Accounting and Law: Partners in the Juridification of the Public Sector in the UK?

Abstract This paper is built around interlinkages between accounting and law. It springs from two key arguments. First, that political parties are increasingly using law, amongst other mechanisms, to mould the behaviour of social systems beyond acceptable levels. This is described as a "juridification process" in critical legal circles and has many disturbing ramifications. Second, the way many political concerns within juridified law are increasingly infiltrated by, and dependent upon, accounting thinking and logic. The paper explores these broad themes at a theoretical level highlighting the nature of these processes and the possible ramifications of juridified law when it goes beyond the "structural coupling" of society and the social systems which are being regulated. It also develops the themes empirically by analysing, using this theoretical framework, two recent important United Kingdom Acts of Parliament with regard to health and education institutions (the Education Reform Act 1988 and the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990). The conclusions from the paper are that these Acts are demonstrably juridification at work containing "politicized accounting" in their various clauses and are outside appropriate levels of "structural coupling". As a result, they run the risk of either disintegrating the political masters and/or the social systems. Because of the dominance of accounting logic in these Acts, accounting can be seen to be an active partner in this possible disintegration process.