ABSTRACT
Accounting has come to be seen as playing a key role in organizational functioning. Concerned, as it now is, with such activities as assessing the costs and benefits of organizational actions, the setting of financial standards and norms, the representation and reporting of organizational performance, and financial planning and control, accounting has been used to cast important aspects of the functioning of the modern organization into economic terms. By offering particular economic representations of organizational activities and outcomes to both internal participants and interested external parties, it has come to be involved in the creation of a quite specific organizational order and mission. Accounting is now associated with particular ways of seeing and trying to shape organizational processes and actions, with the maintenance of certain forms of organizational segmentation, hierarchy and control, and with the furtherance of an economic rationale for action (Batstone, 1979). Indeed in many cases the forms taken by decision processes, the structuring of organizational activities and even the specification of an organizational boundary are not independent of the accounting representation of them. Modes of accounting have become not only important and valued management practices but also ones whose existence and consequences are difficult to disentangle from the functioning of organizations as we know them. Accounting, in other words, has become centrally implicated in the modern form of organizing.
