آزمایش محدودیت های نظریه ساختاردهی در تحقیقات حسابداری

In 1985 I published a paper in Accounting Organizations and Society with Bob Scapens titled Accounting Systems and Systems of Accountability; understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts. The paper suggested the potential usefulness of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory for efforts to understand accounting in its organisational contexts. Rather than engage in a further review of the use of structuration theory in accounting, this paper sets out to test our original proposition as to the usefulness of Giddens ideas for accounting research. I explore three points of possible criticism in the paper. That structuration theory does not take the ‘agency’ of accounting sufficiently seriously; that Foucault and Lacan allow us to get much closer to the ways in which accounting information works back upon human subjects; and that Giddens and accounting share a lack of ethics.

In the above I have sought to test the limits of our 1985 proposition of the value of Giddens’ structuration theory for understanding accounting in its organisational contexts. With the wisdom of hindsight I have suggested that our paper was perhaps too local, and strategic in its focus, and in this way possibly understated the pivotal role of accounting in the structuring our world. Even at an organisational level it is possible that we payed too much attention to accounting as a set of cognitive resources to the neglect of the ways in which particular frames of meaning, norms and power relations were structured into accounting artefacts. Despite or perhaps because of their lack of reflexivity, we should pay more attention to how these accounting ‘actants’ participate in the human agency which Giddens wished to keep centre stage. In my own subsequent work I have wanted to go beyond Giddens’ framework to explore more closely how accounting shapes subjectivity, including the exercise of our ethical sensibilities. Despite these qualifications and supplements structuration theory remains, as was intended, a key ‘sensitising device’ for the project of understanding accounting in its organisational and social contexts. Built into structuration theory are a whole series of lessons from the history of social science that it is vital to incorporate in our own work. He suggests that in the face of any particular empirical setting one must enquire not only into meanings, but also the operation of norms and power relations. In seeking to go beyond the limitations of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, however, he insists that the understanding of meanings should not lead to the neglect of power, at the same time as insisting that all power should not be read as illegitimate, and that perhaps the most perfect form of power is one which shapes the very way a person sees the world. All these terms hover around the notion of praxis and what for me is the profoundly creative view of practice that Giddens work carries through from Marx; that the social world is made and re-made at every instant – ‘produced and re-produced’ – as much in habit as in conscious thought, but always with only limited understanding of its conditions and consequences. Englund and Gerdin note that for the most part, and contrary to the orientation of our own work, most accounting researchers have used Giddens for a form of ‘institutional analysis’ of accounting rather than for the analysis of strategic conduct. This possibly says a great deal about the structuration of academic research and researchers for sadly it is still the case that, for the most part, accounting researchers seem happiest in the company of the accounting numbers, or at least accountants, whilst organisational researchers are happy with anything but the numbers. For this reason understanding accounting in its organisational context has and continues to prove much more difficult than was at first imagined. There is either too much or too little accounting. For this very reason, however, it remains very important that the project of understanding accounting in its organisational contexts is pursued, and within this project structuration theory remains an invaluable resource.