Paolo Quattrone

What is IT? SAP, accounting, and visibility in a multinational organisation

Abstract Recent work on Information Systems tries to reconcile the apparent homogeneity of Information Technologies (IT) with the heterogeneity of their use by recognising that users can render IT systems flexible and malleable. This paper advances theorisation of this apparent paradox by reflecting on the nature of IT, i.e. its ontology. Observations of an ERP (SAP) implementation in a large USA multi-national cast within Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies approaches help illustrate how an object like IT can possess diversity and heterogeneity whilst being a homogeneous and operative technology. The paper argues that IT appears homogeneous for it attracts and generates heterogeneous uses. This paradox is labelled ‘heteromogeneous’. An IT system is theorised as an absence which establishes a presence by mobilising and attracting other actors and technologies, in this instance accounting, seeking visibility in organisations. IT emerges from multiple and continuous translations involving customisations of SAP. Thus the definition of IT is neither stable nor singular across time and space, which enables IT and SAP to travel across organisations.

Spacing and Timing

The aim of this special issue is to explore organizing processes in ways which do not assume an a priori existence of space and time. Rather than providing a summary of the papers collected here, this introduction illustrates how Spacing and Timing relate to issues of knowing, organizing, mediation, engagement, alterity and absence/presence. We examine how various actions and practices may be seen as seeking to achieve order but also concomitantly create further openings and orderings. Finally, while this introduction attempts to highlight a range of issues relating to this process, the development of alternative vocabularies, approaches, and insights are required to develop this work further.

Exploring How the Balanced Scorecard Engages and Unfolds: Articulating the Visual Power of Accounting Inscriptions

Research on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has questioned whether its adoption generates greater integration between financial and nonfinancial performance measures, supports strategy implementation, increases performance and improves strategic decision making. This research has also highlighted how the BSC often generates effects other than these. Building on studies that portray Performance Measurement Systems as intrinsically incomplete practices of representation, the purpose of this article is to investigate how the BSC engages users because of the organizing work that it stimulates around this incompleteness. Our findings allow us to further articulate the power of specific visual elements of the BSC, such as hierarchical trees, wheels, causal and strategy maps. The article provides material that contributes to a better understanding of how the BSC performs multiple roles within organizations beyond a simple representational functionality and unfolds continuously. It contributes to the growing literature on accounting inscriptions, that is, signs producing incomplete representations, by developing an analytical theoretical framework that defines the BSC as a rhetorical machine composed of four key features: (i) a visual performable space (i.e., a schema generating creative engagement); (ii) a method of ordering and innovation; (iii) a means of interrogation and mediation; and (iv) a motivating ritual.

The Possibility of the Testimony: A Case for Case Study Research

This Connexions essay aims to reflect on the nature, rationale, and implications for research and researchers of conducting case studies. It draws on the works of Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben on the meaning of the testimony and the paradox of Auschwitz: only those who died could fully testify the atrocities of the camp, but they tragically passed away. Thus each testimony presents a lacuna, and one needs to listen to the voices coming from this empty space to comprehend what happened. For organizational scholars, this paradox metaphorically implies that listening to managers and interviewees has nothing to do with telling what could be seen (a fact) and rather relates to what is missing (a lacuna) and thus the issue is one of investigating this absence (this space left empty by whichever testimony). This opens some ethical questions: What is the role of researchers in this investigation? Where does their ‘authority’ to narrate come from? What are they ‘authorized’ to recount? And with what consequences? Are researchers ineluctably perpetrators of a domination in the absence (and in the name) of the Other or is there an escape from this?

Governing social orders, unfolding rationality, and Jesuit accounting practices: A procedural approach to institutional logics

This paper questions a key assumption in the organizations literature that the dynamism of institutional logics and practice variations is the result of rivalry among logics and actors, of tensions and institutional shifts, and of the agency of institutional entrepreneurs. This study examines in rich historical detail the development of accounting in the Jesuit Order, illustrating how Jesuit accounting started from a rationality that did not presuppose an external ordering principle; instead, Jesuit rationality was unfolding—founded in continuous interrogations informed by common, purposeful procedural logics stemming from rhetorical practices used to classify, recall, and invent knowledge. I examine this concept of unfolding rationality in two areas of Jesuit practices: spiritual self-accountability and administrative accounting and recordkeeping. In this Jesuit rationality, the relationships between means and ends, and how and why behaviors take place, were not anchored permanently in a substantive logic. Instead, procedural logics left individual Jesuits and the community to imagine modes of action in the specific social and organizational contexts in which their missions operated. Jesuit rationality was thus unfolding, a persistent and recursive mode of governing social behavior and searching for organizational order that generated large-scale administrative routines and institutional dynamism while never fully achieving that order. The analysis brings into question our understanding of the historical and institutional genealogies of modern rationality and its taken-for-granted link with Protestant ethics.

‘We have never been Post-modern’: On the Search of Management Accounting Theory

The issue of how to theorise and what criteria should be adopted in assessing the usefulness and validity of management accounting theories is certainly very important and relevant to the EAR community. The accounting literature in this area has grown considerably in the past few years (e.g. Williams et al., 2006). Management and organisation studies (see, for instance, AMR, 1989, 1999; ASQ, 1995) have devoted equal attention to these issues and other disciplines such as philosophy and sociology of science and have debated at length what makes a theory valid and useful (e.g. Bloor, 1976; Kuhn, 1970; Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970; Laudan, 1977; Pickering, 1992; Popper, 1969). Malmi and Granlund’s paper (from now onwards ‘the paper’) is a timely addition to this debate as is argued in this commentary. EAR’s readers will be familiar with most of the concerns expressed in the paper. For instance, many will agree with its point that a significant part of what is published in management accounting utilises theories developed in other fields in quite an instrumental manner: academic papers resemble a production line where a series of cases flow on a production belt waiting for a theory to encapsulate them in what, then, is an elegant but sterile academic game (Moizer, 2008). The paper rightly makes a similar point on p. 8 when it refers to the use of theories developed in other disciplinary realms. The generality and limited heuristic value of some accounting works which use very sophisticated quantitative and/or qualitative methods to reach very simple conclusions European Accounting Review Vol. 18, No. 3, 621–630, 2009

Towards Integrated Reporting: Concepts, Elements and Principles

Integrated Reporting is a process that results in communicating—through the annual integrated report—value creation over time. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the idea and the logic underpinning Integrated Reporting, shed light on the reasons that enabled the debate on Integrated Reporting to gain relevance over the recent years, and illustrate the features of the Consultation Draft released by the International Integrated Reporting Council on April 2013. In doing so, we focus our attention on a brief review of the fundamental concepts, content elements and guiding principles proposed within the Consultation Draft. We end the chapter with some reflections on the challenges ahead for Integrated Reporting, and on the potential impact of its adoption on the role of the management accounting function.

The visual and material dimensions of legitimacy : accounting and the search for socie-ties

The aim of this article is to contribute to the literature on legitimacy by investigating its material and visual dimensions. By drawing on studies on rhetoric as a means of composing visions of social order and on an historical analysis of accounts in three paradigmatic eras (Roman times, Renaissance and Modernity), it shows how symmetry in accounts constituted an aesthetic code which tied members of a community together in ‘socie-ties’. We investigate the rhetorical process of ratiocinatio and explore how the visual and material dimensions of accounts provided social actors with an opportunity to explore their positions and ties within a community. This process augmented social actors’ understanding of their current relations by reducing them to a series of entries in an account, thus allowing them to reflect on what it meant to be a legitimate member of a society.

Book Review: Norman Belding Macintosh: Accounting, Accountants and Accountability

cultures emerging in various European regions, Pfau-Effinger has argued that gender cultures, i.e. the dominant ideas in any particular context of time and space, ‘are the result of conflicts and compromises between social actors with different power in former historical periods’ (Pfau-Effinger 2000: 266), and ‘Social actors, individuals, political parties, associations and social movements act in any historical phase on the basis of historical context of ideas’ (2000: 266). According to this approach, changing the political context should mean that different cultural work and family schemas emerge. Moreover, according to Pfau-Effinger, in any society actors reproduce, modify or change the cultural stock, or add innovative ideas which may be indigenous or exogenous to their society. If she is correct, escalating processes of globalization may gradually transform cultural schemas in the US, making part-time work more acceptable, as it is in the Netherlands, for example (PfauEffinger 2004). However, while growing global pressures may at least partially fracture the American schema of competing devotions, the chances are that workers in other societies will be exposed to it in their work for US-based multinationals. BlairLoy’s impressive book should therefore stimulate a comparative study that takes political and institutional regional contexts into consideration, but that zooms in on the way different cultural models and ideas affect women and men’s life trajectories in local and multinational workplaces, and in their families. 150 Organization Studies 27(1)

The materiality of absence: Organizing and the case of the incomplete cathedral

This study explores the role of absences in making organizing possible. By engaging with Lefebvre’s spatial triad as the interconnections between conceived (planned), perceived (experienced through practice) and lived (felt and imagined) spaces, we challenge the so-called metaphysics of presence in organization studies. We draw on the insights offered by the project of construction of Siena Cathedral during the period 1259–1357 and we examine how it provided a space for the actors involved to explore their different (civic, architectural and religious) intentions. We show that, as the contested conceived spaces of the cathedral were connected to architectural practices, religious powers and civic symbols, they revealed the impossibility for these intentions to be fully represented. It was this impossibility that provoked an ongoing search for solutions and guaranteed a combination of dynamism and persistence of both the material architecture of the cathedral and the project of construction. The case of Siena Cathedral therefore highlights the role of absence in producing organizing effects not because absence eventually takes form but because of the impossibility to fully represent it.