Robin Fincham

Thinking critically about intellectual capital accounting

The measurement and reporting of intellectual capital has recently attracted a growing interest from accounting researchers, promoting a lively and far‐reaching debate. Two related issues have informed this debate. It is possible to identify these issues as exemplifying financial reporting and management accounting perspectives on the emergence of intellectual capital. Provides a commentary on the progress of the debate to date, while also attempting to contextualise some of the issues it entails in both earlier and wider debates. In an effort to progress the project of accounting for intellectual capital, suggests the adoption of a critical accounting perspective. This would entail exploring the possibilities of intellectual capital providing its own accounts, rather than remaining imprisoned within accounts devised by others.

Narratives of Success and Failure in Systems Development

This paper explores a narrative perspective on ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in computer systems development. Organizational narratives can be seen as sense-making devices and as having a purposive aspect in the ways in which they evolve and change and influence behaviour. Narratives like success and failure in particular can be seen as persuasive rhetorics used in legitimizing particular courses of action. The narrative approach challenges more accepted notions, particularly rationalist views that see computer success/failure as outcomes brought about by simple causation. It also reveals the limitations of process models of IT success/failure, though these stress a more complex form of decision making around IT. In the paper, these issues are explored in contrasting projects in financial services firms. In two case studies, computer success and failure emerge not as discrete conditions, but as interacting themes employed by organizational members in response to the circumstances they confront. The corporate capacity to build success out of failure, and to distance the new from the old, discriminated between successful and unsuccessful projects.

Intellectual Capital Accounting as Management Fashion: A Review and Critique

There is growing interest in the new techniques of intellectual capital accounting (ICA) as a method of measuring and reporting the range of human and knowledge-based factors that create sustained economic value. This paper suggests that viewing ICA as an aspect of expanded forms of management knowledge, and in particular as a ‘management fashion’, provides critical insight into the techniques occupational and organizational roles. The fashion perspective emphasizes the symbolic means of establishing the appeal of ideas to particular audiences, as well as the social mechanisms by which the dissemination of ideas takes place. The paper reviews the emerging debate on ICA, and interprets the professional literature as a narrative that reveals accountancys keen interest in ICA as a mechanism of exploiting tacit knowledge. The suggestion is that the disciplines concerns with its own occupational situation and corporate relevance may be a reflection of the appeal of a development like ICA as much as any simple views of efficacy.

Between Innovation and Legitimation— Boundaries and Knowledge Flow in Management Consultancy

Management consultancy is seen by many as a key agent in the adoption of new management ideas and practices in organizations. Two contrasting views are dominant—consultants as innovators, bringing new knowledge to their clients or as legitimating client knowledge. Those few studies which examine directly the flow of knowledge through consultancy in projects with clients favour the innovator view and highlight the important analytical and practical value of boundaries— consultants as both knowledge and organizational outsiders. Likewise, in the legitimator view, the consultants’ role is seen in terms of the primacy of the organizational boundary. By drawing on a wider social science literature on boundaries and studies of inter-organizational knowledge flow and management consultancy more generally, this polarity is seen as problematic, especially at the level of the consulting project. An alternative framework of boundary relations is developed and presented which incorporates their multiplicity, dynamism and situational specificity. This points to a greater complexity and variability in knowledge flow and its potential than is currently recognized. This is significant not only in terms of our understanding of management consultancy and inter-organizational knowledge dynamics and boundaries, but of a critical understanding of the role of management consultancy more generally.

Rethinking the dissemination of management fashion: accounting for 'intellectual capital' in UK case firms

In research on management knowledge, a tension often exists between perspectives that stress the effects of structural and institutional forces on the spread of new knowledge within managerial communities versus a more action-focused and organizationally embedded perspective on dissemination. This article contributes to the critique of dissemination theory by exploring the fashion for Intellectual Capital Accounting. ICA is a set of accounting models for managing knowledge-based assets and represents a poorly institutionalized variable type of fashion. The findings from case studies of ICA in six UK firms are at variance with the image of packages of knowledge being transferred into organizations. They confirm a process of dissemination that was much more a function of operational constraints and the level to which internal controls had developed; firms seemed to come to ideas via distinctive processes internally constructed around current problems and agendas, technical constraints, and the actions of a range of sponsoring groups.

The consultants’ offensive: reengineering – from fad to technique

Business process reengineering has tended to be seen as a management fashion and the brainchild of the gurus who popularised it. Yet this overlooks the role of consultants in the spread of BPR and the system itself as a specific technique of change management. In fact BPR played a significant role in the push for new business in management consultancy and has become integral to an armoury of consultant tools. This article explores reengineering as a consultancy solution in the context of the external expert’s distinctive claims on knowledge, and argues that this approach reveals new insights into both reengineering and the consultancy process.

Not sharing but trading: Applying a Maussian exchange framework to knowledge management

Knowledge sharing is widely regarded as the process underpinning knowledge management in organizations. The dissemination of knowledge so that all benefit from shared know-how is seen to greatly enhance working capability. Nevertheless, we suggest the sharing perspective can mean a somewhat restricted view of how knowledge workers relate to and use knowledge and that focusing on knowledge exchange affords a better understanding of the processes that prefigure sharing. In particular, we revisit a classic social exchange theory in the framework of gift relations that Mauss developed. Applying ideas of gift-giving to knowledge transfer invokes a complex economy of reciprocation and obligation taking account of a wide range of knowledge categories. Through a study of knowledge work in multinational settings, we demonstrate specific propositions consistent with a Maussian approach: knowledge reciprocity, interplay between sharing and withholding knowledge and knowledge use.

Expert Labour as a Differentiated Category: Power, Knowledge and Organisation

The idea of ‘expert labour’ as a category uniting many kinds of knowledge‐based work has long been of interest. At the same time, existing models often do not differentiate between the many forms of ‘new’ expertise in the main business and technological groups. These tend to be consolidated in single categories of ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘organisational’ or ‘commercial’ professions. This paper built on Reeds seminal account of the expert division of labour. It used his analytic dimensions of power, knowledge and organisation to develop a new framework comparing clusters of expert labour in professional services, business services and knowledge work. It offered a more detailed classification and a comparative view that throws fresh light on key debates around new professionalism and emergent technologically defined occupations.

Silence, Procrustes and Colonization: A Response to Clegg et al.’s ‘Noise, Parasites and Translation: Theory and Practice in Management Consulting’

The article by Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes in March 2004’s issue of Management Learning is a refreshing and welcome contribution to an otherwise largely sterile, atheoretical and overly prescriptive literature on management consulting. However, and sadly, it stops very short of offering a critique and therefore generating substantially novel insights into this phenomenon. Also, and despite the authors’ assertions otherwise, it ends up celebrating consultancy as a privileged arena in achieving what is described as radical change, but what is, in effect, typically a reinforcement of existing power relations and of managerialism and its associated language. This response comes from a position that is, in many respects, empathetic with that expressed in the article. Consulting can indeed readily be seen as an activity through which theory serves ‘as a means by which practice can be interrupted and transformed . . . disturb(ing) organizational realities’ (p. 32) by creating ‘noise’. Moreover, this ‘parasitic’ process is not so much one of creating a new order as one of translation, which combines both ‘difference and repetition’ as it mediates linguistically between different ‘systems’, especially those of the client and consulting organization (p. 39). Indeed, others have presented a similar picture where consultants occupy what appears to be a special place in postmodern thinking— liminality (Clark and Mangham, 2004; Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003). However, even if the account is intended as more aspirational and constitutive than representational, it remains firmly rooted within management discourse and Response

Three's a Crowd: The Role of Inter‐Logic Relationships in Highly Complex Institutional Fields

Institutional complexity is increasingly seen in terms of potential schisms between logics in pluralist fields. However, research into complexity is mostly confined to binary institutional logics that oversimplify settings where more logics interact. The reorganized mental health service we studied brought a range of expert groups together in a highly complex institutional field. Three logics were seen to be continually in play: a health logic based on expert medical values, a care logic of holistic values, and a logic of integration based partly on managerial priorities but also shared more broadly. The paper identifies how the pattern of conflicting and reinforcing inter‐logic relations that underpinned this field was constituted and further explores a number of critical implications for complexity theory.