ABSTRACT
In accounting texts, budgeting and other related procedures of financial control are portrayed as technical phenomena. Emphasis is placed on the rules and calculative procedures by which budgets are formulated and thereafter used to provide means for evaluating the adequacy of actual performance. Consideration is given to the identification of key budgetary constraints, to the alternative mechanisms for assembling and analysing the mass of expectations for the budgetary period, and to the technical possibilities for analysing the variances between budgeted and actual performance. Although such statements of the technical apparatus of budgeting and financial control invariably commence with appeals to the underlying organisational processes and roles which they serve, the detailed discussion of the technical means for their attainment invariably results in a distancing of the technical from the organisational — a distancing which once achieved is often difficult to reverse.
