Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 1992, Pages 633-651

  Porter, Theodore M ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972654356     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: 14603659     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631292022004004     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Yuji Ijiri and Robert K. Jaedicke, ‘Reliability and Objectivity of Accounting Measurements’, Accounting Review, Vol. 41 (1986), 474-83, at 477. This is the formula for statistical variance, taken over measures of the same entity by different measurers. It is intended as an inverse measure: greater agreement among measurers implies lower variance, and hence (by definition) more objectivity.
2. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987);
3. Malcolm Ashmore, Michael Mulkay and Trevor Pinch, Health and Efficiency: A Sociology of Health Economics (Milton Keynes, Bucks.: Open University Press, 1989);
4. Roger Smith and Brian Wynne (eds), Expert Evidence: Interpreting Science in the Law (London: Routledge, 1989).
5. James Secord, ‘Nature's Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons’, Isis, Vol. 72(1981), 163-86.
6. C. Edward Arlington and Jere R. Francis, ‘Letting the Chat Out of the Bag: Deconstruction, Privilege, and Accounting Research’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 14 (1989), 1-25.
7. David Chioni Moore, ‘Accounting on Trial: The Critical Legal Studies Movement and its Lessons for Radical Accounting’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 16 (1991), 763-91, who, however, argues that the critical accountants have not pressed their case hard enough.
8. This generally reflects no great trust in accountants, but rather a confusion between accounting and mere book-keeping.
9. On the uses and authority of accounting in general, see Stuart Burchell et al. ‘The Roles of Accounting in Organizations and Society’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 5 (1980), 5-27, and various papers in Anthony Hopwood, Accounting from the Outside: Collected Papers (New York: Garland, 1988). For a recent introduction to the history of accounting, see Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper and Richard Laughlin, ‘The New Accounting History: An Introduction’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 16 (1991), 395-403.
10. 'Ontologically, mainstream accounting research is dominated by a belief in physical realism’, writes a recent critic, with some exaggeration, in the leading American accounting journal: Wai Fong Chua, ‘Radical Developments in Accounting Thought’, Accounting Review, Vol. 61 (1986), 601-32, at 606.
11. For a fine account of the effort to create and defend standards against the perpetual subversion of creative self-interest, see William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991), Chapter 3. He discusses here the standardized grading of grain, which ultimately made it possible for traders in Chicago or London to buy and sell products they had never seen, and never would. Obviously this depended on creating a corps of reliable graders and inspectors. But the great enemy was elevator operators, who learned to dilute grain to the bottom of the grade, and farmers, whose complaints about such dealings endangered the whole system.
12. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 237.
13. Eric Flamholtz, The Process of Measurement in Managerial Accounting: A Psycho-Technical Systems Perspective’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 5 (1980), 31-42.
14. Quotes from H.E. Arnett, ‘What Does “Objectivity” Mean to Accountants?’, Journal of Accountancy, Vol. 11 (May 1961), 63-68.
15. Harold Bierman, ‘Measurement and Accounting’, Accounting Review, Vol. 38 (1963), 501-07, at 505-06.
16. R.J. Chambers, ‘Measurement and Objectivity in Accounting’, Accounting Review, Vol. 39 (1964), 26-74, at 268.
17. Edward J. Burke, Objectivity and Accounting’, Accounting Review, Vol. 39 (1964), 837-9, at 842.
18. Paul J. Miranti, Jr, Accountancy Comes of Age: The Development of an American Profession, 1886-1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4-5, 128-42.
19. John W. Wagner, ‘Defining Objectivity in Accounting’, Accounting Review, Vol. 40 (1965), 599-605, at 600, 605.
20. H.T. Johnson and R.S. Kaplan, Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1987), Chapter 6. Some blame remains, to be laid at the door of accounting professors.
21. Don Lavoie, ‘The Accounting of Interpretations and the Interpretation of Accounts’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 12 (1987), 579-604, is highly critical of accounting positivism, as are Shahid L. Ansari and John J. McDonough, ‘Intersubjectivity - The Challenge and Opportunity for Accounting’. Vol. 5 (1980), 129-42. But the need for accountants to interpret their numbers, which can often be misleading, was urged, largely to no avail, by some of the most influential figures in American accounting during what can plausibly be regarded as its formative period, the 1930s and 1940s. See remarks by George O. May (1938) and Walter Wilcox (1941) printed in Stephen A. Zeff(ed.), Accounting Principles through the Years: The Views of Professional and Academic Leaders (New York: Garland, 1982), 2,96,99,101.
22. Ijiri & Jaedicke, note 1, 476, 474.
23. Robert H. Ashton, Objectivity of Accounting Measures: A Multirule-Multimeasurer Approach’, Accounting Review, Vol. 52 (1977), 567-75, at 567;
24. James E. Parker, ‘Testing Comparability and Objectivity of Exit Value Accounting’. Vol. 50 (1975), 512-24. Both of these show that the objectivity debates continued to centre around discussion of the advantages of financial accounting according to costs versus various measures of present value.
25. Joseph F. Wojdak, ‘Levels of Objectivity in the Accounting Process’, Accounting Review, Vol. 45 (1970), 88-97, at 97. On the theme of interchangeable observers and the neutralizing of individuality in science see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, forthcoming; also Daston's contribution to this Symposium, Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22 (1992), 597-618.
26. John A. Zeff, ‘Some Junctures in the Evolution of the Process of Establishing Accounting Principles in the USA: 1918-1972’, Accounting Review, Vol. 59 (1984), 447-68, at 466;
27. Arthur L. Thomas, The Allocation Problem in Financial Accounting Theory, Studies in Accounting Research, No. 3 (Evanston, IL: American Accounting Association, 1969), 100; Miranti, note 16.
28. Ashton, note 21.
29. Federal Inter-Agency River Basin Committee, Subcommittee on Benefits and Costs, Proposed Practices for Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects (Washington, DC: United States Government Publications Office, 1950).
30. Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. Richard Szreter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986);
31. Theodore M. Porter, Objectivity as Standardization: The Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis’, Annals of Scholarship, Vol. 9 (1992), in press.
32. Alfred Chandler, Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 267-69, 273-81;
33. H. Thomas Johnson, Toward a New Understanding of Nineteenth-Century Cost Accounting’, Accounting Review, Vol. 56 (1981), 510-18;
34. Johnson & Kaplan, note 18.
35. R.H. Parker, The Development of the Accountancy Profession in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century (London: The Academy of Accounting Historians, 1986);
36. Edgar Jones, Accountancy and the British Economy, 1840-1980 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1981).
37. Anne Loft, Towards a Critical Understanding of Accounting: The Case of Cost Accounting in the UK, 1914-1925’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 12 (1987), 235-65. For a similar story, later in the century, see Stuart Burchell, Colin Clubb and Anthony Hopwood, ‘Accounting in its Social Context: Towards a History of Value Added in the United Kingdom’. Vol. 10 (1985), 381-413.
38. See Michael Power, ‘After Calculation? Reflections on Critique of Economic Reason by André Gorz’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, forthcoming.
39. Barry Barnes, On Authority and its Relation to Power’, in John Law (ed.), Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 180-95.
40. Trevor Hopper and Peter Armstrong, ‘Cost Accounting, Controlling Labour and the Rise of Conglomerates’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 16 (1991), 405-38.
41. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 109;
42. Peter Miller, ‘On the Interrelations between Accounting and the State’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 15 (1990), 315-38.
43. Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society, Vol. 19 (1990), 1-31;
44. Miller and Ted O'Leary, ‘Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person’, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, Vol. 12 (1987), 235-65;
45. Rose, ‘Governing by Numbers: Figuring out Democracy’. Vol. 16 (1991), 673-92.
46. Donaldson Brown, Centralized Control with Decentralized Responsibility (New York: American Management Association, 1927).
47. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). See also Simon Schaffer's paper, ? Manufactory of Ohms’, on the Cavendish Laboratory and the definition of the ohm, given at a UCLA Tech-Know workshop (December 1989); and Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
48. On the rich variety of ways in which instruments can solidify scientific networks, and connect them with a larger culture, see M. Norton Wise, ‘Mediating Machines’, Science in Context, Vol. 2 (1988), 81-117.
49. David Cahan, An Institute for an Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
50. Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
51. Steven Shapin: ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technologies’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 14 (1984), 481-520;
52. Peter Dear, ‘Totius in verba: The Rhetorical Constitution of Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis, Vol. 76(1985), 145-61.
53. Theodore M. Porter, Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers’, Poetics Today, Vol. 12 (1991), 245-65.
54. Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
55. Peter Galison, ‘In the Trading Zone’, paper given at UCLA Tech-Know Workshop (December 1989).
56. Peter Dear, ‘From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 22 (1992), 619-31.
57. Gerd Gigerenzer and David J. Murray, Cognition as Intuitive Statistics (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), 23.
58. From the publication manual of the American Psychological Association, second edition, 1958, quoted in Gerd Gigerenzer, The Superego, the Ego, and the Id in Statistical Reasoning in G. Keren and C. Lewis (eds), Methodological and Quantitative Issues in the Analysis of Psychological Data (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, forthcoming).
59. Zeno Swijtink, The Objectification of Observation: Measurement and Statistical Method in the Nineteenth Century’, in Lorenz Krger, Lorraine Daston and Michael Heidelberger (eds), The Probabilistic Revolution, Vol. 1: Ideas in History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 261-85.
60. Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, Critical Problems conference, Madison, Wisconsin (October 1991). I learn from Peter Dear that Steven Shapin used this phrase in the title of a talk in 1987.
61. Cited in Simon Schaffer, ‘Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation’, Science in Context, Vol. 2 (1988), 115-45, at 120; for other accounting analogies, see 129.
62. See Lorraine Daston, The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light’, paper at UCLA Tech-Know Workshop (February 1990).
63. The phrase comes from Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
64. Robert Merton, ‘Science and Technology in a Democratic Order’ (1942), reprinted as The Normative Structure of Science’, in Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 267-78.