Re-thinking the ‘disciplinary’ power of accounting: A Foucauldian reading of how disciplinary accounting knowledge translates into managerial strategy in a Portuguese bank

Abstract

This paper seeks to re-frame the importance of a diachronic understanding of accounting’s centrality (i.e., focusing on a sense of history) to modern modes of managing as a precondition for considering how it contributes to management change initiatives synchronically (i.e., focusing on the present). It offers a re-appraisal of how a Foucault-inspired approach may enable understandings of how the diachronic is implicated in what goes on in the synchronic episodes so well studied in recent critical research into accounting, management and strategy. It then offers a reading of how a change initiative undertaken in a Portuguese bank, Iberian Bank, takes place at three levels of development and involving different sets of protagonists. It thereby seeks to open out, within accounting research, the kind of historically-informed research of ‘the present’ recommended within the strategy field by Robert Chia (2004).