Accounting, governing, and the historical construction of the "governing subject"

Ann-Christine Frandsen and Keith Hoskin

Chapter 18 in Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance, 2023, pp 398-422 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter draws on Michel Foucault's "bottom-up" conceptualizing of "governmentality" to think the "governing subject" as initiator of, and passage point for, the "thinking and acting" of governing, beginning around 3300 bce in Mesopotamia and continuing down to today. It proposes that accounting as the historically earliest writing-form enabled the governing subject to become thinkable as enactor of forms of accounting-based, mathematically regularized, and centripetal coordination of humans and resources, thus also rendering the "governed subject" thinkable. We identify two major subsequent transformations in our ways of thinking the governing subject. First, "governance" emerges from the 1600s as a term designating the "art of good governing" and so the "ethical governing subject". Second, intensified forms of centripetal coordination and accountability are invented from around 1800, as what Foucault called "governmental management" and Alfred Chandler termed "administrative coordination". We end by considering how one recent and distinctive version of such a subject, the governing subject of corporate governance, may draw on dimensions of each historical construct in seeking to deliver a corporate governance that is both practicable and credible.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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