Accounting for accumulation: A longitudinal field study

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: Tommaso PALERMO (LSE)

Room T030

Abstract:

This paper examines the role of processes of accumulation in the context of how accounting
operates in organisations. Through a longitudinal field study, the paper illustrates multiple
accumulation processes that contribute to the uptake and stabilisation of a credit check control
procedure, which is used in a large telecom company to address a concern with ‘bad debt’. A
patchwork of inscriptions consolidates key assumptions underlying the functioning of credit
check (accumulation as patchwork). Accounting and control technologies, organisational
processes and informing practices gradually accrete, complementing and reinforcing the use
of credit check (accumulation as accretion). The accumulation and absorption of digital
traces about transactions with customers enable to test the functioning of credit check to
further increase its perceived organisational legitimacy (accumulation as absorption). In
addition, the analysis documents a fourth process, which shows how the generative properties
of accumulation dynamics are contingent upon the erosion of certain objects of managerial
concern (e.g. the customer, the sales agent, inefficient organisational processes) and/or
accounting and control technologies that seek to address such objects of concern
(accumulation as sedimentation). Drawing on these observations, the paper offers three
contributions. First, while previous studies tend to focus on distinct processes of
accumulation, this paper highlights how multiple processes can coexist, overlap and reinforce
each other. Second, this paper adds nuance to the notion that processes of accumulation are
additive and generative, showing how these generative and additive properties are contingent
upon the erosion of certain elements, which allows the sedimentation of others. Third, the
paper reveals the important role played by such ‘sediments’, which become preconditions for
subsequent interventions. In so doing, the paper reveals how the much discussed imperfection
of accounting can be addressed via endogenously emerging properties, rather than via
interventions carried out by the designers or the users of accounting.