CHRONOS Lunch research seminar

Organiser: Centre for Critical and Historical Research on Organisation and Society (CHRONOS)

Speaker: Professor Keith Hoskin, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham

Abstract

Through my recent work both on and seeking to extend the thinking of Foucault, I find myself ‘thinking management otherwise’, not just as practice but as knowledge form: not least through discovering Foucault himself to have been thinking and writing as theorist and historian of management, and then too of accounting (Hoskin, 2017). His study, he says in The Birth of Biopolitics, is ‘of the art of governing …the reasoned way of governing best’ (Foucault, 2008: 2). And in Security, Territory, Population, he specifies the modern way as a historically new ‘governmental management (gestion gouvernementale) which has population as its target and apparatuses (dispositifs) of security as its essential mechanisms’ (2007: 108); furthermore these dispositifs he describes as operating via forms of cost/benefit analysis (2007: 3-6).

Procedurally, this opens up three new possibilities, two negative, one positive. First we no longer have to translate concepts from elsewhere in Foucault, e.g. power-knowledge, discipline, dressage, etc, to the critical study of management, or of accounting: he is already self-declaredly one of us. Second we do not have to tie our Foucauldian colours to the mast of some ‘big’ modern discipline – sociology, political philosophy, post-structuralism – thus ironically placing him within the very ‘disciplinary nexus’ which he did so much to critique, while treating his work as a convenient conceptual or methodological ‘toolbox’.

Positively we can seek to follow his passion, which he three times in the Introduction of The Use of Pleasures describes as ‘thinking otherwise’ or “penser autrement” (1985: 8, 9, 11)—arguably a necessary recourse if we are to continue the study of the ‘History of Systems of Thought’ (the title of his Chair at the Collège de France). More specifically we can proceed, as he proposes, to analyze entities such as the state, but also the business entity, on the basis of ‘men’s actual practice, on the basis of what they do and how they think… as a way of doing things [and a way of thinking]’ (Foucault, 2007: 358, phrase in brackets only in the French original).

Such a study has necessarily to be both archaeological (an analysis of what gets said and written in the form of ‘statements’) and genealogical (a tracing of when and how practices of thinking and acting shift sufficiently that we think and act in new ways, as is the case in terms of a new managing and new accounting some two centuries ago): but not necessarily to be distant from other approaches – I think here of the homology between Foucault’s formulation of the state as entity requiring a positive management of subjects and their desiring via the ‘economic truth’ of cost-benefit analysis, and  Chandler’s formulation of the modern business enterprise as entity exhibiting a new structuring, a staff function at every node in every management ‘line’, plus the continuous processing and analysis of ‘accounting and statistical information’ to manage time, space and costs while delivering products and services that simultaneously generate profits and customer satisfaction.

But how further may we think management otherwise? First, if management in general consists of ways of ‘getting people to get things done’—and so of forms not of direction but of indirection—then we may perhaps think management across historical eras as solving that general problem via systematically differing forms of ‘managemental reason’: forms which may then turn out to have significant affinities with, as well as the more usually trumpeted differences from, those of ‘governmental reason’.

But second I would suggest that there must also be some systematic study of how accounting, across such eras, interplays with and even structures both management practice and ‘management reason’. A recent study (Bassnett, Frandsen & Hoskin, 2018) asks first what accounting in general consists of: to which our answer is that, far from being a ‘calculative practice’, accounting is a form of statement, but of a distinctive kind, since it always first names, and also mathematically regularises, objects which it then counts. In its first (Mesopotamian) naming and counting, it is also the first visible-sign statement form, and so not a ‘precursor’ to writing, but the first writing itself.

More generally, accounting as the first writing, articulates writing as systematically different from speech, in that it has no verbs, and so a different ‘grammaticality’—as Foucault observes in The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002: 93); and so an account, like a ‘graph, a growth curve, an age pyramid, a distribution’ is unspeakable. Such statements are spatially, rather than temporally, linear, and constructed to be read synoptically, simultaneously and silently.

This statement form has therefore been differentiated from both speech and that secondary writing form which seeks to model or follow speech, which historians of writing have designated as a ‘glottographic’ writing that produces a similar and temporally linear narrative and commentary to that of speech. In contrast, Hyman (2006) describes the first accounting as the first ‘non-glottographic’ statement form. But in such forms as graphs, charts, equations and distributions, this form is today an essential, even indispensable, component of the ‘truth claims’ made across the scientific and social scientific disciplines: but also in the infra-disciplinary knowledge forms which are management and accounting, whose first forms, I would argue, are constructed in ancient Mesopotamia.

I shall therefore seek in my presentation to celebrate and appreciate the non-glottographic and the infra-disciplinary, as a continuing path towards ‘thinking management otherwise’….

Speaker bio

Keith Hoskin is currently Professor of Accounting at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, England, having previously held professorships at Warwick Business School, and the Manchester School of Management, UMIST. He writes and researches across the fields of accounting, management and education, and is engaging in a series of writings which re-read the work of Michel Foucault and its centrality to understanding how we think and act across the above knowledge fields. These include studies of Foucault as theorist and historian of accounting and management, of forms of governing and managing before 1800 and the ‘leap’ to modern forms of ‘governmental management’ and ‘economic truth’. His study, with Richard Macve, of ‘manageriogenic failure’ on the Western Railroad is part of this project, whose major objective is a book rethinking the genesis and dynamics of modern management and accounting. He was the British Accounting Association’s Distinguished Accounting Academic for 2011.