ACCOUNTING , POWER AND RESISTANCE IN THE ‘ PLANT WITH A PROBLEM ’

INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, many researchers have been concerned to document and analyze the wide-ranging changes that are purported to be taking place in thènew organization`. These changes relate to the organization of work and the emergence of new manufacturing and production practices such as teamworking, flexibility, multiskilling and Total Quality and Willmott, 1995). Emerging in parallel with these new management practices are apparentlyèxcellent`management accounting techniques, aimed at facilitating the management of thènew organization`, for example Activity-Based-Costing (ABC), Added Accounting and Strategic Management Accounting (see for example Bromwich and Bhimani, 1989). Most of the studies that have addressed accounting change and the role of accounting systems in the management of thènew organization`have been concerned with the technical dimension of these changes but without problematizing their development (for a brief review of this literature see Ezzamel, Lilley and Willmott, 1997). In contrast to this technical focus, a different research tradition is emerging which seeks to problematize these recent changes. In this context, the work of Miller and O`Leary (1993, 1994) has been prominent. Miller and O`Leary (M&O) have developed the notion of the `politics of the productàs an organizing slogan for examining the diverse discourses, including those of management accounting, that have emerged and competed to represent the translation of raw materials and human labour power into goods and services. Thèpolitics of the product`framework aims to provide some explanation of why the relevance of conventional management accounting practices to the factory and to the product has been questioned by academics, gurus and practitioners. It also seeks to explain how the 3 problematization of the factory/product was engineered in such a way that renders as the recipes newèxcellent`management accounting techniques, thereby arguing that the emergence of these techniques is inseparable from the problematization process. The strength of the M&O framework is in its concern to understand current attempts tòreform` management accounting as something more than a technical means for gaining better representations of new manufacturing technology. In M&O's work accounting is`politicized` explicitly by linking its fate to the product, the factory, and the emerging modes of governance. While we find much to commend in the M&O framework, we are concerned that it does not promote an engagement with the workersìived experience in having to deal with or even accommodate these new accounting developments. Accounts of organizational change that might suggest thèapparent consentòr`total subordinationòf workers to the formal organization of contemporary employment …