Connecting worlds: the translation of international auditing standards into post-Soviet audit practice

This paper analyses the use and circulation of nternational auditing standards within a large post-Soviet Russian audit firm, as it faces up to the challenges of international harmonisation. It describes this process as one of ‘connecting worlds’ and translation. In a detailed field study based investigation, it traces various attempts to articulate and link Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, old and new imagined audit worlds. The paper underscores the fragile and precarious nature of international standardisation projects. It shows how ideals of audit universalism and international comparability become enmeshed in, and challenged by, global divisions of audit labour, problems and practices of power and exclusion, and struggles for intra-professional distinction, which in turn undermine as well as promote the connecting of worlds through standards

Michel Foucault and the administering of lives

This chapter suggests that Michel Foucault is a nuisance for scholars of organizations, albeit a productive one. Foucault disavowed the study of organizations, yet his work was fundamentally concerned with the administering of lives, a central concern of scholars of organizations. The chapter explores this tension by examining four displacements that Foucault sought to effect: first, a move from asking ‘why’ type questions to ‘how’ type questions; second, a concern with subjectivity that discards the ethical polarization of subject and object in favour of an analysis of the historically varying ways in which the capacities and attributes of subjects are constituted; third, a focus on practices rather than organizations, and a concern to analyse sets or assemblages of practices in terms of how they emerge and how they are stabilized over time; fourth, a focus on rationalities in the plural. It then examines the ‘Foucault effect’ in organization studies

Accounting and the plasticity of valuation

This chapter explores exemplary moments of dissonance and innovation in accounting valuation. Examining the cases of value-added accounting, brand accounting, fair value accounting and impairment testing, this chapter traces debates and show that accounting valuation is ‘plastic’ due to both methodological variability and the different domains of worth that get registered within accounting concepts and techniques. Accounting is both a powerful vehicle of economization, valorising economic constructions of actors and things, and a practice which has been significantly destabilized by processes of financialization, namely ideas and practices of financial economics. The plasticity of accounting should not be read as weakness. This chapter confronts the apparent paradox that the power and reach of accounting as a practice of ordering and valorising has never been greater than at the time of crisis when its core practices of measurement and valuation are most contested and plural

The new politics of numbers: an introduction

This chapter sets out what is “new” in the politics of numbers and this volume’s approach to their study. Rather than asking what quantification is, this volume is interested in describing and analysing what quantification does, tracking and unpacking various quantification practices and their manifold consequences in different domains. The book revisits the power of numbers, and examines changing relations between numbers and democracy. It engages, for the first time, Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, the volume seeks to account more systematically for the plurality of the possible ways in which numbers can come to govern, highlighting not only disciplinary effects but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer

Quantification = economization? Numbers, ratings and rankings in the prison service of England and Wales

This paper uses the case of prison privatization in England and Wales to scrutinize what it means to “economize the social” through numbers. It argues that we ought to be careful not to equate quantification with economization. To uncover the multiple effects of economization and quantification brought about by new public management reforms and prison privatization, one needs to set presumed dichotomies between the public and the private aside and turn instead to the multiplicity of economizing practices (curtailing, marketizing, financializing) and their implication in different forms of quantification. Ironically, numbers and state contracts governing privately managed prisons also shielded these establishments from economization (e.g. budgetary savings requests); and it is the public prisons that have been exposed the most to measures of government austerity

The Foucault effect in Organization Studies

Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, Michel Foucault’s oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on its field. This article traces the different ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with Foucault’s writings over the past thirty years or so. We identify four overlapping waves of influence. Drawing on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the first wave focused on the impact of discipline, and techniques of surveillance and subjugation, on organizational practices and power relations. Part of a much wider ‘linguistic’ turn in the second half of the twentieth century, the second wave led to a focus on discourses as intermediaries that condition ways of viewing and acting. This wave drew mainly on Foucault’s early writings on language and discourse. The third wave was inspired by Foucault’s seminal lectures on governmentality towards the end of the 1970s. Here, an important body of international research investigating governmental technologies operating on subjects as free persons in sites such as education, accounting, medicine and psychiatry emerged. The fourth and last wave arose out of a critical engagement with earlier Foucauldian organizational scholarship and sought to develop a more positive conception of subjectivity. This wave draws in particular on Foucault’s work on asceticism and techniques of the self towards the end of his life. Drawing on Deleuze and Butler, the article conceives the Foucault effect in organization studies as an immanent cause and a performative effect. We argue for the need to move beyond the tired dichotomies between discipline and autonomy, compliance and resistance, power and freedom that, at least to some extent, still hamper organization studies. We seek to overcome such dichotomies by further pursuing newly emerging lines of Foucauldian research that investigate processes of organizing, calculating and economizing characterized by a differential structuring of freedom, performative and indirect agency

Quantifying, economising, and marketising: democratising the social sphere?

In recent decades, there has been an avalanche of numbers in public life, one that matches that which occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century. The difference today is that many of the numbers that are now so central to political rule pertain to performance, and depend on a felicitous interlocking of quantifying, economising, and marketising. The calculated management of life is at a critical juncture, and it is essential that we consider carefully how this is affecting who we are, what we have become, and who we wish to be. Only a few decades ago, this bandwagon seemed limited or at least focused in its reach, yet it now appears as if no domain of human endeavour can escape. We argue that it is important to differentiate quantifying, economising, and marketising, so as to counter the often phobic response to the unrelenting march of numbers in modern political rule. We call for greater attention to the role of accounting numbers, for accounting numbers go beyond the abstract models of economics and allow a form of action on the actions of others that economics does not. We argue also for greater attention to the conditionality of the performativity of quantification, so that we can identify the conditions under which numbers produce effects, and the varying nature and extent of those effects. Finally, we consider the thorny issue of “democratising” the social sphere, and note that it is only recently that quantification has been largely annexed by the phenomenon dubbed neoliberalism

Von Performativität zu Generativität:Bewertung und ihre Folgen im Kontext der Digitalisierung

In this article we explore (1) how the study of valuation practices can illuminate the relationships between comparison, classification, and measurement, and (2) how a focus on valuation practices can be used to critically analyze the conditions and consequences of new digital formats, such as comparison portals, recommender systems, and screening and scoring techniques. Departing from the view that value either resides in the mind of the subject (as preference) or is an objective property of a good, we argue that it is through valuation practices and technologies such as ratings, rankings, and other evaluative infrastructures that a good can be estimated as valuable or not. We develop an analytical framework for the study of interactive, digitized valuation technologies and propose that an analysis of such technologies can be enhanced by focusing on 1) evaluative infrastructures as regimes of valuation (as opposed to a narrow focus on individual devices); 2) protocol as the specific power effect of evaluative infrastructures, where, paradoxically (and in opposition to disciplinary power regimes), power is at once distributed and concentrated; and 3) the generative potential of such valuation regimes, i.e., the production of new values and categorizations through digital evaluative infrastructures (rather than performativity)

Comparability, competition and control: performance management in the correctional services of Germany and England and Wales

Over the last three decades, performance measurement has advanced to become a ubiquitous part of public management and has also spread to the penal sector. This chapter compares the performance measurement systems that have come to exist in the penal sectors of Germany and England and Wales by discussing three main themes: First, we describe and analyse the different measurement systems in use. Second, we compare different rationales and objectives underlying the introduction of the different performance measurement systems. Third, we examine uses and effects of the respective systems. We then discuss implementation challenges in both systems and potential negative unintended consequences. We suggest that by keeping the performance measurement systems open to negotiation and debate, such systems may help to mediate between different prison values and objectives. The article, written in English, is preceded by a German summar