|
Accounting technologies and technologies in a broader sense,
play a crucial role in organizations and making markets. Rather
than being neutral tools to solve problems (or instruments to steer
processes), they can be considered transformative of organizational
realities. To provide an understanding of the constitutive role of
technology in organizing, this course introduces the material and
practice turn in social science and organization and accounting
studies. The aim of the course is to support students in
identifying and analyzing how various (accounting) technologies are
part of Strategy-making, Organizational practices, and
Leadership/management, and to use these insights in relation to
understand how they become part of practices in organizations. In a
more popular sense the aim is to learn about how accounting
technologies (inscriptions and devices) become part of strategy
making or other organizational transformations, to show and discuss
specific practices and to learn how practitioners calculate when
changing organizations.
The course offers a very broad conception of technology. It places
emphasis on technologies for managing economic aspects and the
quantification of organizational life, for instance the tools that
organizations use to make themselves controllable, transparent and
accountable, such as user satisfaction surveys, cost calculations,
evaluations, risk management, etc.
Content:
The course covers four dimensions:
- The material turn in organization and accounting studies is
introduced, as a background for understanding the relationships
between:
- Accounting technologies and Strategy (The role of accounting to
strategy and the like)
- The role of technology in organizational transformations and
developments (for instance, the role of calculations in outsourcing
processes)
- Technology and Leadership/management (how technologies are used
to underpin leadership and management).
The first part of the course introduces various perspectives on
technologies and organizing – the so called material and practice
turn, and establishes a broad understanding of ‘technology’. We
critically examine the claim that technology tends to be left out
of the picture when managers discuss strategy, organizational
processes and leadership/management in organizations. We then
reflect on how we may use insights from the material and practice
turn in social science to broaden the view of strategy,
organization and leadership. In particular, the notion of
performativity – i.e. how economic theories participate in
performing organizational practices - will allow us to open up
otherwise naturalized technologies and reflect upon how they play a
part in the constitution of organizational and
market realities.
The rest of the course is divided into three sections, each
discussing how strategy, organizational processes and
leadership/management are closely intertwined with various
technologies. Each session explores a particular type of
technology, to provide empirically rich examples of how otherwise
unobtrusive elements of organizations and businesses play a
decisive role for their constitution and conduct. The cases also
serve to illustrate how development and implementation processes
may benefit from an understanding of the organizing role of
technologies.
Overlap with the course Organizing Markets
Both Organizing Markets (OM) and Organizing Technologies (OT)
discuss recent social scientific developments that challenge how
organization and markets are usually understood and analyzed.
Drawing extensively on Actor-network Theory, OT discusses and
analyses the role of management technologies (such as accounting,
budget, marketing, and strategy tools) in shaping and transforming
the practice of contemporary organization. OM uses recent
developments in economic sociology and science and technology
studies that challenge the traditional dichotomy between markets
and organization. It presents work that analyzes, in different
forms, how markets are organized.
|
|
Callon, M. (1998). The Laws of the market. Blackwell
Publishers.
Callon, Michel (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation:
domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay in
J. Law, Power, action and belief: a new sociology of
knowledge? Routledge, London, pp. 196-223
Chapman, C., Chua, W.F and Mahama, H. (2015).
Actor-Network-Theory and strategy as practice. In D. Golsorkhi, L.
Rouleau, D. Seidl and E. Vaara (Eds., Cambridge Handbook of
Strategy as Practice, (pp. 267-282). 2nd Edition.
Hayne, C. and Free, C. (2014). Hybridized professional groups
and institutional work: COSO and the rise of enterprise risk
management, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 39,
309-330.
Tryggestad, K.( 2005).Technological strategy as macro-actor: How
humanness might be made of steel. In B. Czarniawska and T. Hernes.
Actor-Network-Theory and Organizing, , Liber and Copenhagen
Business School Press.
Power, M. (1996). Making things auditable. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 21(2/3), 289-315
Skærbæk & Tryggestad (2010). The role of accounting devices in
performing corporate strategy. In Accounting, Organizations and
Society 35, 108-124
Skærbæk, P. & S. Thorbjørnsen (2007). The commodification of
the Danish Defence Forces and the troubled identities of its
officers. Financial Accountability & Management,
23(3), 0267-4424
Christensen, M., Skærbæk, P. and Tryggestad, K. (2017). On the
stronger and weaker roles of accounting in military (out-)
sourcing: Programs on trial, Working Paper .
Christensen, M. and Skærbæk, P. (2010). Consultancy outputs and
the purification of accounting technologies. Accounting,
Organization and Society, 35, pp.
524-545.
|
Permalink