start of Lecture 1, as Foucault sets out the first major theme he wishes to address in

the year’s lecture cycle.

That exercise of power entails an interplay between accounting and management of a kind

never possible before. First this is, one may argue, because accounting takes on or develops a

new set of practices or techniques concerned in Foucault’s terms with cost-benefit analysis,

and does so only because it is conjoined, as the second of the passages above indicates, with a

new kind of human agent, who shares with the new techniques in being ‘enlightened,

reflected, analytical, calculated and calculating’. Second it is because in its new interplay

with accounting and human agents of this new kind, management itself undergoes a historic

shift, from being concerned with the ‘economic’ in the sense validated since Aristotle with

the nomos (or rule and allocation of resources) of the oikos (the household or estate with

wife, children and servants) to being a new kind of ‘economics’ of that other great Platonic

category of concern, the polis (as city or state). What comes about, or what has to come

about, as Foucault puts it, is a translation wherein the old form of economic activity can now

function effectively at the level of the polis in a new and unprecedented kind of ‘political

economy’. What took place, discursively, in the old literature on ‘the art of government’ was

a focus, in all discussions of ‘economy’, on ‘the government of the family’ (Foucault, 2009:

94). The question that this literature addresses, but does not solve, he goes on, is:

‘the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say the proper way of

managing individuals, goods and wealth, like the management of a family by a

father who knows.... how to make his family’s fortunes prosper… – how to introduce

this meticulous attention… between the father and his family into the general

management (gestion génerale) of the state’ (Foucault, 2009: 94-5, emphasis added)

This is what Foucault is arguing, by the end of Lecture 4 of STP, is what has effectively taken

place, discursively, at least with the development of that ‘governmental management’ which

he names as the third leg of the new triangle in the exercising of modern power, made up as:

‘sovereignty, discipline, governmental management’.

In the next section of this paper I go further into how accounting is implicated in this new

exercising of power and how it has come to be so difficult to read this presence of both

management and accounting as such as being such integral constructs to Foucault’s analyses

and analytics of modern power. In the following section, I go further into his earlier

understandings of management/gestion and also of accounting in relation not just to

disciplining but to earlier Christian forms of pastoral power under the guise of an accounting

for sins and an accountability of the pastor for his flock. In the final section I consider how

these constructs enter into a more general approach to the analytics of power which is not just

applicable to modernity, but is extended across all human eras in the exercising of power and

which generally (as it does for modernity) seeks to develop a bottom-up analysis of the

exercise of power, beginning in one respect within the human subject and the relation

between thinking and acting which we all engage in, but always doing so respecting how all

human subjects and their modes of thinking and acting take form and develop within

particular historical systems of thought and action.

2. Opening up a reading Foucault as Analyst and Historian of accounting and

management as such

I wish to begin with a slightly more extended consideration of the three passages from STP

set out at the start of this paper (which are successively from Lectures 1, 3, and 4). I return

first to the first passage, from the very start of Lecture 1.

First, as that passage shows, the apparatus/dispositif of security operates for Foucault through

generating numbers of particular occurrences (e.g. theft) across a given totality of people (a

totality that therefore becomes nameable, historically, as a ‘population’) and then subjecting

the numbers to some form of cost-benefit analysis. Second, he then, in Lecture 3, comes back

to how this is feasible, and observes that, for both the statistical and accounting practices,

what is necessary is the co-presence of reflective and calculating agents and relevant

techniques, and what the practice undertaken by such agents deploying such techniques

generates are constantly compilable and compiled sets of statistics and of course accounts.

For there is no way to undertake the types and range of cost-benefit analyses which he

designates as central to the exercise of this new form of power without the co-presence of

such agents and techniques.

[I leave to one side, for the purposes of the present paper, precisely when and where the

exercise of this kind of power, integrating the processing of statistics and accounting to

constitute continual apparatuses of ‘security’, successfully gets exercised across a given

‘territory’ (real or virtual). I equally leave aside just when and where ‘populations’ get

constituted in the form of totalities of people seen as uniform (or sufficiently ‘uni-form’) in

terms of being measurable, all and singly, together, so that effective ‘statistics’ and ‘cost-

benefit calculations’ can successfully be undertaken.

I do so because Foucault himself signals that his analysis in STP is not primarly concerned

with the moment or era when these practices became fully formed and executed in particular

arenas of power, but instead is focussed on the (prior) emergence of discourses articulating

the possibility of such apparatuses of security, and thinking in terms of states being made up

of populations of thinking and acting subjects who have to be acknowledged in terms of their

thinking, acting and active ‘desiring’. His discursive focus on ‘arts of government’, as evident

in the passage cited above on how such arts discussed ‘economy’ (2009: 94) is one sign of

this.

But in addition he makes it explicit that this is his procedural concern at the outset of the

series of lectures he delivered at the College de France in the following year, now published

(in the English version) as The Birth of Biopolitics; here he directly says, reflecting on what

he had initiated in STP and proposed to continue in the new lectures (Foucault, 2008: 2):

I have not studied and do not want to study the development of real governmental

practice… . I wanted to study the …reasoned way of governing best and, at the same

time, reflections on the best possible way of governing. In a sense I wanted to study

government’s consciousness of itself….. to grasp the way in which this practice that

consists in governing was conceptualised both within and outside government.]

Finally, there is the third of these three passages, which comes from what is perhaps the most

problematic, because it is the most famous or well-known, lecture of these whole two lecture

series, Lecture 4 of STP, delivered on 1 February, 1978. The passage is in itself arguably the

most stunning demonstration of just how central the construct ‘management’ (or in the

French gestion) was to Foucault’s new analytics of power in general, and not just to the

aspect of this analytics which was concerned with the apparatus/dispositif of security.

There are, I would suggest, two reasons from within the text for this use of the term

‘stunning’ in the superlative with respect to this passage. First there is the extensive and

insistent repetition of the terms ‘management’, ‘manage’ and ‘managing’ (in the French

consistently either ‘gestion’ or the equivalent verb-form, ‘gérer’) across the passage. Count

them up from the start of the sentence ‘Discipline was never more important….’: and you

find them used no less than ten times, and in a particularly insistent way to refer to the

managing of a population not just at the global level of the collective mass, i.e. the macro-

entity, but down at the individual or indeed intra-individual level, that micro-level of depth,

‘fine points’ (in the French, finesses), and details.

But second, and equally important, or perhaps even more important in terms of understanding

the historical analytic that Foucault is unfolding or developing here, is the fact that he applies

the term not just to the construct ‘discipline’, but instead is arguing that what eventuates

historically, at the end of, or as the culmination of, the process he has been seeking to

document across these first four lectures, is a new kind of society, made up of, and indeed

reproduced and extended down to today by, a historically new mode of thinking and acting

human subject, engaged and engaged in a new version of ancestrally old power relations and

knowledge or truth games. This is what is needs unravelling through a new and re-reading of

what is getting said as he argues that we should not see things in terms of a progression from

a society of sovereignty to one of discipline to one of government, but that instead ‘we have a

triangle’ (2009: 107) – which perhaps we should designate as ‘Foucault’s triangle’. For what

he sees here as conjoined in or as that triangle brings ‘management’ in again. Management

here is not just an aspect of discipline (though it must be at work in the disciplining of the

population, along of course with the accounting and statistics which are necessary to name,

count and constitute the population in the first place, and then to place monetary values on

alternative courses of action thus defining the governmentally ‘best’). Management is here

translated beyond just the sphere of disciplining to the core of governing (and so arguably to

the new exercise of ‘sovereignty’ though that is not spelled out).

But what is spelled out absolutely clearly, through the repetition of the phrase in Foucault’s

delivery of the lecture which is retained in the French text, and which I have therefore

restored here to the English version, is that management also constitutes the core of the new

‘governmental’ way of exercising power and so successfully constructs and maintains the

new triangle of power. For twice he says that it is ‘governmental management’ (gestion

gouvernmentale in the French) that completes the new triangle which brings together into a

new alignment the previously existing modes of sovereignty and discipline, and so

presumably (though again he does not specify this) endows them with an even more intensive

and extensive purchase.

Now the intriguing thing with all this, and a major reason why, I suspect, the reading

proposed here will at least initially prove hard to entertain is that we have not been able to see

that this is what Foucault said until so recently.2 On the contrary, we have, in the

overwhelming majority, had a potentially very different understanding, for two reasons.

First we were not able to be aware of the sustained kind of accounting-based analysis

Foucault undertakes in the first three lectures of STP (and there is more than indicated just in

the passages cited at the outset, as I will attempt to indicate further below). We simply did not

have access to the text of what he said on these matters.

Second, there has been a systematic form of misunderstanding or mis-naming of what he was

saying in Lecture 4, of 1 February, 1978, and this has been visited upon us all, unintentionally

and for the best of reasons, because that particular lecture was published in standalone form

very soon after its delivery: but not in French (since Foucault did not, while he was alive,

approve the publication in French of any of his work without his own prior editing), but

instead first in Italian (through a translation of a cassette recording of the lecture, and then in

a translation of the Italian version, in English).

That progression from cassette to Italian and then to English is already, in translation terms, a

potential recipe for misunderstanding or error (and the new versions of the lecture remark, in

their footnotes, on one significant case of error in this earlier version).3 But then of course,

there is also the fact that, once the lecture (as it did) struck a chord with wider and wider

audiences, it was that first, twice-removed from the original, English version that would be

the one that became, for the wider reading audience, the ‘lecture as such’. And there was one

more fateful little trick that was to be played thanks to the translation and excerption or

abridgement procedures that the original spoken version here went through.

For just half a page after this climactic (and it is climactic in the original delivery of the

lecture) moment where Foucault ends his ten-fold repetition of the term management/gestion

2 I except those, and I am aware that there are some, who had listened to the tapes of the lectures and perhaps

transcribed them for themselves. However even that form or prior listening or reading is very different from the

reading that is possible of such a well-established and carefully redacted text as that of the lectures produced

through the procedures of editing referred to in footnote 1. 3 See Foucault, 2009: 101, asterisked footnote: this notes that a passage of some 13 lines is missing from the

earlier English version of the lecture, and also from a subsequent French version published after Foucault’s

death and included in his Dits et Ecrits. Furthermore the passage is replaced by a totally different paragraph ‘of

which there is no trace either in the recording or the manuscript’. My own speculation – and it is no more than

that – is that the initial tape ended occasioning a gap in recording while a new one was inserted, and the passage

was a well-meaning attempt to recuperate what had been missed.

in formulating the stunning new construct ‘governmental management’, he pauses for

reflection. And in that moment he suggests that perhaps he should not have entitled his

lecture series Security, Territory, Population: instead he should have found (Foucault, 2009:

108) ‘a more exact title’. For ‘what I would really like to undertake is something that I would

call a history of “governmentality”.’ Now what is intriguing is that, if you read the whole four

lectures as delivered up to this point, this term ‘governmentality’ is one that Foucault has

never employed. [It will be found in the brief summary that precedes Lecture 4, but the

Lecture summaries are an addition of the editors, as they note (Foucault, 2009: xvi).]

Now this is not to say that Foucault will not deploy it in successive lectures; and he clearly

finds it a term of heuristic analytical value.4 Nevertheless, one effect of the translation of just

this one lecture, out of context, in an English version which would come to have, from the

1990s on huge circulation, was to give the term ‘governmentality’ a currency that it has never

since lost but does not have within Foucault’s analysis up to this point. For the lecture

delivered on 1 February 1978 and then presented in twice-removed form to the world in a

standalone English version has become one of the most widely known, cited and influential

single pieces by Foucault. Published initially in the small circulation journal I & C in 1979

and then in the very large circulation book The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon & Miller,

1991), it would go round the world as Foucault’s essay ‘Governmentality’ (Foucault: 1991:

87-104).

But finally, not only did the term ‘governmentality’ displace ‘governmental management’,

this English version had already erased it, and at the same time, reduced Foucault’s insistence

on repeating management to something far more muted, and also restricted. For a comparison

of the third passage quoted at the outset with the version as translated in the 1979 and 1991

‘Governmentality’ texts reveals that Foucault’s 10 invocations of management/gestion have

become just three. Furthermore all three uses relate to management’s role in the exercise of

discipline.5 Meanwhile, ‘management’ has disappeared completely from Foucault’s triangle.

The ‘triangle’ that concluded with ‘governmental management’ (twice) is rendered: ‘In

reality one has a triangle, sovereignty—discipline—government….’ (Foucault, 1990: 102).

4 It was a term already used, but with a more restricted scope, by Foucault’s friend Roland Barthes, as noted by McKinlay and Pezet (2010: 486). And I by no means wish to comment adversely on the heuristic scope that

governmentality and the term that he then does introduce (Foucault, 2009: 109): ‘governmentalization’. 5 The text reads (Foucault, 1990: 102): ‘Discipline was never more important …than the moment when it

became important to manage a population; the managing of a population not only concerns the collective mass

of phenomena; it also implies the management of a population in its depth and details’. There is no insistent

emphasis on management/gestion here.

To conclude this section, I would just wish to propose that, on the basis of what may now be

clear as to what Foucault was saying in the first four lectures of STP, we may want to try re-

think what Foucault may still have to offer to understanding our selves and our world (and

also to understanding the worlds and selves preceding our modernity). I say this, while

acknowledging that such a re-thinking is not to unthink the Foucault who wrote a piece

entitled ‘Governmentality’ as we have largely understood him till now. Such an unthinking

would be both impossible and pointless, not least because of the range of governmentality

studies that have emanated beginning in the 1980s, and increasingly over the two following

decades. It is more a matter of thinking how new horizons for thinking on that construct and

on the possibly constitutive roles of accounting and management within ‘the governmental’

may be valuable and new (not least since the major strands of work drawing on the construct

of governmentality have all self-avowedly only found certain departure points in Foucault

which have then led towards paths not before travelled).6

To that extent, this paper suggests that this fourth lecture in STP should and now can be read

as the culmination of a dense and yet rigorous analysis of how old forms of accounting and

management/gestion came together to constitute a new power of disciplining, together with a

new mode of ‘governmental management’, which in turn requires both the techniques and

agents who combine being ‘analytical, calculated and calculating’ with being ‘enlightened’

and ‘reflected’ (or perhaps ‘reflective’ or ‘reflexive’ since the French term used, réfléchi,

bears all these meanings).

3. From reading Foucault to re-thinking the status of management and accounting

How then may we build on an emergent recognition, however hesitant, that Foucault is, far

more than we have understood till now, undertaking an analytics of the power of accounting

and management as such?:To what extent may we begin to understand ‘governmental

management’ or ‘gestion gouvernmentale’ as a new mode of exercising knowledge-based

power, specifically for Foucault to bring alive the great governmental entity of the modern

6 So for instance, Miller & Rose (2008), in their valuable retrospective on their own approach and its debts to

and differences from Foucault, specifically say: ‘In the development of our approach we preferred not to be

Foucault scholars’ (2008: 8) and go on to signal in helpful depth the range of influences and strands of thought

they drew upon, beyond the focus on apparatuses and programmes and technologies which they did derive from

his work (2009: 8-16 esp).

era, the state , but analytically as well to that other great entity exhibiting and circulating

governmental management, the modern business enterprise?

Here I suggest that one needs to start preparing a path towards understanding how and how

far Foucault sees this new exercise of knowledge based power as a bottom-up process in

which the exercise of macro-power is a direct product of the exercise of micro-powers, but in

which equally the exercise of these micro-powers begins (with one huge analytical proviso)

within the self, and thence proceeds to the level of our interaction as selves with others, in

which we and they act, interact and counter-act, something we can all do only through

thinking, and not least thinking of what the other may do in thinking and acting for or against

us. The analytical proviso is, of course, that this is not to begin the analytics of power from

what goes on within some ahistorical ‘pure’ self-sufficient self. For equally there cannot be

an analytics of the self as pure psychologised individual who is therefore seen as ‘constitutive

subject’. For the thinking that goes on within the self does not ever begin ex nihilo; instead

what each of us engages in as a thinking human subject is always only possible within the

given system of thought (and of action) into which we are individually and collectively born.

Between them, these two re-readings of Foucault’s overall oeuvre can enable us to bring to

life a dormant seed for a general innovative re-thinking of accounting and management. We

may see, as we come to recognise his detailed naming of accounting and management as

integral to modern governmental modes of power, a wider framing of the modern emergence

of accounting as significant, beyond a connection purely to ‘business’ and/or attenuated ideas

of ‘the economic’. But we may also see how these modern exercises of power can only make

sense by beginning with a new form of ‘bottom-up’ analysis, which begins by tracing the

actions of micro-powers within the self and in the interactions of selves with others, as the

sole means to an adequate understanding the operation of macro-powers at the level of such

entities as the state or the corporate firm.

Here the relation of action to thinking, beginning within the self but always linked to the

system of thought within which the self is born and so finds initial limits or horizons to its

thinking and acting is a key analytical constant.

Of particular interest, I suggest, for the field of accounting, and more specifically in the

context of promoting new and different ways of thinking and writing about accounting, is the

fact that Foucault’s recently published writings, and particularly STP, now make it clear that

he wrote much more extensively on forms of accounting as such than we have recognised

before. Of parallel interest, particularly for those interested in the inter-relations between

accounting and management and between accounting, management and strategy, is the

realisation that he wrote equally extensively on management as such, as indicated through the

insistent naming already remarked upon of management/gestion

For insofar as we may now see Foucault as having talked directly, particularly in STP, about

both accounting and management, this undermines virtually all the interpretations and uses

made of his work in these fields by those drawing on Foucault over the past three decades.

For any recognition of any direct engagement by Foucault with management and accounting

will be found to have been virtually completely absent before.

Instead the default assumption in earlier writing was that Foucault talked of other constructs

which then became variously applicable to the accounting and management fields only

through the intervention of those already working and researching in those fields. Among the

constructs invoked we will find, for instance: ‘power-knowledge’, ‘discipline’,

‘governmentality’, ‘biopower’, ‘panopticism’, ‘ethics’, ‘technologies of the (care of the) self’

and ‘parrhesia’. Let me take just one classic text summarising the first wave of Foucault

studies in management, McKinlay and Starkey’s Foucault, Management and Organization

Theory: From Panopticon to technologies of the self (1998): in every chapter you will find

one or more of these constructs being invoked. But no one remarks in any way on Foucault as

having named either management or accounting as key analytical categories or terms in his

work: for no-one had ever observed such an insistent naming of these constructs in the texts

available at the time.

[One may observe this absence for instance through reviewing the summary in the book’s

Introduction of the individual contributions. First they are seen, revealingly, as attempting ‘to

apply Foucauldian categories and procedures to throw fresh light on the history of the

factory, management and the modern corporation’ (1998: 3). The summary of the first set of

chapters (by Burrell, Clegg, and Jackson & Carter) presents them as drawing on such

categories as the Panopticon, disciplinary practices/power, and dressage (1998: 2-6) to set out

how using Foucault can advance Organization Theory.

The second more historically focussed set (by Savage, Hoskin, McKinlay & Starkey, and

Hopper & Macintosh) are presented as drawing on similar categories, but also reading off

from Foucault’s concern in Discipline and Punish with normalizing judgement and

examination (Foucault, 1977: 170ff), a recognition of the power of accounting in

implementing disciplinary forms of management accounting, and management and labour

control (1998: 6-9).

The third more presentist set (by Deetz, McKinlay & Taylor, Townley, and Findlay &

Newton) are presented as showing, discursively as well as via practices, the ways in which

individuals (and groups) in modern managerial work settings become ‘knowable, calculable

and comparable’ (1998: 10-12), e.g. through HRM systems, under regimes of sovereign as

well as disciplinary power, and through becoming self-disciplining and so constituting modes

both of mutual control and self-actualizing. Finally, the editors offer an Afterword, reflecting

on the themes in Foucault’s late works, to suggest that our constitution as human subjects,

born within our given historical milieu but proceeding actively via processes of subjectivation

and objectivation (see Foucault, 1994c: 315-319), entails a tension between discipline and

desire.

A full analysis would follow the procedure followed in each chapter in detail; however it

would not gainsay the characterisation above. All of the contributions see Foucault as having

to be brought from elsewhere to management. There is no moment where Foucault becomes

seen as a historian or theorist of management as such. Perhaps most poignant in this regard is

the one passage in the book where Foucault is actually quoted as using ‘management’ as such

(Jackson & Carter, 1998: 54). What is so poignant is that here Foucault is refusing to reduce

the problem of power to economistic explanations, and so is seeing the prison as like the

permanent military garrison and the Jesuit boarding schools and the first large-scale

workshops all of which appeared in the eighteenth century. He characterizes this as ‘a whole

technique of human dressage by location, confinement, surveillance, the perpetual

supervision of behaviour and tasks, in short a whole technique of “management” of which the

prison was merely one manifestation’ (Foucault, 1984b: 105). Yet Jackson & Carter, perhaps

because their focus and title is ‘Labour as Dressage’, follow up, not with any observation on

the fact that Foucault here uses the term management, and indeed does so as his concluding

descriptive term. Instead they proceed to analyse, very interestingly it must be said, the

naming by Foucault of dressage.

Perhaps the final poignancy, however, is that one contributor (Hoskin, 1998: 93) actually

takes a passage where Foucault is talking about how statistics becomes from the eighteenth

century necessary to the government of the state, enabling its strengths and the strength of

other states to be known, and proposes that if one just substitutes ‘accounting’ for ‘statistics’,

‘management’ for ‘government’ and ‘the firm’ for ‘the state’, then Foucault is demonstrably

‘one of us’, talking our language.7

At the same time, it may, now, have become presumptuous to assume Foucault as ‘one of us’,

because in some respects he is now receding from theoretical view, or, as with

governmentality research, seen as someone who contributed to the first steps forward but has

now been left behind. To some extent, this can be read off not only from the shifting fashions

in critical accounting research journals but in the more retrospective but recent critical

compilation emanating from within the accounting research field, Accounting, Organizations

and Institutions (Chapman, Cooper & Miller, 2009). As with governmentality work, here

across the spectrum of critical work in accounting one sees that, although many of the

contributors drew extensively in previous decades on Foucault’s work, by now they have

largely moved on. In the index, he rates less entries than Latour (and far less if one includes

Actor-Network Theory given that ‘discipline’ or ‘disciplinarity’ are totally absent). Perhaps

most tellingly, one paper refers to his power/knowledge construct having first penetrated

research discourse in the early 1980s and thereafter having influenced ‘social and

organisational studies of accounting for the rest of the 1980s and much of the 1990s’ (Robson

& Young, 2009,:351). So his time has come and gone. But at the same time, nowhere in the

text is there any sense that Foucault might be as, or more, directly engaged in thinking

accounting (both as such and in relation to management) than the local inhabitants of the

critical domain.

But there is now, I suggest, good cause for arguing that what he has to say goes beyond what

most of us have said, and that he therefore talks our language better than us, not only in how

he analyses the new conjunction between accounting and management referred to above, but

also in the ways that he sees accounting and/or management operating in eras before that of

‘governmental management’ dependent on accounting and statistics. For what he discerns as

getting said in the discourses or arts of government, in their various aspects before the late

18th

century, shows management (as oiko-nomia) and the exercise of pastoral power as

bringing these practices into various forms of relation, distinct from those today, but in each

case potentially opening our ways of thinking about accounting, management and modernity.

7 The same applies with

For what takes shape, however inchoately, so Foucault argues, is a new kind of exercise of

power where an ancient oiko-nomic mode of commanding and coordinating activity gets

joined together with the two other ancestral forms of exercising power, the pastoral power of

the shepherd as developed in the Latin Christian pastorate, and the sovereign power exercised

by the ruler as King, Emperor or Prince. What has to be solved, as noted above, is the

extension (Foucault, 2009: 94) of this ‘government of the family, which is called precisely

“economy”’ to the level of the state: what is at stake is

‘the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say the proper way of

managing individuals, goods and wealth, like the management of a family by a

father who knows.... how to make his family’s fortunes prosper… – how to introduce

this meticulous attention… between the father and his family into the general

management (gestion génerale) of the state’ (Foucault, 2009: 94-5, emphasis added)

When we reach the new triangular coming together sovereignty, discipline and governmental

management, this is in this regard the coalescing of the three old and distinct modes of

exercising power: the sovereign, the pastoral (which had during the seventeenth century

transmuted into the disciplining of individuals and groups, particularly in institutional

settings), and the ‘oikonomic’. It is only then that management can become a construct which

which plays across the spaces of power, not just within the sphere of the household.

Having got this far, perhaps now we may begin to see how far Foucault in this work that has

remained, in its complexity, out of our view till now, holds out to us a new way of

understanding a conjunction from beyond the world of Foucault studies, that coming together

of management and accounting with the running of entities in the business world which we

have, since Chandler’s work in particular (esp. Chandler, 1977), been able to see as beginning

in the mid nineteenth century United States. Specifically we may re-address the history of

how and why the structuring of lines of activity via a staff function came to be conjoined with

a processing via that staff function of the accounting and statistical information garnered in

each unit of each line, thus constituting first that historically new mode of doing business that

Chandler names as ‘administrative coordination’, and then in consequence that new form of

business entity which Chandler names as the ‘modern business enterprise’.

For another of the developments that he describes across the first three lectures of STP, is the

taking shape as a similar staff-function based approach to the structuring of the coordination

of the state. In particular he notes in Lecture 1 the importance of structuring space and time

and circulation through appropriate modes of town planning, the circle or indeed the heart,

but in practice, as at Nantes, through techniques for ‘organizing circulation’ (2009: 18), first

on an ‘axis of circulation with Paris’ but then internally along the banks of the Loire, in a

project by Vigny, ‘to construct quays along one side of the Loire, allow a quarter to develop,

and then to construct bridges over the Loire, resting on islands, and to enable another quarter

to develop….opposite the first’ (2009: 19). Or again, in Lecture 2, he sees how discipline

constructs a force field, and one which ‘is essentially centripetal’ (2009: 44), as it ‘isolates a

space, …determines a segment’ and so ‘concentrates, focuses and encloses’. But he goes on,

‘the apparatuses of security…have the constant tendency to expand; they are centrifugal.

New elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology, behaviour, the ways

of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, and exporters, and the world

market. Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway allowing the development of ever-

wider circuits’ (2009: 45).

Here we may see a parallel analysis to that developed by Chandler in developing the idea of

the administrative coordination breakthrough of the visible hand. Both structuring and

processing are entailed in making the new force field come alive – although whether the term

‘centrifugal’ is really apt for the extension and linking of elements to constitute the world

market may be questionable. The centripetal dynamic within units remains in play and in

place, the issue is how units get circumscribed and rendered (relatively) stable through a

centripetality within, while the circumscribed units get linked together in a further exercise of

centripetality across units. It is the effecting of this that constitutes the successful modern

business enterprise.

Finally, the other great way in which he sees management and accounting coming together is

(as discussed at length in Lecture 3) in the articulation of the new construct of ‘population’,

Here both management and accounting are necessarily co-present, since the ‘population’ is

made up not of passive subjects – those passive subjects ruled by the old-style imperious

sovereign by being rendered obedient. Instead its whole raison d’etre comes about through its

being constituted out of active citizens, who act moreover on a principle of desire which must

therefore be actively shaped and, as he says, managed rather than being prevented or

suppressed. Or as he puts it (2009: 72-3);

So you can see that a completely different technique is emerging that is not getting

subjects to obey the sovereign’s will, but having a hold on things that seem far

removed from the population, but which, through calculation, analysis and reflection,

one knows can really have an effect on it. …. (Foucault, 2009: 72)

And one can act on the population in this far removed way precisely because:

‘…according to the first theorists of population in the eighteenth century, there is at

least one invariant that means that the population taken as a whole has one and only

one mainspring of action. This is desire. …Every individual acts out of desire. One

can do nothing against desire. …However—and it is here that this naturalness of

desire thus marks the population and becomes accessible to governmental

techniques—….this desire is such that….on condition that it is given free play, all

things considered and within a certain limit…., it will produce the general interest of

the population. …The production of the collective interest through the play of desire

is what distinguishes both the naturalness of population and the possible artificiality

of the means one adopts to manage it’. (Foucault, 2009: 72-3, emphasis added)

Foucault is quite clear that this is a new form and power of management/gestion. For

‘with this idea of a management of populations on the basis of the naturalness of

their desire….we have something that is completely the opposite of the old ethical-

juridical conception of government and the exercise of sovereignty. …The sovereign

is the person who can say no to any individual’s desire, the problem being how to

legitimise this “no”…. [Instead] the problem of those who govern…is how they can

say yes; it is how to say yes to this desire.’

And he has explained just previously how at the micro-level this management of the

population and its ‘natural’ desires is to be effected. It requires the reflective and reflexive

managing activity of those who are proficient at tracking the regularities of desire (Foucault,

2009: 71). Which is where we find the second of those passages cited at the outset being

brought into play: to repeat it once more, now in its fuller context:

‘To say that population is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed by decree

does not mean, however, that is an inaccessible and impenetrable nature, quite the

contrary. …(For) the naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly

accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents

and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected (réfléchis), analytical, calculated,

and calculating’.

And it is precisely these new calculating, analytical agents who will be the means to the

exercise of power on the population in line with their desires, through the mix that they have

acquired in the process of learning to become expert agents, namely of ‘calculation, analysis

and reflection’.

Finally, we may recall but here in a little more detail just what he had to say in the first of the

introductory quotes to this paper, on the specific virtue and value of the micro-roles playable

by accounting, once it comes into a systematic relation with the collection of statistics. As we

may recall, the new apparatus of security works through three steps. First there is an invoking

a new mode of questioning, specifically asking a ‘kind of questions’ (2009: 4), which all

entail naming, counting and accounting. Second the specific counting must be of events (e.g.

crime events) in a way that through aggregation of the events enables the naming of new

constructs (in this instance ‘criminality’). Finally and thirdly, it is then possible to engage in a

calculative evaluation of options for dealing with the newly named construct, based on

establishing the costs and benefits of options for controlling and correcting the event

frequencies. It is here that he suggests that the questions to be asked are as follows:

‘What is the average rate of criminality for this type? How can we predict statistically

the number of thefts at a given moment…in a given town…? …How much does this

criminality cost society, what damage does it cause, or loss of earnings?...What is the

cost of repressing these thefts? Does severe and strict repression cost more than one

that is more permissive. …What therefore is the comparative cost of the theft and of

its repression, and what is more worthwhile?’ (2009: 4-5)

In this way one establishes a first version of that wonderfully ambiguous modern construct,

the ‘norm’ – that term which expresses simultaneously the quantitative sense of an average or

mean in a distribution and the qualitative sense of a standard of goodness or excellence to

which one should aspire. Or in his words:

‘The general question basically will be how to keep a type of criminality…within

socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average that will be

considered optimal for a given social functioning.’ (2009: 5)

This whole approach to a management grounded in accounting as the set of micro-practices

enabling ‘governmental management’ may therefore lead us to entertain the possibility of

framing our understandings of the modern emergence of accounting and management and

their unprecedented range and power of interplays in relation not just to the frame of business

and economics, as the Chandler analysis has tended to do, but to the emergence of the

exercise of power via new micro-practices simultaneously in state and in business settings.

One might add too, this also opens the possibility, even more strongly, of not remaining

within the restrictive categories for understanding management and accounting’s modern

interplays invoked to define research into accounting and management in the past three

decades. I think here not just of the categories that those writing from an old Foucauldian

perspective might be expected to excoriate, those of neo-classical or positivist economics, or

the forms of naïve positivism, psychologism or sociologism more generally. I think equally

of those categories used to explain accounting by those writing from within the old

Foucauldian and other less naïve but sociologically derived modes of analysis, insofar as

they too have assumed that the analytic categories for critical understanding of accounting

and management have to come from beyond the knowledge fields of accounting and

management to make sense of how they operate and articulate their truth-statements.

4. From accounting and management as such to a bottom-up analytics of power,

knowledge and truth interplays

The ultimate reason for staking the claim just made is that at a more general level, Foucault’s

late work offers a path to a less flat and repetitive set of ways of thinking across the human

sciences generally, but again beginning from within the fields of accounting and

management. For the wider observation that can emerge from the new reading and re-reading

of his late work is that Foucault does not only prove to have been speaking directly of

accounting and management and stressing the importance of the analytical, reflective, and

calculating human subjects who coordinate and administer them.

It also becomes clear that his more general form of analysis is moving in a consistent new

direction where he is concerned to move from the level of thinking within the subject (as

what takes place as unavoidable human activity yet which is intimately related to what then

we undertake as ‘action’, as in the example of a caring for self) to the interplay between

thinking and acting subjects, to the more macro-levels of the engagement in power,

knowledge and truth games.

This, it begins to become clear, is a consistent bottom-up form of analysis, not only

applicable to the field of governmental management and the uses of accounting plus statistics,

but in principle across all forms of human acting and thinking. So if it can be discerned in the

form of analysis undertaken first in the publications already mentioned, it can secondly be

discerned in the lecture series from the 1980s now being published and concerned with the

care of the self (e.g. Foucault, 2005; 2010; 2011), and thirdly it is there in other essays

published in earlier decades, but which now can have more analytical purchase because of the

publication of this new material.

As I read it, the long-term objective of this form of analysis is to displace not only the

persistent faux-naïf positivism of the Vienna Circle (and its economistic epigones as

exemplified by the work of Friedman and the Chicago School), but equally any residual

psychologism, anthropologism or indeed sociologism, even of the kind developed against the

‘sociology of the social’ exemplified in the French intellectual milieu by Bourdieu and so

well articulated by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005) as a ‘sociology of associations’.

Here Foucault can now be seen as being concerned always to begin from an adequately

reflective level of ‘bottom-up’ analysis, whether in the analyses of modern large entities such

as the state, or in his more intimate analyses of how individual human subjects think and act

in particular historical settings. In each case there will be practices shaping the dominant

modes, and also the silences or absences, in our thinking and acting; and so he traces the

changing specific acts and reflections involved in the historically changing reflexive

processes involved in ancient modes of care of self, just as he begins to trace the lineaments

of the first modern modes of interweaving ‘calculation, analysis and reflection’.

Perhaps we may begin again from within STP, but this time from a famous passage that

follows very quickly on the passage where management is named ten times, namely that

where he warns against treating the state as a Nietzschean ‘cold monster’, but instead

remaining open to the possibility that: ‘Maybe the state is only a composite reality’.

The bottom-up movement of Foucault’s thought is rendered very clear in a first respect here,

as he proposes (2009: 109; for comparison see the version in Burchell et al, 1991: 102) that

we should avoid any ‘overvaluation of the problem of the state’, in either of its two forms:

first ‘the lyricism of the cold monster confronting us’; and second ‘reducing the state to a

number of functions like…the development of the productive forces or the reproduction of

the forces of production’. Instead, he counsels that we should begin from a bottom-up

analysis focussing on ‘what I would call the “governmentalization” of the state’ (2009: 109).

But the precise form that he envisages such a bottom-up analysis of the large entity taking is

not articulated in the remaining few lines of that lecture. It is only returned to explicitly in the

final paragraphs of the final lecture of STP (delivered on 5th April, 1978), where it becomes

clear that it must begin from the levels of not only how we act but how we think, as he

reflects on what he had been seeking to do across the whole set of lectures for that year,

which was:

‘to show how starting from the relatively local and microscopic analysis of those

typical forms of power of the pastorate, it was possible, without paradox or

contradiction, to return to the general problems of the state, on condition precisely

that we [do not make] the state [into] a transcendent reality whose history could be

undertaken on the basis of itself.’ (Foucault, 2009: 358, passages in square brackets

are conjectural additions where the original tape-recording is unclear)

At which point he introduces the crucial analytical difference to his bottom-up analysis which

entails beginning from the interplay of thinking and acting, and so renders it possible for us to

undertake a form of critical bottom-up analysis which no longer has either to begin from or

rest at the sociological or anthropological levels (even as an analysis of ‘associations’), and

which equally no longer has to seek instead to begin from or rest within any naïve

psychological or sub-psychological (e.g. in either a Freudian or a neurological reduction)

alternative, any of which begins from the ahistorical human self as ‘constitutive subject’.

Instead he proposes, in his concluding words, that:

‘It must be possible to do the history of the state on the basis of men’s actual practice,

on the basis of what they do and how they think. Certainly I do not think analyzing the

state as a way of doing things [and a way of thinking] is the only possible analysis

when one wants to do the history of the state, but it is, I think, a sufficiently fruitful

possibility, and to my mind its fruitfulness is linked to the fact that we cdan see that

there is not a sort of break between the level of micro-power and the level of macro-

power, and that talking about one [does not] exclude talking about the other. In actual

fact, an analysis in terms of micro-powers comes back without any difficulty to the

analysis of problems like those of government and the state’. (Foucault, 2009: 358).8

From this departure point, we can then perhaps begin to see the fuller scope of Foucault’s

form of bottom-up analysis, by drawing in related insights set out in a number of essays

published in the 1990’s (Foucault, 1994a; 1994b; 1994c).

In these he develops first a re-thinking of power, as a process not of domination or direction

but of what one might term ‘indirection’, or as he terms it, an ‘acting on the actions of others’

(1994a). More specifically he says (1994a: 340):

'a relationship of power...is a mode of action that does not act directly and

immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions'. Therefore it requires 'two

elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship’: first ‘that

"the other" (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognized and maintained to

8 The bracketed passage in bold is present in the French version (see Foucault, 2004: 366), and essential to

Foucault’s argument here, but missing from the English translation, it seems to this reader purely through

oversight.

the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a

whole field of responses, reactions, results and possible interventions opens up'.

Second he links this form of acting on the actions of others integrally to thinking, as he

articulates the idea (1994b: 200) that there is no action without thinking, and that therefore

thought ‘is to understood as the very form of action’. Or again, in his words:

‘Thought is ‘what establishes, in a variety of possible forms, the play of true and false,

and consequently constitute s the human being as a knowing subject…it is what

establishes the relation with oneself and with others… . In this sense, thought is

understood as the very form of action [emphasis added]

Which leads him to what he states in yet a third essay (Foucault, 1994c: 318) as his positive

‘methodological principle’ namely ‘that of appealing to “practices” as a domain of analysis’,

but with a particular focus on those practices that are ‘understood simultaneously as modes of

acting and of thinking’.

It is a level of analysis he ends up at in both the second and third of these essays. In the

second, following on from his observation about thought as the form of action, he continues

that it qualifies as action:

‘…insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal or rules,

the relation of oneself and others. The study of forms of experience can thus proceed

from an analysis of “practices”—discursive or not—as long as one qualifies that word

to mean the different systems of action insofar as they are inhabited by thought as I

have characterized it here’ (Foucault, 1994b: 200-201)

That sentiment is echoed and if anything deepened in the dense but crucial exegesis in the

third of these essays of what specific practices may qualify as those constituting ‘systems of

action… inhabited by thought’. Here his specification is that these are:

‘the practices—ways of doing things—that are more or less regulated (réglées), more

or less conscious (réfléchies), more or less goal-oriented (finalisées), through which

one can grasp the lineaments both of what was constituted as real for those who were

attempting to conceptualize and govern it, and of the way in which those same people

constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analyzing and ultimately

modifying the real’ (1994a: 318).

So here we have a progression, in one respect ever inwards or downwards, from acting on the

actions of others, to thought as the form of action (but therefore as action itself) and then to

the level of the practices that constitute thought. Except that, at the moment that one reaches

the level of appealing to practices, one is taken out to the level at which Systems of Thought

obtain their purchase on the thinking and acting subject. For the practices that are regulated

bear the imprint of whatever are the historically given rules encountered by the as yet

unknowing and unthinking subject, as do those that are goal-oriented bear the trace of what

are already accepted as goals or ends, and both then shape thinking and action through the

inescapable practice of reflecting and reflexively becoming conscious of what is to be

possibly thought and done.9

5. Conclusion

These are initial thoughts on how, from out of a new reading and re-reading of Foucault’s

historical-theoretical analyses as developed from the late 1970s on, we may find new paths

towards innovative or at least different ways of thinking accounting and acting as researchers

of (and indeed beyond that as practitioners of) accounting knowledge and practices.

At the same time, the challenge or opportunity held out here may not be for these times –

institutionally at least. Alternatively some may see these as times that more than most require

a re-engagement with an author who has been becoming, rather as occurred in French

philosophical circles in the late 1980s, seen as one no longer necessary to engage with

closely. Perhaps the new kind of engagement that this paper suggests can at least happen

intellectually: and then perhaps institutional stasis may weaken or become more labile when

one might least expect it.

9 I provide the French terms that Foucault employs since the each is elusive and multiple compared with any

English equivalent: ‘réglée’ signifies rule-bound, regulated and is even the term for the lines ruled on paper;

‘réfléchie translated here as ‘conscious’ is the term that Burchell translates in STP as ‘reflected’ but also

signifies reflective and reflexive, and ;finalisée’ signifies finalised as much as goal-oriented: and each of these

alternatives would fit perfectly well with the range of regularities that Foucault is searching to identify as those

shaping thinking and action at some systemic and extra-individual level.

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