Re-reading Foucault as Theorist of Accounting and Management as Such

Paper Submitted for the 2012 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference,

Cardiff


Keith Hoskin
Visiting Professor, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Colchester, England
[Please do not cite without permission of the author]



Re-reading Foucault as Theorist of Accounting and Management as Such
Abstract
The recent and continuing publication of Michel Foucaults Collge de France lectures from
the 1970s and 80s enable a significant re-reading of the analytical and historical scope of his
work, with particular significance for its potential seeding of readings of accounting and
management in both past and present which diverge from even those critical approaches
which draw to greater or lesser degree on Foucauldian ideas. Most significantly, the re-
reading now possible reveals him as an analyst and historian of accounting and management
as such, something hardly recognised (if at all) in previous work drawing on his ideas in
these fields of analysis, or indeed more widely. Furthermore he can be seen as articulating,
via an analytics grounded in accounting and management, a new way of understanding the
genesis and maintenance of modern macro-level entities such as the state and corporation
which has not been systematically followed as yet. This is a a bottom-up level of analysis,
which begins from a focus how humans, historically situated in their given era, think, and so
act, thus negating the frequently adopted critical move of grounding of analysis at the
institutional, sociological or anthropological levels. These twin moves suggest two
consequences. First accounting and management analyses may come to engage (or perhaps
re-engage) with Foucault in new ways which have hardly been recognised as feasible as yet,
thus perhaps reversing, certainly in critical accounting work, a move redolent of French
philosophy in the 1980s, where we do not need Foucault any more since we have gone
beyond him (as for instance in much work under the sign of governmentality). Second,
accounting and management may (and certainly on the basis of this re-reading should)
become comprehended as far more central to more general analytics of modern power and
knowledge relations, whether undertaken under the governmentality sign or through more
conventional modes of political-economic, social or institutional analysis.


1. Introduction:

What are we to understand by security? The third modulationwill be governed
by the following kind of questions. For example: What is the average rate of
criminality for this type? How can we predict statistically the number of thefts at a
given momentin a given town? How much does this criminality cost society,
what damage does it cause, or loss of earnings?...What is the cost of repressing these
thefts? Does severe and strict repression cost more than one that is more permissive.
What therefore is the comparative cost of the theft and of its repression, and what is
more worthwhile? Th(is) third form istypicalof the apparatus (dispositif) of
security. (T)he apparatus of security inserts the phenomenon in question, namely
theft, within a series of probable events. Second, the reactions of power to this
phenomenon are inserted in a calculation of cost. Finally, third, instead of a binary
division between the permitted and the prohibited, one establishes an average
considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the
acceptable that must not be exceeded. (Foucault, 2009: 4-6)
To say that population is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed by decree
does not mean, however, that is an inaccessible and impenetrable nature, quite the
contrary. (For) the naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly
accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents
and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected (rflchis),analytical, calculated, and
calculating. (Foucault, 2009: 71)
In short, the transition from an art of government to a political science, the transition
in the eighteenth century from a regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to a
regime dominated by techniques of government, revolves around population and
consequently around the birth of political economy. I am not saying that sovereignty
ceased to play a role when the art of government becomes political science. As for
discipline that is not eliminated either. (D)iscipline was never more important or
more valued than when the attempt was made to manage the population: managing
the population does not mean just managing the collective mass of phenomena or
managing them simply at the level of their overall results; managing the population
means managing it in depth, [managing it] in all its fine points and [managing its]
details. So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty
by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of
government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline and governmental
management, [a governmental management] which has population as its main target
and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism. (Foucault, 2009: 107-8,
emphases and phrases in brackets added)


I have prefaced what follows with three passages taken from the set of thirteen lectures
Michel Foucault delivered between January and April 1978 as his required annual lecture
series as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collge de France. The
versions I have given are derived from the versions now available in book form, and which
were published initially in French as Scurit, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collge de
France, 1977-78 (Foucault, 2004), and more recently in the generally excellent translation by
Graham Burchell, as Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France,
1977-78 (Foucault, 2009).
1
[However one should note that the phrases in brackets in the last
passage are in the original French but omitted from the English version. One argument here is
that those omissions are significant, particularly if we are to understand the significance of
accounting and management in the type of analytics of power and knowledge relations that
Foucault is developing in this text. Hence Foucaults original words need to be restored in
full, to get the full tenor of his argument.]
That argument, I shall argue (and as the above passages may at least begin to hint), revolves
around a fundamental change or shift in the way power was exercised that Foucault sees as
taking shape from the sixteenth century on a shift that also entailed a new relation between
the exercise of power and particular forms of knowledge, in particular accounting, and those
who were expert agents (i.e. calculated and calculating) in the exercise of such forms of
knowledge. More specifically Foucault lays out, particularly across the first four lectures of
his series, an analytics of the new exercise of power which gets embodied in the new
apparatus (dispositif) of security referred to in the first passage a passage that comes from

1
One should note that the French text is, like the English translation, based mainly on the cassette tapes of
Foucaults lectures made by attendees, supplemented, as the editors Ewald and Fontana observe, by access to
the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures and now in the possession of Daniel
Defert (Foucault, 2004: p. x; 2009: p. xvi). The lecture tape used here is available in the University of
California, Berkeley archive of Foucault tapes at http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/videodir/foucault/stp780201.mp3.
the very start of Lecture 1, as Foucault sets out the first major theme he wishes to address in
the years lecture cycle.
That exercise of power entails an interplay between accounting and management of a kind
never possible before. First this is, one may argue, because accounting takes on or develops a
new set of practices or techniques concerned in Foucaults terms with cost-benefit analysis,
and does so only because it is conjoined, as the second of the passages above indicates, with a
new kind of human agent, who shares with the new techniques in being enlightened,
reflected, analytical, calculated and calculating. Second it is because in its new interplay
with accounting and human agents of this new kind, management itself undergoes a historic
shift, from being concerned with the economic in the sense validated since Aristotle with
the nomos (or rule and allocation of resources) of the oikos (the household or estate with
wife, children and servants) to being a new kind of economics of that other great Platonic
category of concern, the polis (as city or state). What comes about, or what has to come
about, as Foucault puts it, is a translation wherein the old form of economic activity can now
function effectively at the level of the polis in a new and unprecedented kind of political
economy. What took place, discursively, in the old literature on the art of government was
a focus, in all discussions of economy, on the government of the family (Foucault, 2009:
94). The question that this literature addresses, but does not solve, he goes on, is:
the question of how to introduce economy that is to say the proper way of
managing individuals, goods and wealth, like the management of a family by a
father who knows.... how to make his familys fortunes prosper how to introduce
this meticulous attention between the father and his family into the general
management (gestion gnerale) of the state (Foucault, 2009: 94-5, emphasis added)

This is what Foucault is arguing, by the end of Lecture 4 of STP, is what has effectively taken
place, discursively, at least with the development of that governmental management which
he names as the third leg of the new triangle in the exercising of modern power, made up as:
sovereignty, discipline, governmental management.
In the next section of this paper I go further into how accounting is implicated in this new
exercising of power and how it has come to be so difficult to read this presence of both
management and accounting as such as being such integral constructs to Foucaults analyses
and analytics of modern power. In the following section, I go further into his earlier
understandings of management/gestion and also of accounting in relation not just to
disciplining but to earlier Christian forms of pastoral power under the guise of an accounting
for sins and an accountability of the pastor for his flock. In the final section I consider how
these constructs enter into a more general approach to the analytics of power which is not just
applicable to modernity, but is extended across all human eras in the exercising of power and
which generally (as it does for modernity) seeks to develop a bottom-up analysis of the
exercise of power, beginning in one respect within the human subject and the relation
between thinking and acting which we all engage in, but always doing so respecting how all
human subjects and their modes of thinking and acting take form and develop within
particular historical systems of thought and action.

2. Opening up a reading Foucault as Analyst and Historian of accounting and
management as such
I wish to begin with a slightly more extended consideration of the three passages from STP
set out at the start of this paper (which are successively from Lectures 1, 3, and 4). I return
first to the first passage, from the very start of Lecture 1.
First, as that passage shows, the apparatus/dispositif of security operates for Foucault through
generating numbers of particular occurrences (e.g. theft) across a given totality of people (a
totality that therefore becomes nameable, historically, as a population) and then subjecting
the numbers to some form of cost-benefit analysis. Second, he then, in Lecture 3, comes back
to how this is feasible, and observes that, for both the statistical and accounting practices,
what is necessary is the co-presence of reflective and calculating agents and relevant
techniques, and what the practice undertaken by such agents deploying such techniques
generates are constantly compilable and compiled sets of statistics and of course accounts.
For there is no way to undertake the types and range of cost-benefit analyses which he
designates as central to the exercise of this new form of power without the co-presence of
such agents and techniques.
[I leave to one side, for the purposes of the present paper, precisely when and where the
exercise of this kind of power, integrating the processing of statistics and accounting to
constitute continual apparatuses of security, successfully gets exercised across a given
territory (real or virtual). I equally leave aside just when and where populations get
constituted in the form of totalities of people seen as uniform (or sufficiently uni-form) in
terms of being measurable, all and singly, together, so that effective statistics and cost-
benefit calculations can successfully be undertaken.
I do so because Foucault himself signals that his analysis in STP is not primarly concerned
with the moment or era when these practices became fully formed and executed in particular
arenas of power, but instead is focussed on the (prior) emergence of discourses articulating
the possibility of such apparatuses of security, and thinking in terms of states being made up
of populations of thinking and acting subjects who have to be acknowledged in terms of their
thinking, acting and active desiring. His discursive focus on arts of government, as evident
in the passage cited above on how such arts discussed economy (2009: 94) is one sign of
this.
But in addition he makes it explicit that this is his procedural concern at the outset of the
series of lectures he delivered at the College de France in the following year, now published
(in the English version) as The Birth of Biopolitics; here he directly says, reflecting on what
he had initiated in STP and proposed to continue in the new lectures (Foucault, 2008: 2):
I have not studied and do not want to study the development of real governmental
practice . I wanted to study the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same
time, reflections on the best possible way of governing. In a sense I wanted to study
governments consciousness of itself.. to grasp the way in which this practice that
consists in governing was conceptualised both within and outside government.]
Finally, there is the third of these three passages, which comes from what is perhaps the most
problematic, because it is the most famous or well-known, lecture of these whole two lecture
series, Lecture 4 of STP, delivered on 1 February, 1978. The passage is in itself arguably the
most stunning demonstration of just how central the construct management (or in the
French gestion) was to Foucaults new analytics of power in general, and not just to the
aspect of this analytics which was concerned with the apparatus/dispositif of security.
There are, I would suggest, two reasons from within the text for this use of the term
stunning in the superlative with respect to this passage. First there is the extensive and
insistent repetition of the terms management, manage and managing (in the French
consistently either gestion or the equivalent verb-form, grer) across the passage. Count
them up from the start of the sentence Discipline was never more important.: and you
find them used no less than ten times, and in a particularly insistent way to refer to the
managing of a population not just at the global level of the collective mass, i.e. the macro-
entity, but down at the individual or indeed intra-individual level, that micro-level of depth,
fine points (in the French, finesses), and details.
But second, and equally important, or perhaps even more important in terms of understanding
the historical analytic that Foucault is unfolding or developing here, is the fact that he applies
the term not just to the construct discipline, but instead is arguing that what eventuates
historically, at the end of, or as the culmination of, the process he has been seeking to
document across these first four lectures, is a new kind of society, made up of, and indeed
reproduced and extended down to today by, a historically new mode of thinking and acting
human subject, engaged and engaged in a new version of ancestrally old power relations and
knowledge or truth games. This is what is needs unravelling through a new and re-reading of
what is getting said as he argues that we should not see things in terms of a progression from
a society of sovereignty to one of discipline to one of government, but that instead we have a
triangle (2009: 107) which perhaps we should designate as Foucaults triangle. For what
he sees here as conjoined in or as that triangle brings management in again. Management
here is not just an aspect of discipline (though it must be at work in the disciplining of the
population, along of course with the accounting and statistics which are necessary to name,
count and constitute the population in the first place, and then to place monetary values on
alternative courses of action thus defining the governmentally best). Management is here
translated beyond just the sphere of disciplining to the core of governing (and so arguably to
the new exercise of sovereignty though that is not spelled out).
But what is spelled out absolutely clearly, through the repetition of the phrase in Foucaults
delivery of the lecture which is retained in the French text, and which I have therefore
restored here to the English version, is that management also constitutes the core of the new
governmental way of exercising power and so successfully constructs and maintains the
new triangle of power. For twice he says that it is governmental management (gestion
gouvernmentale in the French) that completes the new triangle which brings together into a
new alignment the previously existing modes of sovereignty and discipline, and so
presumably (though again he does not specify this) endows them with an even more intensive
and extensive purchase.
Now the intriguing thing with all this, and a major reason why, I suspect, the reading
proposed here will at least initially prove hard to entertain is that we have not been able to see
that this is what Foucault said until so recently.
2
On the contrary, we have, in the
overwhelming majority, had a potentially very different understanding, for two reasons.
First we were not able to be aware of the sustained kind of accounting-based analysis
Foucault undertakes in the first three lectures of STP (and there is more than indicated just in
the passages cited at the outset, as I will attempt to indicate further below). We simply did not
have access to the text of what he said on these matters.
Second, there has been a systematic form of misunderstanding or mis-naming of what he was
saying in Lecture 4, of 1 February, 1978, and this has been visited upon us all, unintentionally
and for the best of reasons, because that particular lecture was published in standalone form
very soon after its delivery: but not in French (since Foucault did not, while he was alive,
approve the publication in French of any of his work without his own prior editing), but
instead first in Italian (through a translation of a cassette recording of the lecture, and then in
a translation of the Italian version, in English).
That progression from cassette to Italian and then to English is already, in translation terms, a
potential recipe for misunderstanding or error (and the new versions of the lecture remark, in
their footnotes, on one significant case of error in this earlier version).
3
But then of course,
there is also the fact that, once the lecture (as it did) struck a chord with wider and wider
audiences, it was that first, twice-removed from the original, English version that would be
the one that became, for the wider reading audience, the lecture as such. And there was one
more fateful little trick that was to be played thanks to the translation and excerption or
abridgement procedures that the original spoken version here went through.
For just half a page after this climactic (and it is climactic in the original delivery of the
lecture) moment where Foucault ends his ten-fold repetition of the term management/gestion

2
I except those, and I am aware that there are some, who had listened to the tapes of the lectures and perhaps
transcribed them for themselves. However even that form or prior listening or reading is very different from the
reading that is possible of such a well-established and carefully redacted text as that of the lectures produced
through the procedures of editing referred to in footnote 1.
3
See Foucault, 2009: 101, asterisked footnote: this notes that a passage of some 13 lines is missing from the
earlier English version of the lecture, and also from a subsequent French version published after Foucaults
death and included in his Dits et Ecrits. Furthermore the passage is replaced by a totally different paragraph of
which there is no trace either in the recording or the manuscript. My own speculation and it is no more than
that is that the initial tape ended occasioning a gap in recording while a new one was inserted, and the passage
was a well-meaning attempt to recuperate what had been missed.
in formulating the stunning new construct governmental management, he pauses for
reflection. And in that moment he suggests that perhaps he should not have entitled his
lecture series Security, Territory, Population: instead he should have found (Foucault, 2009:
108) a more exact title. For what I would really like to undertake is something that I would
call a history of governmentality. Now what is intriguing is that, if you read the whole four
lectures as delivered up to this point, this term governmentality is one that Foucault has
never employed. [It will be found in the brief summary that precedes Lecture 4, but the
Lecture summaries are an addition of the editors, as they note (Foucault, 2009: xvi).]
Now this is not to say that Foucault will not deploy it in successive lectures; and he clearly
finds it a term of heuristic analytical value.
4
Nevertheless, one effect of the translation of just
this one lecture, out of context, in an English version which would come to have, from the
1990s on huge circulation, was to give the term governmentality a currency that it has never
since lost but does not have within Foucaults analysis up to this point. For the lecture
delivered on 1 February 1978 and then presented in twice-removed form to the world in a
standalone English version has become one of the most widely known, cited and influential
single pieces by Foucault. Published initially in the small circulation journal I & C in 1979
and then in the very large circulation book The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon & Miller,
1991), it would go round the world as Foucaults essay Governmentality (Foucault: 1991:
87-104).
But finally, not only did the term governmentality displace governmental management,
this English version had already erased it, and at the same time, reduced Foucaults insistence
on repeating management to something far more muted, and also restricted. For a comparison
of the third passage quoted at the outset with the version as translated in the 1979 and 1991
Governmentality texts reveals that Foucaults 10 invocations of management/gestion have
become just three. Furthermore all three uses relate to managements role in the exercise of
discipline.
5
Meanwhile, management has disappeared completely from Foucaults triangle.
The triangle that concluded with governmental management (twice) is rendered: In
reality one has a triangle, sovereigntydisciplinegovernment. (Foucault, 1990: 102).

4
It was a term already used, but with a more restricted scope, by Foucaults friend Roland Barthes, as noted by
McKinlay and Pezet (2010: 486). And I by no means wish to comment adversely on the heuristic scope that
governmentality and the term that he then does introduce (Foucault, 2009: 109): governmentalization.
5
The text reads (Foucault, 1990: 102): Discipline was never more important than the moment when it
became important to manage a population; the managing of a population not only concerns the collective mass
of phenomena; it also implies the management of a population in its depth and details. There is no insistent
emphasis on management/gestion here.
To conclude this section, I would just wish to propose that, on the basis of what may now be
clear as to what Foucault was saying in the first four lectures of STP, we may want to try re-
think what Foucault may still have to offer to understanding our selves and our world (and
also to understanding the worlds and selves preceding our modernity). I say this, while
acknowledging that such a re-thinking is not to unthink the Foucault who wrote a piece
entitled Governmentality as we have largely understood him till now. Such an unthinking
would be both impossible and pointless, not least because of the range of governmentality
studies that have emanated beginning in the 1980s, and increasingly over the two following
decades. It is more a matter of thinking how new horizons for thinking on that construct and
on the possibly constitutive roles of accounting and management within the governmental
may be valuable and new (not least since the major strands of work drawing on the construct
of governmentality have all self-avowedly only found certain departure points in Foucault
which have then led towards paths not before travelled).
6

To that extent, this paper suggests that this fourth lecture in STP should and now can be read
as the culmination of a dense and yet rigorous analysis of how old forms of accounting and
management/gestion came together to constitute a new power of disciplining, together with a
new mode of governmental management, which in turn requires both the techniques and
agents who combine being analytical, calculated and calculating with being enlightened
and reflected (or perhaps reflective or reflexive since the French term used, rflchi,
bears all these meanings).


3. From reading Foucault to re-thinking the status of management and accounting
How then may we build on an emergent recognition, however hesitant, that Foucault is, far
more than we have understood till now, undertaking an analytics of the power of accounting
and management as such?:To what extent may we begin to understand governmental
management or gestion gouvernmentale as a new mode of exercising knowledge-based
power, specifically for Foucault to bring alive the great governmental entity of the modern

6
So for instance, Miller & Rose (2008), in their valuable retrospective on their own approach and its debts to
and differences from Foucault, specifically say: In the development of our approach we preferred not to be
Foucault scholars (2008: 8) and go on to signal in helpful depth the range of influences and strands of thought
they drew upon, beyond the focus on apparatuses and programmes and technologies which they did derive from
his work (2009: 8-16 esp).
era, the state , but analytically as well to that other great entity exhibiting and circulating
governmental management, the modern business enterprise?
Here I suggest that one needs to start preparing a path towards understanding how and how
far Foucault sees this new exercise of knowledge based power as a bottom-up process in
which the exercise of macro-power is a direct product of the exercise of micro-powers, but in
which equally the exercise of these micro-powers begins (with one huge analytical proviso)
within the self, and thence proceeds to the level of our interaction as selves with others, in
which we and they act, interact and counter-act, something we can all do only through
thinking, and not least thinking of what the other may do in thinking and acting for or against
us. The analytical proviso is, of course, that this is not to begin the analytics of power from
what goes on within some ahistorical pure self-sufficient self. For equally there cannot be
an analytics of the self as pure psychologised individual who is therefore seen as constitutive
subject. For the thinking that goes on within the self does not ever begin ex nihilo; instead
what each of us engages in as a thinking human subject is always only possible within the
given system of thought (and of action) into which we are individually and collectively born.
Between them, these two re-readings of Foucaults overall oeuvre can enable us to bring to
life a dormant seed for a general innovative re-thinking of accounting and management. We
may see, as we come to recognise his detailed naming of accounting and management as
integral to modern governmental modes of power, a wider framing of the modern emergence
of accounting as significant, beyond a connection purely to business and/or attenuated ideas
of the economic. But we may also see how these modern exercises of power can only make
sense by beginning with a new form of bottom-up analysis, which begins by tracing the
actions of micro-powers within the self and in the interactions of selves with others, as the
sole means to an adequate understanding the operation of macro-powers at the level of such
entities as the state or the corporate firm.
Here the relation of action to thinking, beginning within the self but always linked to the
system of thought within which the self is born and so finds initial limits or horizons to its
thinking and acting is a key analytical constant.
Of particular interest, I suggest, for the field of accounting, and more specifically in the
context of promoting new and different ways of thinking and writing about accounting, is the
fact that Foucaults recently published writings, and particularly STP, now make it clear that
he wrote much more extensively on forms of accounting as such than we have recognised
before. Of parallel interest, particularly for those interested in the inter-relations between
accounting and management and between accounting, management and strategy, is the
realisation that he wrote equally extensively on management as such, as indicated through the
insistent naming already remarked upon of management/gestion

For insofar as we may now see Foucault as having talked directly, particularly in STP, about
both accounting and management, this undermines virtually all the interpretations and uses
made of his work in these fields by those drawing on Foucault over the past three decades.
For any recognition of any direct engagement by Foucault with management and accounting
will be found to have been virtually completely absent before.

Instead the default assumption in earlier writing was that Foucault talked of other constructs
which then became variously applicable to the accounting and management fields only
through the intervention of those already working and researching in those fields. Among the
constructs invoked we will find, for instance: power-knowledge, discipline,
governmentality, biopower, panopticism, ethics, technologies of the (care of the) self
and parrhesia. Let me take just one classic text summarising the first wave of Foucault
studies in management, McKinlay and Starkeys Foucault, Management and Organization
Theory: From Panopticon to technologies of the self (1998): in every chapter you will find
one or more of these constructs being invoked. But no one remarks in any way on Foucault as
having named either management or accounting as key analytical categories or terms in his
work: for no-one had ever observed such an insistent naming of these constructs in the texts
available at the time.

[One may observe this absence for instance through reviewing the summary in the books
Introduction of the individual contributions. First they are seen, revealingly, as attempting to
apply Foucauldian categories and procedures to throw fresh light on the history of the
factory, management and the modern corporation (1998: 3). The summary of the first set of
chapters (by Burrell, Clegg, and Jackson & Carter) presents them as drawing on such
categories as the Panopticon, disciplinary practices/power, and dressage (1998: 2-6) to set out
how using Foucault can advance Organization Theory.
The second more historically focussed set (by Savage, Hoskin, McKinlay & Starkey, and
Hopper & Macintosh) are presented as drawing on similar categories, but also reading off
from Foucaults concern in Discipline and Punish with normalizing judgement and
examination (Foucault, 1977: 170ff), a recognition of the power of accounting in
implementing disciplinary forms of management accounting, and management and labour
control (1998: 6-9).
The third more presentist set (by Deetz, McKinlay & Taylor, Townley, and Findlay &
Newton) are presented as showing, discursively as well as via practices, the ways in which
individuals (and groups) in modern managerial work settings become knowable, calculable
and comparable (1998: 10-12), e.g. through HRM systems, under regimes of sovereign as
well as disciplinary power, and through becoming self-disciplining and so constituting modes
both of mutual control and self-actualizing. Finally, the editors offer an Afterword, reflecting
on the themes in Foucaults late works, to suggest that our constitution as human subjects,
born within our given historical milieu but proceeding actively via processes of subjectivation
and objectivation (see Foucault, 1994c: 315-319), entails a tension between discipline and
desire.
A full analysis would follow the procedure followed in each chapter in detail; however it
would not gainsay the characterisation above. All of the contributions see Foucault as having
to be brought from elsewhere to management. There is no moment where Foucault becomes
seen as a historian or theorist of management as such. Perhaps most poignant in this regard is
the one passage in the book where Foucault is actually quoted as using management as such
(Jackson & Carter, 1998: 54). What is so poignant is that here Foucault is refusing to reduce
the problem of power to economistic explanations, and so is seeing the prison as like the
permanent military garrison and the Jesuit boarding schools and the first large-scale
workshops all of which appeared in the eighteenth century. He characterizes this as a whole
technique of human dressage by location, confinement, surveillance, the perpetual
supervision of behaviour and tasks, in short a whole technique of management of which the
prison was merely one manifestation (Foucault, 1984b: 105). Yet Jackson & Carter, perhaps
because their focus and title is Labour as Dressage, follow up, not with any observation on
the fact that Foucault here uses the term management, and indeed does so as his concluding
descriptive term. Instead they proceed to analyse, very interestingly it must be said, the
naming by Foucault of dressage.
Perhaps the final poignancy, however, is that one contributor (Hoskin, 1998: 93) actually
takes a passage where Foucault is talking about how statistics becomes from the eighteenth
century necessary to the government of the state, enabling its strengths and the strength of
other states to be known, and proposes that if one just substitutes accounting for statistics,
management for government and the firm for the state, then Foucault is demonstrably
one of us, talking our language.
7


At the same time, it may, now, have become presumptuous to assume Foucault as one of us,
because in some respects he is now receding from theoretical view, or, as with
governmentality research, seen as someone who contributed to the first steps forward but has
now been left behind. To some extent, this can be read off not only from the shifting fashions
in critical accounting research journals but in the more retrospective but recent critical
compilation emanating from within the accounting research field, Accounting, Organizations
and Institutions (Chapman, Cooper & Miller, 2009). As with governmentality work, here
across the spectrum of critical work in accounting one sees that, although many of the
contributors drew extensively in previous decades on Foucaults work, by now they have
largely moved on. In the index, he rates less entries than Latour (and far less if one includes
Actor-Network Theory given that discipline or disciplinarity are totally absent). Perhaps
most tellingly, one paper refers to his power/knowledge construct having first penetrated
research discourse in the early 1980s and thereafter having influenced social and
organisational studies of accounting for the rest of the 1980s and much of the 1990s (Robson
& Young, 2009,:351). So his time has come and gone. But at the same time, nowhere in the
text is there any sense that Foucault might be as, or more, directly engaged in thinking
accounting (both as such and in relation to management) than the local inhabitants of the
critical domain.
But there is now, I suggest, good cause for arguing that what he has to say goes beyond what
most of us have said, and that he therefore talks our language better than us, not only in how
he analyses the new conjunction between accounting and management referred to above, but
also in the ways that he sees accounting and/or management operating in eras before that of
governmental management dependent on accounting and statistics. For what he discerns as
getting said in the discourses or arts of government, in their various aspects before the late
18
th
century, shows management (as oiko-nomia) and the exercise of pastoral power as
bringing these practices into various forms of relation, distinct from those today, but in each
case potentially opening our ways of thinking about accounting, management and modernity.

7
The same applies with

For what takes shape, however inchoately, so Foucault argues, is a new kind of exercise of
power where an ancient oiko-nomic mode of commanding and coordinating activity gets
joined together with the two other ancestral forms of exercising power, the pastoral power of
the shepherd as developed in the Latin Christian pastorate, and the sovereign power exercised
by the ruler as King, Emperor or Prince. What has to be solved, as noted above, is the
extension (Foucault, 2009: 94) of this government of the family, which is called precisely
economy to the level of the state: what is at stake is

the question of how to introduce economy that is to say the proper way of
managing individuals, goods and wealth, like the management of a family by a
father who knows.... how to make his familys fortunes prosper how to introduce
this meticulous attention between the father and his family into the general
management (gestion gnerale) of the state (Foucault, 2009: 94-5, emphasis added)

When we reach the new triangular coming together sovereignty, discipline and governmental
management, this is in this regard the coalescing of the three old and distinct modes of
exercising power: the sovereign, the pastoral (which had during the seventeenth century
transmuted into the disciplining of individuals and groups, particularly in institutional
settings), and the oikonomic. It is only then that management can become a construct which
which plays across the spaces of power, not just within the sphere of the household.
Having got this far, perhaps now we may begin to see how far Foucault in this work that has
remained, in its complexity, out of our view till now, holds out to us a new way of
understanding a conjunction from beyond the world of Foucault studies, that coming together
of management and accounting with the running of entities in the business world which we
have, since Chandlers work in particular (esp. Chandler, 1977), been able to see as beginning
in the mid nineteenth century United States. Specifically we may re-address the history of
how and why the structuring of lines of activity via a staff function came to be conjoined with
a processing via that staff function of the accounting and statistical information garnered in
each unit of each line, thus constituting first that historically new mode of doing business that
Chandler names as administrative coordination, and then in consequence that new form of
business entity which Chandler names as the modern business enterprise.

For another of the developments that he describes across the first three lectures of STP, is the
taking shape as a similar staff-function based approach to the structuring of the coordination
of the state. In particular he notes in Lecture 1 the importance of structuring space and time
and circulation through appropriate modes of town planning, the circle or indeed the heart,
but in practice, as at Nantes, through techniques for organizing circulation (2009: 18), first
on an axis of circulation with Paris but then internally along the banks of the Loire, in a
project by Vigny, to construct quays along one side of the Loire, allow a quarter to develop,
and then to construct bridges over the Loire, resting on islands, and to enable another quarter
to develop.opposite the first (2009: 19). Or again, in Lecture 2, he sees how discipline
constructs a force field, and one which is essentially centripetal (2009: 44), as it isolates a
space, determines a segment and so concentrates, focuses and encloses. But he goes on,
the apparatuses of securityhave the constant tendency to expand; they are centrifugal.
New elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology, behaviour, the ways
of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, and exporters, and the world
market. Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway allowing the development of ever-
wider circuits (2009: 45).

Here we may see a parallel analysis to that developed by Chandler in developing the idea of
the administrative coordination breakthrough of the visible hand. Both structuring and
processing are entailed in making the new force field come alive although whether the term
centrifugal is really apt for the extension and linking of elements to constitute the world
market may be questionable. The centripetal dynamic within units remains in play and in
place, the issue is how units get circumscribed and rendered (relatively) stable through a
centripetality within, while the circumscribed units get linked together in a further exercise of
centripetality across units. It is the effecting of this that constitutes the successful modern
business enterprise.

Finally, the other great way in which he sees management and accounting coming together is
(as discussed at length in Lecture 3) in the articulation of the new construct of population,
Here both management and accounting are necessarily co-present, since the population is
made up not of passive subjects those passive subjects ruled by the old-style imperious
sovereign by being rendered obedient. Instead its whole raison detre comes about through its
being constituted out of active citizens, who act moreover on a principle of desire which must
therefore be actively shaped and, as he says, managed rather than being prevented or
suppressed. Or as he puts it (2009: 72-3);

So you can see that a completely different technique is emerging that is not getting
subjects to obey the sovereigns will, but having a hold on things that seem far
removed from the population, but which, through calculation, analysis and reflection,
one knows can really have an effect on it. . (Foucault, 2009: 72)

And one can act on the population in this far removed way precisely because:

according to the first theorists of population in the eighteenth century, there is at
least one invariant that means that the population taken as a whole has one and only
one mainspring of action. This is desire. Every individual acts out of desire. One
can do nothing against desire. Howeverand it is here that this naturalness of
desire thus marks the population and becomes accessible to governmental
techniques.this desire is such that.on condition that it is given free play, all
things considered and within a certain limit., it will produce the general interest of
the population. The production of the collective interest through the play of desire
is what distinguishes both the naturalness of population and the possible artificiality
of the means one adopts to manage it. (Foucault, 2009: 72-3, emphasis added)

Foucault is quite clear that this is a new form and power of management/gestion. For

with this idea of a management of populations on the basis of the naturalness of
their desire.we have something that is completely the opposite of the old ethical-
juridical conception of government and the exercise of sovereignty. The sovereign
is the person who can say no to any individuals desire, the problem being how to
legitimise this no. [Instead] the problem of those who governis how they can
say yes; it is how to say yes to this desire.

And he has explained just previously how at the micro-level this management of the
population and its natural desires is to be effected. It requires the reflective and reflexive
managing activity of those who are proficient at tracking the regularities of desire (Foucault,
2009: 71). Which is where we find the second of those passages cited at the outset being
brought into play: to repeat it once more, now in its fuller context:

To say that population is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed by decree
does not mean, however, that is an inaccessible and impenetrable nature, quite the
contrary. (For) the naturalness identified in the fact of population is constantly
accessible to agents and techniques of transformation, on condition that these agents
and techniques are at once enlightened, reflected (rflchis), analytical, calculated,
and calculating.

And it is precisely these new calculating, analytical agents who will be the means to the
exercise of power on the population in line with their desires, through the mix that they have
acquired in the process of learning to become expert agents, namely of calculation, analysis
and reflection.

Finally, we may recall but here in a little more detail just what he had to say in the first of the
introductory quotes to this paper, on the specific virtue and value of the micro-roles playable
by accounting, once it comes into a systematic relation with the collection of statistics. As we
may recall, the new apparatus of security works through three steps. First there is an invoking
a new mode of questioning, specifically asking a kind of questions (2009: 4), which all
entail naming, counting and accounting. Second the specific counting must be of events (e.g.
crime events) in a way that through aggregation of the events enables the naming of new
constructs (in this instance criminality). Finally and thirdly, it is then possible to engage in a
calculative evaluation of options for dealing with the newly named construct, based on
establishing the costs and benefits of options for controlling and correcting the event
frequencies. It is here that he suggests that the questions to be asked are as follows:

What is the average rate of criminality for this type? How can we predict statistically
the number of thefts at a given momentin a given town? How much does this
criminality cost society, what damage does it cause, or loss of earnings?...What is the
cost of repressing these thefts? Does severe and strict repression cost more than one
that is more permissive. What therefore is the comparative cost of the theft and of
its repression, and what is more worthwhile? (2009: 4-5)

In this way one establishes a first version of that wonderfully ambiguous modern construct,
the norm that term which expresses simultaneously the quantitative sense of an average or
mean in a distribution and the qualitative sense of a standard of goodness or excellence to
which one should aspire. Or in his words:

The general question basically will be how to keep a type of criminalitywithin
socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average that will be
considered optimal for a given social functioning. (2009: 5)

This whole approach to a management grounded in accounting as the set of micro-practices
enabling governmental management may therefore lead us to entertain the possibility of
framing our understandings of the modern emergence of accounting and management and
their unprecedented range and power of interplays in relation not just to the frame of business
and economics, as the Chandler analysis has tended to do, but to the emergence of the
exercise of power via new micro-practices simultaneously in state and in business settings.

One might add too, this also opens the possibility, even more strongly, of not remaining
within the restrictive categories for understanding management and accountings modern
interplays invoked to define research into accounting and management in the past three
decades. I think here not just of the categories that those writing from an old Foucauldian
perspective might be expected to excoriate, those of neo-classical or positivist economics, or
the forms of nave positivism, psychologism or sociologism more generally. I think equally
of those categories used to explain accounting by those writing from within the old
Foucauldian and other less nave but sociologically derived modes of analysis, insofar as
they too have assumed that the analytic categories for critical understanding of accounting
and management have to come from beyond the knowledge fields of accounting and
management to make sense of how they operate and articulate their truth-statements.



4. From accounting and management as such to a bottom-up analytics of power,
knowledge and truth interplays

The ultimate reason for staking the claim just made is that at a more general level, Foucaults
late work offers a path to a less flat and repetitive set of ways of thinking across the human
sciences generally, but again beginning from within the fields of accounting and
management. For the wider observation that can emerge from the new reading and re-reading
of his late work is that Foucault does not only prove to have been speaking directly of
accounting and management and stressing the importance of the analytical, reflective, and
calculating human subjects who coordinate and administer them.

It also becomes clear that his more general form of analysis is moving in a consistent new
direction where he is concerned to move from the level of thinking within the subject (as
what takes place as unavoidable human activity yet which is intimately related to what then
we undertake as action, as in the example of a caring for self) to the interplay between
thinking and acting subjects, to the more macro-levels of the engagement in power,
knowledge and truth games.

This, it begins to become clear, is a consistent bottom-up form of analysis, not only
applicable to the field of governmental management and the uses of accounting plus statistics,
but in principle across all forms of human acting and thinking. So if it can be discerned in the
form of analysis undertaken first in the publications already mentioned, it can secondly be
discerned in the lecture series from the 1980s now being published and concerned with the
care of the self (e.g. Foucault, 2005; 2010; 2011), and thirdly it is there in other essays
published in earlier decades, but which now can have more analytical purchase because of the
publication of this new material.

As I read it, the long-term objective of this form of analysis is to displace not only the
persistent faux-naf positivism of the Vienna Circle (and its economistic epigones as
exemplified by the work of Friedman and the Chicago School), but equally any residual
psychologism, anthropologism or indeed sociologism, even of the kind developed against the
sociology of the social exemplified in the French intellectual milieu by Bourdieu and so
well articulated by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005) as a sociology of associations.

Here Foucault can now be seen as being concerned always to begin from an adequately
reflective level of bottom-up analysis, whether in the analyses of modern large entities such
as the state, or in his more intimate analyses of how individual human subjects think and act
in particular historical settings. In each case there will be practices shaping the dominant
modes, and also the silences or absences, in our thinking and acting; and so he traces the
changing specific acts and reflections involved in the historically changing reflexive
processes involved in ancient modes of care of self, just as he begins to trace the lineaments
of the first modern modes of interweaving calculation, analysis and reflection.

Perhaps we may begin again from within STP, but this time from a famous passage that
follows very quickly on the passage where management is named ten times, namely that
where he warns against treating the state as a Nietzschean cold monster, but instead
remaining open to the possibility that: Maybe the state is only a composite reality.

The bottom-up movement of Foucaults thought is rendered very clear in a first respect here,
as he proposes (2009: 109; for comparison see the version in Burchell et al, 1991: 102) that
we should avoid any overvaluation of the problem of the state, in either of its two forms:
first the lyricism of the cold monster confronting us; and second reducing the state to a
number of functions likethe development of the productive forces or the reproduction of
the forces of production. Instead, he counsels that we should begin from a bottom-up
analysis focussing on what I would call the governmentalization of the state (2009: 109).

But the precise form that he envisages such a bottom-up analysis of the large entity taking is
not articulated in the remaining few lines of that lecture. It is only returned to explicitly in the
final paragraphs of the final lecture of STP (delivered on 5
th
April, 1978), where it becomes
clear that it must begin from the levels of not only how we act but how we think, as he
reflects on what he had been seeking to do across the whole set of lectures for that year,
which was:

to show how starting from the relatively local and microscopic analysis of those
typical forms of power of the pastorate, it was possible, without paradox or
contradiction, to return to the general problems of the state, on condition precisely
that we [do not make] the state [into] a transcendent reality whose history could be
undertaken on the basis of itself. (Foucault, 2009: 358, passages in square brackets
are conjectural additions where the original tape-recording is unclear)

At which point he introduces the crucial analytical difference to his bottom-up analysis which
entails beginning from the interplay of thinking and acting, and so renders it possible for us to
undertake a form of critical bottom-up analysis which no longer has either to begin from or
rest at the sociological or anthropological levels (even as an analysis of associations), and
which equally no longer has to seek instead to begin from or rest within any nave
psychological or sub-psychological (e.g. in either a Freudian or a neurological reduction)
alternative, any of which begins from the ahistorical human self as constitutive subject.
Instead he proposes, in his concluding words, that:

It must be possible to do the history of the state on the basis of mens actual practice,
on the basis of what they do and how they think. Certainly I do not think analyzing the
state as a way of doing things [and a way of thinking] is the only possible analysis
when one wants to do the history of the state, but it is, I think, a sufficiently fruitful
possibility, and to my mind its fruitfulness is linked to the fact that we cdan see that
there is not a sort of break between the level of micro-power and the level of macro-
power, and that talking about one [does not] exclude talking about the other. In actual
fact, an analysis in terms of micro-powers comes back without any difficulty to the
analysis of problems like those of government and the state. (Foucault, 2009: 358).
8


From this departure point, we can then perhaps begin to see the fuller scope of Foucaults
form of bottom-up analysis, by drawing in related insights set out in a number of essays
published in the 1990s (Foucault, 1994a; 1994b; 1994c).
In these he develops first a re-thinking of power, as a process not of domination or direction
but of what one might term indirection, or as he terms it, an acting on the actions of others
(1994a). More specifically he says (1994a: 340):
'a relationship of power...is a mode of action that does not act directly and
immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions'. Therefore it requires 'two
elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: first that
"the other" (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognized and maintained to

8
The bracketed passage in bold is present in the French version (see Foucault, 2004: 366), and essential to
Foucaults argument here, but missing from the English translation, it seems to this reader purely through
oversight.
the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a
whole field of responses, reactions, results and possible interventions opens up'.
Second he links this form of acting on the actions of others integrally to thinking, as he
articulates the idea (1994b: 200) that there is no action without thinking, and that therefore
thought is to understood as the very form of action. Or again, in his words:
Thought is what establishes, in a variety of possible forms, the play of true and false,
and consequently constitute s the human being as a knowing subjectit is what
establishes the relation with oneself and with others . In this sense, thought is
understood as the very form of action [emphasis added]
Which leads him to what he states in yet a third essay (Foucault, 1994c: 318) as his positive
methodological principle namely that of appealing to practices as a domain of analysis,
but with a particular focus on those practices that are understood simultaneously as modes of
acting and of thinking.
It is a level of analysis he ends up at in both the second and third of these essays. In the
second, following on from his observation about thought as the form of action, he continues
that it qualifies as action:
insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal or rules,
the relation of oneself and others. The study of forms of experience can thus proceed
from an analysis of practicesdiscursive or notas long as one qualifies that word
to mean the different systems of action insofar as they are inhabited by thought as I
have characterized it here (Foucault, 1994b: 200-201)
That sentiment is echoed and if anything deepened in the dense but crucial exegesis in the
third of these essays of what specific practices may qualify as those constituting systems of
action inhabited by thought. Here his specification is that these are:
the practicesways of doing thingsthat are more or less regulated (rgles), more
or less conscious (rflchies), more or less goal-oriented (finalises), through which
one can grasp the lineaments both of what was constituted as real for those who were
attempting to conceptualize and govern it, and of the way in which those same people
constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analyzing and ultimately
modifying the real (1994a: 318).
So here we have a progression, in one respect ever inwards or downwards, from acting on the
actions of others, to thought as the form of action (but therefore as action itself) and then to
the level of the practices that constitute thought. Except that, at the moment that one reaches
the level of appealing to practices, one is taken out to the level at which Systems of Thought
obtain their purchase on the thinking and acting subject. For the practices that are regulated
bear the imprint of whatever are the historically given rules encountered by the as yet
unknowing and unthinking subject, as do those that are goal-oriented bear the trace of what
are already accepted as goals or ends, and both then shape thinking and action through the
inescapable practice of reflecting and reflexively becoming conscious of what is to be
possibly thought and done.
9


5. Conclusion
These are initial thoughts on how, from out of a new reading and re-reading of Foucaults
historical-theoretical analyses as developed from the late 1970s on, we may find new paths
towards innovative or at least different ways of thinking accounting and acting as researchers
of (and indeed beyond that as practitioners of) accounting knowledge and practices.
At the same time, the challenge or opportunity held out here may not be for these times
institutionally at least. Alternatively some may see these as times that more than most require
a re-engagement with an author who has been becoming, rather as occurred in French
philosophical circles in the late 1980s, seen as one no longer necessary to engage with
closely. Perhaps the new kind of engagement that this paper suggests can at least happen
intellectually: and then perhaps institutional stasis may weaken or become more labile when
one might least expect it.


9
I provide the French terms that Foucault employs since the each is elusive and multiple compared with any
English equivalent: rgle signifies rule-bound, regulated and is even the term for the lines ruled on paper;
rflchie translated here as conscious is the term that Burchell translates in STP as reflected but also
signifies reflective and reflexive, and ;finalise signifies finalised as much as goal-oriented: and each of these
alternatives would fit perfectly well with the range of regularities that Foucault is searching to identify as those
shaping thinking and action at some systemic and extra-individual level.

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