Accounting and cultural translation: measuring the ‘good citizen’ in Iranian public management

Abstract

Drawing on post-colonial studies we analyse the ways in which technologies used to recruit and evaluate the ‘good citizen’ in the Iranian oil industry operate as practices of cultural translation, enacting different and conflicting conceptions of the ‘local self’ vis-a-vis the Western ‘other’. The National Iranian Oil Company’s (NIOC) security department employs practices that render faith-based behaviour calculable under the banner of Islamic management and in the name of resistance towards Western imperialism. By contrast, NIOC’s HR department uses selection and appraisal practices linked to the organisation’s Balanced Scorecard, discursively associated with ‘Western modernisation’ and a competing interpretation of Islamic management. We contribute to post-colonial accounting studies by analysing contested translations of the ‘local self’, where discourses of resistance may themselves mask coercion and domination. Second, we contribute to debates on Islamic accounting by illustrating how personnel evaluation practices enact politicised appropriations of Islamic principles that diverge from other interpretations of Islamic faith, tradition, and practice. Finally, the interpretive lens of cultural translation also contributes to studies on accounting, globalisation and culture more broadly by conceptualising accounting not only as disseminating global discourses, but also as writing local cultures, and discursively producing, reinforcing or resisting particular conceptions of organisational selves.