ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relation between job counsellors, management accountants and managers at Pole Emploi. It discusses the contemporary government of unemployment in France. The chapter also discusses how do management accountants rationalise and "frame" counsellors' work to solve the so-called efficiency problem of the state in reducing mass unemployment? At Pole Emploi, management accountants produce and circulate scoreboards among managers during the budget repartition process – the "performance dialog" – which lasts half a year from June to December. Pole emploi is an administrative institution attached to the French Ministry of Labor. In Pole Emploi, management accountants shape figures to produce scoreboards. They then transmit notes to their manager so as to make those tables speak. Formerly powerless, management accountants sort the good and the bad action plans through a validation procedure within which they estimate the relevance of the reorganisation and its potential effects on the indicators.
