References to "customers‟ have become commonplace in the policy discourses within UK government and other public sector bodies. It is a working assumption of UK public sector management that the concept of the "customer‟ can be applied to any public sector service agency or department; this...

The financialised character of contemporary rationalities of public governance has been the subject of increased attention within a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. This paper proposes a particular analytical framework, focused on the notion of ‘governance devices', for...

The merger of HM Commissioners of Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise in 2005 stands out as one of the most instantly recognisable reforms of the UK Civil Service in recent times. A good deal has been written about the consequences of the merger, but we focus in this chapter on the period...

This paper develops a particular narratological approach to analyse a common category of narratives: individuals’ accounts of their organization’s context and purpose. In two phases of interview research with 45 senior UK accounting professionals (tax officials, tax advisors to, and tax...

We show that alumni events are not only settings where professional identities are renewed in social gatherings, or simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. They are also continuous with the organizations they notionally celebrate by reproducing features of these...

Goody (1996: The East in the West) contests the arguments of Weber and others that Western accounting developments — and in particular double-entry bookkeeping ('DEB') which first appeared in Italy around the end of the 13th century AD — provided a new calculative rationality that drove the...

This paper aims to trace the development of management accounting systems (MAS) in a Portuguese bank, where an activity based costing system (ABC) has been trialled for implementation over the past few years, as a means to improving the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of employee activity....

In attempting to understand the genesis and scope of modern cost and management accounting systems, accounting historians adopting what has been labelled a ‘Foucauldian’ approach have been rewriting the history of key 18th and 19th century developments in the U.K. and U.S. through new...