Aim of the study/relevance to the panel: To identify rival assumptions concerned with theorizing accounting change, especially in order to generate research questions that are likely to add new and interesting theorizing of the performativity of ‘others’ than accounting approaches
When taking the ‘performativity thesis’ as a critical point of departure, theorizing of accounting in public service domains (PSA) is primarily challenged by its ontological a priori: the relational constitution of accounting in organizations and, hence, public service delivery.
From that, actor-network-theory, as the main advocate of this claim, may be treated as another complementary approach for addressing the societal impact of accounting and accountability in organizations, particularly by spotting the ‘performativity’ of economics via accounting devices. This is considered to be a theoretical gap which is weakly addressed within PSA as an interdisciplinary but in fact fragmented research field. Subsequently, forcing this approach and its critical stance may become a conceptual template to scrutinize the societal impact-flaw, largely by arranging research inquiries that make the performativity of accounting devices and their overflows more recognizable.
Despite the value of being more interdisciplinary, relational ontology may also be treated as a specific meta-theoretical position and epistemological stance which is useful to problematize how prevalent approaches arrive at their research inquiry in PSA, which is mainly borrowing the gap from a pre-selected theoretical frame. Problematization instead of gap-spotting is proposed as a methodology for identifying and challenging assumptions underlying the existing literature and, as a result, generates research questions that are more likely to introduce interesting problems within a research domain. The necessity for such reflection on how accounting change is enacted is indicated by Vosselman’s (2014) proposition on the performativity of both instrumental and relational accountability: “As there is a multiplicity of practices there may be concrete-contingent networks where economics is less performative while competing theories are more performative”. Consequently, prospective inquiries on the societal impact-flaw need to be sensitive for more than the performativity of economics, which then is the performativity of this ‘others’.
Research design: Using problematization as a methodology to challenge field-based assumptions about accounting change in local government
Due to the challenge of relational ontology, the paper aims to introduce problematization as a methodological approach to reconstruct assumptions from PSA research about the societal consequences of accounting change in local government. The analysis uses a meta-analysis of case-based accounting research - as introduced by Bruns (2014) - as a method to synthesize the more recent state of explorative insights associated with this phenomenon of interest.
Discussion: Probably, the generation of ‘that’s (now) interesting’ in PSA research
The outcome of the paper is tentative, because the epistemological stance as well as the method-in-use implicates methodological novelty within PSA research.
Literature:
Bruns, H.-J (2014). Accounting change and its effects in local government: A Meta-synthesis of explorative, case-based research. Paper prepared for XVIII IRSPM Conference, Carleton University, Canada
Vosselman, E. (2014). The ‘performativity thesis’ and its critics: Towards a relational ontology of management accounting. Accounting and Business Research, 44(2), 181-203.
G1 - Accounting and Accountability – Constructing society – History, culture, politics and
