Managing by Ambiguity: An Archaeology of the Social in the Absence of Management Accounting

Abstract

The paper excavates the nature of the social in a large successful company in the UK financial sector, drawing on multiple control traditions. As might be expected in an organisation where there is an absence of management accounting controls, the paper emphasises a social enactment of change. First, change was accomplished at Bestsafe through an enacted strategy of "managing by ambiguity". This generates a sufficient variety of practice within which managers can point to different exemplars of delivery to fit their current agendas. Second, the management ethos at Bestsafe mobilises current agendas through an attenuation of access by more senior managers. This attenuation restitutes conditions of kinship in which talk among local managers focuses on what currently constitutes "delivery". However, the main aim of the paper is not to detail a set of "primitive" controls prior to their elimination by more "modern" technologies. Principally, the findings challenge any marginalising of the social by discounting interdependencies between multiple control technologies. First, the distribution of authorities and resources, the reporting systems and the management ethos all mutually support each other. This mutuality of control may be contrasted with naive attributions of control to either people or management accounting systems. Second, the paper illustrates how the social is intimately affected by the materiality of the artefacts on which it relies to give it form. While actors within Bestsafe appear to be governed solely by precedent, the analysis shows that much work enacted through the management ethos takes the form constructing access as an artefact, whose attenuation is then "read" by managers outside conditions of copresence. This analysis suggests the importance of a heterogeneous conception of the social, which includes rather than excludes the materiality of the technical. © 1995 Academic Press. All rights reserved.