ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the old spirit of cost management. It explains how and why traditional cost accounting was problematized in the face of an emerging set of neoliberal demands. The chapter also discusses new cost management as a surveillance assemblage. It addresses an important theoretical perspective about Activity-Based Costing implications for staff functions in the organization. The chapter focuses on cost management as a holistic programme. It shows how reconfigured cost management has become amenable to four interrelated developments: controls beyond the shop-floor; the reinvention of the terrain of decision making; the bundling and hybridization of managerial practice; and the strategizing the cost objects. Cost management is established as a holistic programme encapsulating various elements of organizational practices and expanding its rhetoric beyond the firms' factory floors and operational domains to infrastructural elements of production and reproduction within and outside organizational boundaries.
