ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the political-economic and historical logic of management accounting. It focuses on the 'old spirit of capitalism' and the traditional mode of management accounting. The chapter also explores the concepts of modernity, modernism, and capitalism. It discusses how their emergence and growth are related to the development of human sciences or 'disciplines', including management accounting, and how such disciplines constitute the basis of control and regulation in modern societies. The chapter explains modernity as a transformation in the mode of government. This transformation was from sovereignty to governmentality. It also discusses capitalism as the ideological and structural context of management accounting. Liberal economic democracy was the political ideology of modernity. Capitalism, modernism, and modernity are interrelated concepts that accounting academics use to explain the origin and evolution of management accounting. Biopolitical accounting involves constructing the collective social body of population and economy as accounting entities. Governmentality is not only macro and biopolitical. It is simultaneously micro-organizational and anatomico-political.
