The ‘performativity thesis’ and its critics: Towards a relational ontology of management accounting: Ed Vosselman

In a functionalist view accounting is passive and has no intrinsic societal consequences. It is a device for decision-making and control and as such it is in the hands of individual human actors. The human decision-maker is active and up front; accounting is passive and comes in later as a neutral tool. This passive role of accounting is consistent with the dominant conceptual

metaphor that describes the essence of accounting: accounting is an instrument (Amernic and Craig 2009).