Mahmoud Ezzamel

Power, Control and Resistance in 'The Factory That Time Forgot'

This paper contributes to a developing body of literature which questions the claim that the ‘factory of the future’ is a total institution in which self-subordination through ‘new wave management’ is virtually inescapable. It examines the experience of frustrated management efforts to re-engineer working practices, mainly at the point of production, in response to repeated corporate-driven initiatives designed to implement a range of ‘lean manufacturing’ initiatives at ‘Northern Plant’, a pseudonym. Our findings illustrate how workers can and do employ a variety of individual and collective forms of resistance involving dissembling co-operation with change initiatives whilst maintaining a distance from them. In accounting for resistance, we note the significance of market conditions but focus primarily upon the importance of workers’ identification with practices that had been established earlier when management were content to indulge self-managing patterns of work in return for securing required levels of output.

The impact of environmental uncertainty, managerial autonomy and size on budget characteristics

This study provides the results of an empirical investigation into the impact of various contextual variables on the design of the corporate budgeting system. The results support earlier findings linking contextual variables to budgetary characteristics. Further, the results indicate that compared with corporate context variables as measured by managerial autonomy and size, the external variable represented by perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) had a greater impact on the design of budget characteristics. The results also suggest that the impact of PEU was much stronger for larger size companies compared with smaller size companies.

Control and cost accounting practices in the Spanish Royal Tobacco Factory

The aim of this paper is to analyse the cost accounting system implemented in 1773 by a large Spanish tobacco company which operated as a monopolist. Drawing on data extracted from original archives, the paper examines the characteristics of the cost system within the broader context of a strict control system. The paper argues that there was a connection between the two systems. One of the main roles of the cost accounting system was to buttress a set of structural measures instituted in the RTF with the aim of minimising the scope for tobacco theft. Another aim was to impart visibility upon the various activities undertaken in the RTF. The paper also examines the role of the cost accounting practices as a disciplinary regime. A combination of physical measures, reflecting the rates and mixes of resource utilisation and monetary measures were developed to facilitate monitoring and surveillance of the activities of the factory employees. These measures were used to establish a powerful regime of calculability which rendered human accountability visible. Such calculability created an environment at the RTF in which management could compare, differentiate, hierarchaise, homogenise, and even exclude individuals.

Some Empirical Evidence from Publicly Quoted UK Companies on the Relationship Between the Pricing of Audit and Non-audit Services

Abstract Using data obtained from a sample of 314 UK quoted companies (excluding financial sector companies), this paper examines three aspects of the relationship between fees for audit and non-audit services: (a) the extent and nature of the provision of non-audit services to audit clients; (b) whether the positive association between the level of audit fees and non-audit services fees found in the majority of non-UK studies holds in the UK; and (c) whether it is possible to throw further light on the nature of the relationship between audit fees and non-audit services fees by exploring the interaction between non-audit services and other factors that appear to affect audit pricing. Our results suggest that: (i) income earned by audit firms from non-audit work for quoted clients averaged nearly 90% of the levels of audit fee earnings in 1992/93 (and more than a quarter of clients paid more for non-audit services than for the audit); (ii) the extent of voluntary disclosure of the breakdown of non-audit s...

Market Comparison Earnings and the Bidding-up of Executive Cash Compensation: Evidence From The United Kingdom

We argue that compensation committees will pay executives at least at the going rate and that deviations from that rate will influence subsequent pay. In a sample of large U.K. companies, we estima...

Accounting and management-labour relations: the politics of production in the 'factory with a problem'

This paper examines the role of accounting in management–labour relations within the context of contemporary moves to re-conceptualise and reorganise manufacturing processes. We explore how new manufacturing and accounting discourses are received by employees, and how their (more or less accommodating) responses to such initiatives shape the trajectory of their introduction. So doing we show why a more adequate understanding of accountings presence and significance in the workplace does not simply require a little more attention to the politics of the production process but, rather, its positioning at the centre of analysis. We develop our argument by drawing on material collected from an intensive and longitudinal case study of a manufacturing plant of a large multinational company based upon participant observation and extensive interviews. We show how, following shifts in market conditions and company ownership, pressures to enhance productivity and improve profits led to several attempts by senior management at the plant to introduce change initiatives in production methods, management style, and accounting techniques. We demonstrate how shopfloor workers interpreted these initiatives as intensifying labour by reducing head count, leading them to resist these initiatives over a period of 13 years. We argue that during this period the rhetoric of corporate governance was mediated by workers’ ability to create a space through which their own interests were defined, articulated and brought to bear on the discourses and rationalities advanced by senior management in support of ‘new’ accounting (and management) techniques. By appreciating the presence and significance of labour in the politics of production, additional ways of accounting for the rise and demise of ‘new’ or ‘excellent’ accounting techniques are contemplated.

The relationship between accounting and spatial practices in the factory

Abstract During the eighteenth century, tobacco production in the Royal Tobacco Factory (RTF) of Spain moved from the San Pedro Factory located in downtown Seville to the purpose built New Factories outside the city walls. This paper examines the relationship between accounting practices and spatial practices in these two radically different factory premises. The paper explores how the intervention of detailed accounting calculations into spatial configurations and the intertwining of accounting and spatial practices provide discipline in the factory by yielding calculable spaces and accountable subjects. The spaces produced by architects in the New Factories were subsequently mediated through administrative arrangements that rendered enclosure and partitioning more disciplinary. Moreover, accounting practices were developed as a coding system to reconfigure factory space by classifying it into cost centres, quantifying activities carried out in these cost centres, and rendering spaces visible and subjects accountable. In this context, we argue that accounting practices have the capacity to function as time–space ordering devices, and, through networking with spatial practices, provide the scope for managers/administrators to enhance employee surveillance and overall factory discipline.

Corporate Governance and Financial Accountability: Recent Reforms in the UK Public Sector

During the last decade, several financial initiatives aimed at “reforming” the public sector in the UK have been produced by the Government. These initiatives seek to supplant historically established bureaucratic modes of governance, underpinned by a public service ethic, by market‐based principles. Reflects on these developments and provides a critical evaluation of the markets and hierarchies literature by focusing specifically on recent developments in the governance of health and community care. Argues that the discourse and practices of economic rationalism are not “given” or “natural” but arise within, and serve to secure and legitimize, particular (historical) power/ knowledge relations. It is only by developing more substantially democratic forms of governance that there is any prospect of removing the irrational consequences attributed to markets and hierarchies.

TOWARDS AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF ACCOUNTING CHANGE IN THE ROYAL TOBACCO FACTORY OF SEVILLE

This paper is initially informed by an institutional sociological framework to analyze changes in accounting practices that took place in the Royal Tobacco Factory (RTF) of Seville during the period 1760–1790. We argue that the significantly greater development and use of accounting practices during that period can be linked to the move to the much larger and more purposefully built new factories, the decline in total tobacco consumption, and the pressure to increase revenue for the Spanish Crown while reducing production cost and maintaining high product quality to deter entry. These new accounting practices were developed in part with the intent of improving factory efficiency, but importantly, they enhanced the external legitimacy of the RTF in the face of the events mentioned above and contributed to the long survival of the RTF as a monopolist.

Accounting for Management and Managing Accounting: Reflections on Recent Changes in the UK

This paper uses data derived from interviews carried out in a number of UK companies to explore the extent to which management concerns are driven by accounting practices, and also how accounting practices are mediated by the views that managers have of the role of accounting. The paper also analyses accounts given by UK managers of the ways in which changes in accounting are being managed. Two specific issues relating to accounting change are examined: (1) the impact of new information technology on accounting change, and (2) the competition between accounting and alternative bodies of expertise as mechanisms for change. In studying accounting in the context of wider organizational change, the paper focuses on a number of distinct, yet related, themes: (1) management accounting’s power to reinvent itself; (2) the interface between management accounting practices and employee empowerment (as one example of ‘new’ management practices); and, (3) contradictions in using management accounting calculi to facilitate the ‘new’ organization.