۱- Introduction

۲- Literature Review and Theoretical Lens on Fluidity of Management Accounting Concepts

۳- Methodology: Empirical Setting, Data Collection, and Data Analysis

۴- Field Study Insights

۶- Conclusion

References

Abstract

This study offers new insights into what renders management accounting concepts (MACs) fluid. Extant literature depicts how fluidity is an effect of heterogeneous associations among actors, which translate and mobilize them in situated and variegated forms. This focus on heterogeneous arrangements, however, tends to neglect the role of practices and how these practices render MACs fluid. Hence, the study investigates how practices, together with arrangements, which Schatzki (2002. The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press) refers to as ‘site’ (i.e. a mesh-work of practice-arrangement bundles), are implicated in MACs’ fluidity. To do so, an ethnography of the MAC ‘Enterprise Risk Management’ (ERM) at the largest division of a multi-national manufacturer was conducted. By analyzing attended risk meetings, the paper shows the ways in which the ERM site prefigures multitudinous paths for carrying on and carrying out risk management activities, which in turn, render the ERM site into a fluid space of intelligibility. These findings indicate that MACs’ fluidity is associated with multidimensional prefigurements that the site produces. With these insights, the paper contributes to understanding how the situated functionality of management accounting comes about, and reveals nuances and multiplicities amid the enabling and constraining space for actions that practiced MACs as mesh-work engender.

Conclusion

The fluidity of (practiced) MACs has gained heightened attention (Briers & Chua, 2001; Bukh et al., 2001; Busco & Quattrone, 2015, 2018; Dechow & Mouritsen, 2005; Hansen & Mouritsen, 2005; Jones & Dugdale, 2002; Mouritsen et al., 2001; Quattrone & Hopper, 2001, 2005). In particular, ANT-inspired accounting research has unfolded MACs’ fluidity as ongoing processes of translation, drift, unsettledness, multiple meanings as well as heterogeneous, situated, and variegated mobilizations (Andon et al., 2007; Briers & Chua, 2001; Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevón, 2005; Jones & Dugdale, 2002; Quattrone & Hopper, 2001) through paying attention to the heterogeneous sets of associations among human and non-human actors. This study underlines the message that practiced MACs are fluid by presenting ethnographic insights into the mesh-work of ERM and risk updating activities at the studied manufacturing division. At the same time, this study complements existing studies by delineating how this fluidity is not only associated with the heterogeneous arrangements, but with the intermeshing bundles of practices and arrangements. Hence, the study contributes to our understanding of fluidity by unfolding how the fluid nature of practiced MACs is implicated with the way that the mesh-work prefigures actions by qualifying a path to be carried out and on in multitudinous ways. This multidimensional prefigurement of actions makes actions variegated and situationally intelligible, and in turn, renders the practiced MACs fluid. Yet, prefiguring does not mean determination. Prefiguring multitudinously fields of possibilities for courses of actions implies that MACs as practice-arrangement bundles are awaiting importation for actions. Ahrens and Chapman (2007) refer to this as a resource for action, which management control systems provide. Carrying practices out and on, actors revert to the mesh-work of practice-arrangement bundles as resource that provides practical intelligibility to skillfully and artfully ‘play the cards’ in the daily challenge of, for example, measuring costs with ABC, strategizing with the BSC, or enterprising in risk management with ERM. In the portrayed vignettes, actors played the cards of accurately documenting risks, taking counter actions, administering the smorgasbord of risk information, and trying to reduce the pressure, risk, and stress from risk-based performance measurement. These and other multitudes of different cards were played, showing how the fluidity of practiced MACs can be located in the dynamics between the site’s multitudinous prefigurements of actions and the importation of practically intelligible actions when carrying out and on the site.