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Title: Accounting for Foucault Authors: Alan McKinlay, Eric Pezet PII: DOI: Reference: To appear in: S1045-2354(09)00096-3 doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2009.08.006 YCPAC 1506 Critical Perspectives on Accounting

Please cite this article as: McKinlay A, Pezet E, Accounting for Foucault, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2008), doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2009.08.006 This is a PDF le of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its nal form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

Alan McKinlay and Eric Pezet

University of St Andrews and CGS, Ecole des Mines, Paris

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Corresponding author: Alan McKinlay School of Management University of St Andrews The Gateway The North Haugh St Andrews KY16 9AL Telephone: +44 (0) 1334 462800 Email: am53@st-andrews.ac.uk

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Accounting for Foucault

Abstract Michel Foucaults concept of governmentality has been central to critical accounting research for two decades, a centrality that has placed systems of calculation as the starting point of discussions of the state, the firm and the market. We begin by outlining the development of governmentality in Foucaults own work. Despite the rich, productive nature of the concept, Foucault was careful to define governmentality as broadly and loosely as possible, the better to convey its open-endedness. The second section considers the introduction of Foucault to accounting research. The combination of Foucault and accounting history is not at all obvious, but became possible because a series of important contextual studies demonstrated that accounting history had to consider both the historicity of the profession and that its practices were vital in constructing measures of organisational performance, not simply uncovering previously obscure or hidden social realities. Moreover, accounting history studies the production of targets and measures of progress towards utility and welfare, processes that are not reducible to the firm or even to economic calculation. Our third section outlines the genesis of the London School of governmentality and the main strands of their theoretical contribution. Finally, we examine the governmentalists analysis of corporate restructuring and the introduction of new production organisation by Caterpillar. Our aim is to use the Caterpillar case as the vehicle for a broader consideration of governmentality, strategy and the enterprise

In 1957 Roland Barthes coined what he called a barbarous but unavoidable neologism: governmentality. For Barthes, governmentality involved the government presented as the Essence of efficacy (Barthes 1957: 130). It seems likely that Foucault was introduced to the term during the late 1950s and early 1960s when the two were friends and part of the same intellectual circles around the newlyestablished literary journal, Tel Quel, and Critique (Eribon 1991: 80-1; Macey 1993: 150-1; Paras 2006: 6-7; Patrou 1999). For Barthes, the association between government and efficacy was so self-evident in the popular imagination that no semiological analysis was required to demonstrate governmentality in action. Although the concept was developed no further by Barthes, governmentality was to become one of the key terms in Foucaults philosophical and historical lexicon, at least for a time. In terms of the development of his thinking, governmentality was the conceptual bridge between the disciplinary moment of Discipline and Punish, with its relentless stress on bleak individualisation, and the notions of the individuals capacity to make themselves with, through, and against these practices and institutions, themes that dominated his final work on the history of sexuality (McCarthy 1994: 266-70).

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Liberalism, insists Foucault, is not only, nor even necessarily primarily, a political question. Liberalism has two dimensions: political and economic. To understand both dimensions, Foucault offered a reading of Jeremy Bentham that stressed both discipline and utility. In Bentham, the states competence and motives are never

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Foucault and Governmentality

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3 assured, and always mistrusted. Utility is, then, a suspicious principle that limits - and evaluates - the will to govern: the utility of individual and the general utility will be the major criteria for working out the limits of public authorise and the formations of a form of public law and administrative law (Foucault 2008: 44). The liberal state battles to reconcile an open-ended concern with the populations well-being with a determination that the state should be frugal, constantly seeking to curtail its activities in the interests of cost and liberty. The tension at the centre of governmental rationality, is captured by Benthams couplet government-interest. Foucault stressed that utilitarian liberalism is obsessed with delimiting public authorities. After all, Bentham first conceived the panopticon not for prisoners, to grind rogues honest, but to allow citizens to cointinuously observe and control civil servants, particularly to eliminate favouritism. Panoptic control is, therefore, about efficiency, transparency and legitimacy as much as surveillance. Increasingly, from the late eighteenth century, the state becomes responsible for increasing the populations welfare. The states ability to protect and increase social welfare becomes the acid test for any administration in terms of achievement and means. The growth in the states administrative knowledge of its population census, mortality, education, productivity becomes both a source of knowledge about welfare and a measure of the efficacy of specific state interventions and governmentality in general. In turn, the collection, comparison and interrogation of all kinds of social statistics became not just an anonymous administrative matter but central to all political debate.

Given the impossibility of reconciling the need to reduce its scope as it simultaneously expands its responsibilities, the liberal state can only fail. In turn, Foucault introduces the notion of governmentality in recognition that the states effectiveness is measured by its capacity to influence the behaviours of individuals to improve the welfare of the population. To the degree that the state can calculate its range, the limits of governmental reason have to be respected and operate on the understanding that its legitimacy is dependent upon sustaining that distinction and its effectiveness in improving social welfare (Foucault 2008: 11, 16; Senellart 2003). None of this entails a functionalist logic in which the state knowingly manages its impossible burden through pushing responsibilities onto civil society (Foucault 2008: 297). Rather, where the state has to justify such actions it does so by defining them as a way of expanding a specific domain of freedom, beyond the state. Liberal governmentailty cannot be defined, far less understood, from the perspective of the state, since civil society co-defines the limits of the liberal state. Indeed, Foucault reverses this logic by insisting that the governmentalization of the state is immeasurably more important than the etatisation of society (Foucault 1991: 103; Lascoumes & Le Gales 2004). Here Foucault draws a sharp distinction between the nature of the absolutist and the liberal state. The very possibility of sovereign power vested in an absolutist monarch meant that all state actions, from routine administration to making war, were designed to maintain the integrity of a highly personalised state. Governmentality inverts this notion of monarchic power, and the singular, focal place of the monarch gives way to the dispersed, multivocal power of the liberal individual: everyone becomes a sovereign citizen and consumer. By shattering the indivisibility of the sovereign and the state, governmentality marks the beginnings of two kinds of techniques: those disciplines that individualise by targeting the body and those pastoral techniques which regulate behaviours by acting on populations. Power is no longer solely deployed by the monarch but is constituted

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4 by the interaction of disciplinary and pastoral techniques together with the behaviours of individuals and populations. Power no longer has the clear purpose of protecting or furthering sovereign rule. Power can no longer be traced back to the monarchs body or attributed solely to the state. This historic decoupling of power and the state also marks a new uncertainty about how power operates and of its impact; an uncertainty that constantly demands new forms of knowledge and practice.

A central theme of Foucaults historical studies of the hospital, the prison, the asylum is that they are all institutions that place the individual foursquare before the state. In short, Foucault studied only a limited range of exceptional, total state institutions. He did not study those organisations which allow citizens to experiment, perhaps broaden, their experience of freedom. Governmentality, by contrast, involves the management of populations, not exclusively individuals, far less individuals subjected to constant surveillance. The very notion of population necessarily involves management at a distance, that analytical distance necessary for definition, understanding, and to measure and compare the impact of specific interventions. By remaining at a distance the state is able to measure its efficacy and to maintain that separation from the individual essential for its legitimacy. For Foucault, the liberal state carries an impossible burden. Every liberal state is a failing state since it can only fail to satisfy ever-rising expectations of economic growth, security and well-being and individual freedom.

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The main object of liberal government becomes population. Population is far from a commonsensical term in Foucault for it involves a double action. First, that population is not discovered but defined and constructed as an object to be governed (Foucault 2008: 103). Second, that this definition of a population is the first act of government. The purpose of government is the welfare of the population, the improvement of its conditions, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc; and the means that government uses to attain the end are themselves in some senses immanent to the population; it is the population itself on which the government will act either directly through large scale campaigns, or indirectly through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of the birth rate, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activities (Foucault 1991: 100). Measurement is a necessary and defining characteristic of any governmentalisation project. Governmentality refers to the way in which behaviours are oriented: la conduite des conduites, the guidance, not control, of how people conduct or orient, perhaps manage, themselves. Foucault deliberately plays on the double meaning of the verb conduire: at once, to manage and to conduct oneself. Unlike discipline, this gentler form of self government does not directly target the individuals body but initiates the ways that people think about themselves and their behaviour. Through his use of this deceptively simple verb, Foucault captured the paradox of the free yet intensely disciplined individual of liberalism (Pezet 2007).

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Foucault and the New Accounting History? In this section we will suggest that there are three reasons why Foucault, particularly his notion of governmentality, has assumed such prominence in shaping accounting history over the last thirty years. First, the development of a sophisticated, coherent school of thought, the London governmentalists. Importantly, the coherence of the London governmentalists owed much to the way they created a space in which to develop their ideas that was independent of wider academic debates. Second, the governmentalists emerged out of intellectual and political debates that signalled the demise of structuralist Marxism. Third, the rise of neo-liberalism with the objective of shrinking the state underscored the importance of Foucaults central ideas about the impossible burden of the liberal state. The corollary of this need to understand the dynamics of politics beyond the state entailed a re-examination of the concepts and practices of the enterprise and employment. This was an audacious rejection of statecentred analyses of politics and economics.

Politically and intellectually, the London governmentalists were shaped by their engagement with the French structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser (Althusser 2006). For the governmentalists, there was to be no wholesale rejection of Althusserianism, but a recognition that there were important epistemological and theoretical continuities between Althusser and Foucault (Carter et al, 2002). For Althusser, while concepts do not necessarily have real referents they can result in altered social practices. Althusser is concerned with the categories which determine what is thinkable and doable (Benton 1984: 36-7, 43). These two themes were common to both Althusser and Foucault and formed a touchstone of governmentalism in general and foucauldian accounting history in particular. In terms of their intellectual and political practice, Althusser and Foucault were quite different. Where Althusser dealt almost exclusively with high level abstractions, Foucault stressed contingency and institutional specificity. Equally, while Althusser and Foucault both prioritise theory over experience, they do so in quite different ways. Althusser offers a philosophical argument against empiricism, which is defined so broadly as to preclude historical research. Foucault, by contrast, drenches his philosophy in historical narrative; and deploys what at first reading seem to be thick descriptions of specific events real or imaginary as theoretical devices (Dews 1994: 122). Critics, most notably the historian E.P. Thompson, were contemptuous of the inelegance of Althussers theoretical language and its neglect, even disdain, for popular experience and the agency and inventiveness of grassroots social movements (Thompson 2004). Foucault was aware of his failure to take popular experience seriously and in the Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1972: 136-7) declared his intention to study not just the history of sciences but also of those shady philosophies that haunt literature, art, the sciences, ethics, and even mans daily life the spontaneous philosophy of those who did not philosophise. And here is the paradox. Foucault could not write of experience, could not easily incorporate social history, but his interest in the margins, the limit cases of individuals and institutions, takes him close to Thompsons determination to recover the neglected voices of the common people. None of Thompsons project to rescue grassroots experience from the condescension of history was retained by the governmentalists. The London governmentalists share Althussers scepticism about any humanist imperative to examine popular experience;

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6 and do not use events to make theoretical points. Rather, the governmentalists focus on programmes of rule, the ways in which systems of thought and practice cohere (Dean 1999). More than this, by concentrating on the programmatic, the governmentalists ignore how those individuals, groups and organisations effected by these systems of power and knowledge, conform, resist and adapt (OMalley et al 1997).

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Foucaults own partial break from Althusserian structuralism was mirrored by that of the reception of his work in Britain (Jones 2002). Or, perhaps more accurately, we should speak of the lack of a broad welcome for Foucault (Gordon 1996: 262-4). In Britain, the journal Ideology and Consciousness formed a theoretical bridge between Althusser and Foucault. Ideology & Consciousness was established to form an open, transdisciplinary space to permit departures from, rather than rejection of, Althusserian Marxism (see Miller & Rose 2008: 2-5). Initially, Foucault was a parenthetic figure. Ideology and Consciousness increasingly carried translations of important essays and interviews with Foucault. Within three years the journal was explicitly foucauldian and no longer engaged in debate about Althusser. A key article that established the theoretical and much of the empirical territory for the nascent governmentality school was Nikolas Roses (1979) The Psychological Complex. Rose moves between psychology and social administration to argue that the late nineteenth century categories of the nascent individual psychology were used as the categorical bases of social engineering, including eugenics. This method became the cornerstone of governmentalist historical research into fields as diverse as accounting, national efficiency, scientific management and the democratic legitimacy of the managerial corporation. This articles second contribution to governmentalist theory was to highlight efficiency as an example of a tactical category that could be used by quite different agencies for radically different purposes precisely because of its ambiguity, again the investigation of the way that analytical categories were developed and deployed to enable and legitimise new practices has been a constant theme of governmentalist research (Rose 1979: 28-37).

The foucauldian turn, signalled a significant shift in the style and emphasis of Ideology & Consciousness. Initially, Foucault was honoured by translation, summary and pastiche: descriptions of institutional arrangements and Victorian social reforms geared towards social categorisation, surveillance, and moral engineering, all seasoned with appropriate quotes from Foucault. However, the task quickly became deploying and elaborating foucauldian categories to escape the dead-end of structuralist Marxism and the better to understand the governance of the present. Theoretically, this foucauldian turn retained one key Althusserian motif. That is, the development of governmentality involved a particular form of critique that justified its own self-referentiality by rejecting various theories psychological, social psychological, sociological and linguistic because the theory which we want to construct cannot readily displace existing theories without replacing their objects. Thus, it is necessary for the theory to construct its own theoretical object internal to itself (Adlam et al 1977: 3). This refusal to draw upon or engage with contemporary academic literatures has remained a distinctive part of governmentalism as a collective research project. Epistemological differences may explain part of the insularity of governmentalism but the objective was also pragmatic: to avoid the

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7 distractions of conventional academic debate, almost as if it were a form of static that would impede the development of the theory of governmentality.

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The context of the early 1980s was vital for the emergence of Foucault as a key resource for critical accounting history (Rowlinson & Carter, 2002; Carter, 2008). The determination of neo-liberalism to shrink the state, to withdraw from direct economic management, and to managerialise public provision bore all the hallmarks of managing at a distance. State-centred Althusserian Marxism could not offer any convincing analysis of the retreat of the state. The pace and scope of the states withdrawal from social life became critical to the legitimacy of neo-liberalism. But this was not simply the practical expression of a political programme. For, as political and economic historians are beginning to demonstrate, neo-liberalism was far from being a coherent, well-articulated project but one that was developed over time, together with, for instance, new accounting techniques (Auerbach 1999; McKinlay 2009). Neo-liberalism was not reducible to the pursuit of class interests. Nor can the language of neo-liberalism be dismissed as a smoke-screen that obscured real interests. For, as the governmentalists observed, it produced effects, different ways of thinking about citizenship, employment or poverty that, in turn, created novel ways of measuring policy impacts on individuals and populations (Rose & Miller 1992). There are three crucial observations here. First, that neo-liberalism was a complex and initially confused political project that gained coherence over time and, by its very nature, was not could not be restricted to formal politics or the state. Second, that as neo-liberalism gained momentum it produced knowledge and practices that measured its diffusion and impact. Third, that as institutions and individuals learnt to cope with neo-liberalism these languages and practices altered the ways that individuals behaved, how they thought about themselves, and how they accommodated this cultural remaking of social, political and economic roles. None of this was simply derived from economic pressures or class positions. Rather, these distinct but intertwined processes were based around rhetorics of freeing the liberal individual, even if this required compulsion. Every struggle with a recalcitrant union, profession or organisation was, then, invested with a moral imperative that reached far beyond economic interest.

The neo-liberal ascendancy and the crisis of western manufacturing combined to cause a crisis of confidence in conceptions of management. During this crisis, Japan, culture and flexibility emerged as key motifs. Corporatist settlements at the macro and micro levels were not simply broken as an economic expedient but their legitimacy as a form of interest representation was systematically dismantled. Now, it was not that one economic condition was necessary for the other cultural change. Rather, the point is that these cannot be thought of as distinct, discreet processes but were intertwined institutionally, culturally and economically. Through the debris of manufacturing certainties, strode two new - initially, ill-defined, figures: the empowered worker and the manager as leader. Management gurus notably Tom Peters represented much more than a set of practices that addressed the failings of Western organisation, although these were real enough (Peters & Waterman 1982; Huczynski 2007). Rather, Peters offered management a set of practical interventions and moral guidelines. Practical in his insistence that only what could be measured could be managed, and only those who could be measured could be liberated from the

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8 snares of public or corporate bureaucracies. Moral, in that the individual employee could no longer be thought of as a reluctant conscript but must be regarded as a willing volunteer, a willingness that was both assumed and constructed by Peters techniques. The measure of the individual employee was the committed, empowered associate the enterprising self no longer the sceptical, unionised employee. Measurement became perhaps the central task of management, rather than the exclusive preserve of accountants. Management now attempted to measure the cultures of organisation, the scope and depth of individuals endorsement of new techniques such as TQM (Mueller & Carter, 2005) and so their acceptance of personal responsibility for managing their new selves. Again, measurement assumed a moral force as much as an economic imperative: only by liberating employees or citizens could the organisation regain its competitive edge or the polity its vitality. The new management legitimised itself by discrediting the old, inert hierarchies as guilty of impeding the natural impulses of the corporate leader (Mueller & Carter, 2007), and the innate commitment of the employee (Miller & Rose 1990, 1995). Opposition was pathologised as conservatism, and recidivists rooted out as unfit for the new high commitment workplace.

The new accounting history that emerged from the late 1970s was critical in breaking the hold of any notion that the development of accounting was a narrative of progressive, cumulative technical improvement in accounting methods that delivered ever more perfect approximations of underlying economic realities (see Napier 2006). Equally, operational, organisational and logistical innovations turned upon concepts of flows rather than stocks: processes not just outcomes had to be accounted for. By adopting Foucault, critical accounting history could both ensure some resonance with contemporary corporate developments and rescue itself from an endless round of technically demanding but theoretically arid reconstructions of company accounts. On the other hand, accounting history could also escape from the tyranny of teleology: merely tracking the technical improvements in accounting techniques. This represented a clear epistemological break from accounting history based on a nave belief that the authenticity of the narrative was confirmed by fidelity to the archive. The new accounting history established the historical specificity and contingency of accounting as socially constructed practices (Burchell 1985). Crucially, Foucauldian studies went one step further by arguing not just that the social effected the development of accounting techniques, but that these techniques were constitutive of ways of seeing the world, above all making individuals and certain of their behaviours calculable (Miller & OLeary 1987). Given the importance of numbers to enumerating and categorising populations, accounting, in all its forms, was a natural locus for foucauldian scholarship. Foucauldian scholarship developed from or rather in opposition to sociological research into the social, political as well as economic context of the development of accounting as a practice, a profession, and as an organisational function. Sociological contextualism was rejected as theoretically unsatisfactory. Key contextualist terms such as longitudinal and processual masked but could not hide the absence of any sophisticated historiography. For, as Hayden White observes, the search for origins, impact and influence is a search for links and generalities (White 1975: 18-9). Ultimately, for contextualist history, events, decisions, and processes can be explained by their context; this was a search for functional relationships and agency that suggested the possibility of a complete history, a vague and unattainable holism (Berkhoffer 1995: 31-4).

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Caterpillar: The Impossible Factory Governmentalist analyses have examined abstract programmes of government: conceptions of individuals as consumers, producers, citizens; ways of calculating, making and remaking individual and popular behaviours. The Caterpillar case is significant because it represented the first and only attempt by governmentalists to consider a single enterprise. The objective was to move from theoretical to a specific empirical analysis of a corporate restructuring programme by the earth-moving firm, Caterpillar (Miller & OLeary 1998: 709). The Caterpillar experience was used to exemplify the shift from taylorised to flexible work regimes. Taylorism aimed to create a science of docile bodies, a corpus of knowledge and practices that assumed and pursued the reduction of workers to mere hands. Where Taylorism signified the emergence of the governable person, individualised work regimes were progressively displaced by managements post-war construction of the governable process, a process that accelerated from the early 1980s (Miller &OLeary 1994: 41). From 1945 to the late 1970s a variety of managerial strategies sought to enrich work and defined worker well-being as a central objective. Managing the social and the psychological was understood as a counterweight, a consolation for the narrow excesses of scientific management. The vital distinction was that through the 1980s worker well-being now dropped from sight and was replaced by organisational competitiveness as the marker of personnel strategy. Caterpillar pursued a rapid reorganisation of its production organisation and a radical change in the assumptions that underpinned employment: a shift from flow to modular production based on more flexible technologies; from individual tasks to team-based work organisation; the introduction of accounting systems that tracked and measured costs against competitor benchmarks rather than internal, historic norms. Finally, individual employees were assigned responsibility for ratcheting up efficiencies and quality levels inside their cells through constant monitoring of their own short-cycle material flows in the restructured labour process. Manufacturing velocity was accelerated by the introduction of a decentralised real-time materials planning system and by the elimination of all but the slimmest of buffer stocks. In an important sense, the Caterpillar experience is deeply familiar. An invocation of failing competitiveness which management sought to embed on the shopfloor coupled with a shift to flexible manufacturing techniques and teamworking: these were the terms of engagement across the corporate world, from Japanisation through total quality management to lean manufacturing and beyond (see, inter alia, Oliver & Wilkinson 1992; Starkey & McKinlay 1993; Elger & Smith 2005). Caterpillar was chosen as an exemplar of the profound rethinking and restructuring of production organisation and the employment relationship that occurred in the closing two decades of the twentieth century. This rethinking cannot, argue the governmentalists, be read off economic imperatives, but that the factory becomes the institutional focus for a set of political, cultural and administrative discourses. This argument is not confounded by the failure of real factories to shift to teamworking regimes or that real working lives fell short, often by some way, of the ideals of economic citizenship (Miller & OLeary 2002: 113).

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10 The Caterpillar case has drawn a barrage of criticism, both substantive and theoretical. On the one hand, critics focus on the inadequacies of Miller and OLearys account of the restructuring of manufacture and the rhetoric of flexibility, employee participation and corporate competitiveness. Miller and OLearys account neglects shopfloor employees experience of Caterpillars restructuring and says little about the bargaining strategies of their union, the UAW (Arnold 1998: 666-9). Tactical concessions by Caterpillar reduced supervision and a slackening of task controls were followed by an aggressive campaign against key elements of labour contracts and the unions representative functions. The language of economic citizenship highlighted by Miller and OLeary was little more than a smoke-screen that masked a bargaining process in which labour surrendered formal and informal controls over contracts and workloads in return for managerial platitudes about partnership. There seems little doubt that some upskilling and increased autonomy was experienced by Caterpillar workers but that this was tempered by ever greater job insecurity. The governmentalist account is peculiarly ahistorical. There is no acknowledgement that Caterpillar only recognised trade unionism because of state pressure during World War 2, far less the companys determination to erode the scope of collective contracts over the next thirty years (Derber 1989: 294-9). Nor does the governmentalist account acknowledge the sustained and deep campaigns of corporate America to extol the virtues of free enterprise and individualism in the workplace, the community and the family. In the mid-1950s, for instance, Caterpillar held training days for local opinion moulders such as barbers, so that they could more knowledgeably discuss company policy and performance (Fones-Wolf 1994:177). Equally, there is no attempt to locate Caterpillars restructuring in the 1980s within a long-run account of the company as a multinational that pioneered the development of an international division of labour from the mid-1960s onwards (Woolfson & Foster 1988: 2; Knox & McKinlay 1999). In short, all the main rhetorical elements of the transition to cellular manufacturing international competition, the burden of expensive labour contracts, and the rigidities of the seniority system were ever-present throughout the post-1945 period.

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Here their point is not whether or not teamworking intensified work or extended individual job roles. Rather, where Taylorism pursued highly individualised labour processes monitored by standard costing, cellular manufacture replaced or complemented - the emphasis on the calculable individual with the group and the governable space. The team replaces the individual as the object of managerial innovation and the target of managerial monitoring. For management, incremental innovations not only resulted in efficiency gains but also, and more importantly, signify increased employee commitment. Governmentalists have been criticised for describing this spatial, organisational and linguistic shift as positive. Positive, argues Arnold (1998:672), suggests the endorsement of the factory regime as progressive, liberal and empowering for the employee. This criticism is misplaced. For Foucault, positive has a specific theoretical, rather than literal, meaning that does not necessarily imply endorsement. Power is not simply repressive and inhibitory but positive and productive. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesnt weigh on

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11 us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. Forms of representation render behaviours visible, calculable and abstract knowledge possible. In turn, this allows for the possibility of managerial intervention, the possibility of new objects of managerial knowledge and practice. However, Miller and OLeary omit this stage, of the accumulation of data and managerial experimentation, and move straight from the possibility of new forms of visibility to an assumption of behavioural change. In practice, the stress on the link between discourse and action dissolves when confronted with the Caterpillar experience. The result, remarks Armstrong (2006), has something in common with the prophecies of Nostradamus. The meaning of terms is open, anything is possible and nothing can happen which is not foretold. Concepts feed upon empirical data, as romantic poetry feeds on landscape (similarly, Froud 1998 et al 688-9). We would go further. What is at stake here is not simply scholarly obscurantism nor an attempt to disguise theoretical and empirical vapidity. What has been dismissed by Armstrong as little more than smoke and mirrors used to disguise the absence of analysis and a desperate lack of research-based evidence, was expressed by Rose and Miller (1992: 175) as the schematic of a theory of governmentality: The mentalities and machinations of government that we explore are not merely traces, signs, causes or effects of real transformations in social relations. The terrain they constitute has a density and significance of its own. Government is the historically constituted matrix within which are articulated all those dreams, schemes, strategies and manoeuvres of authorities that seek to shape the beliefs and conduct of others in desired directions by acting upon their will, circumstances or their environment.

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Here is a prime example of all the linguistic evasions, allusions and faux precision that so infuriated Peter Armstrong. Are the dreams of authorities to be accorded the same theoretical and empirical weight as their strategies? Embedded in this short passage is the suggestion of a governmentalist methodology (Rose & Miller 1992: 177; Miller 1997: 362): Our studies of government eschew sociological realism and its burdens of explanation and causation. We do not try to characterise how social life really was and why. We do not seek to penetrate the surfaces of what people said to discover what they meant, what their motives or interests were. Rather, we attend to the ways in which authorities in the past have posed themselves these questions: what is our power; to what ends should it be exercised; what effects has it produced; how can we know what we need to know, and do what we need in order to govern?

But there are prior questions: why do these questions arise and why in this form? How do actors experience this questioning, because it almost certainly represents a major transition for those involved? Caterpillar executives did have a concept of the organisations interests, a sense that sustained capital investment in flexible manufacturing technology had not delivered the anticipated gains in innovation,

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12 quality and efficiency. The executives diagnosis was that the potential of this flexible equipment had been thwarted by a hierarchical management structure and inflexible work organisation. In short, for Caterpillar executives, there was or they had to create - a profound crisis of legitimacy of established management practices that opened up space for new ideas to gain currency. Here we have the paradox of a theory and a historiography that operates only at the abstract level of the programme: the ways in which particular forms of government are conceived, their moral and practical purposes. Nevertheless, the governmentality school seem in no doubt that these perfect visions are necessarily never achieved: it is precisely the vision of perfect government that should be charted, never the messy, compromised reality. The irony is that the research of the governmentality school mimics the gap between programme and historical realities: a will to theory that is as doomed to failure as the will to govern.

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Knowledge does not simply mean ideas but refers to the vast assemblage of persons, theories, projects, experiments and techniques that has become such a central component of government. Theories from philosophy to medicine. Schemes from town planning to social insurance. Techniques from double entry book-keeping to compulsory medical inspection of schoolchildren. Knowledgeable persons from generals to architects and accountants. Our concern, that is to say, is with the know how that has promised to make government possible

One confronts a battery of words that may be concepts, or perhaps just words. Are theories superior to schemes, and, if so, in what ways, in all circumstances? Are theories subject to abstract logics while schemes are assessed in terms of empirical effects? Finally, are techniques practices embodied in collective professions and individual subjects? Techniques, it would seem, are not expressive of schemes or theories. Nowhere are we told of the relationships between these concepts or even guidance as to how these may have played out in particular domains. It seems certain that the links between these concepts are not causal but we are left none the wiser whether they are necessary, wholly contingent, contrived or accidental. We can be sure that there is no sequence, far less stages, involved. In Caterpillar, one is entitled to enquire how these programmes, theories, schemes and techniques played out during corporate restructuring and factory reorganisation. Here we part company with Peter Armstrong. Perhaps this welter of concepts overlapping, complementary, contradictory, endlessly qualified is a deliberate literary style designed to convey a crucial theoretical point. The intention is to disorientate the reader who is supposed to become lost in a terminological maze. Even the most determined reader would struggle to find a clear chronology, far less cause and effect, in Caterpillar or any of

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The central ideas used by Caterpillar drew upon a broad national debate about the failure of American management and the search for new, flexible recipes. There is no attempt to trace how such national concerns fed into Caterpillars executive decisionmaking: who were the interlocutors who translated abstract concerns into local meanings and actions? Vague allusions about societal discourses about competitiveness and flexible manufacturing are insufficient. This is a surprising criticism since knowledge is one of the key concepts of governmentality:

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13 the other governmentality studies. Again, this is not accidental. Governmentalists are consciously indifferent to theoretical neatness, disdainful of analytical closure. They offer accounts that aim to be incomplete and eschew any notion that they are offering anything approaching the last word on a subject. Circularity, repetition, and hesitation are deployed to displace certainty and render futile any search for origins, causes, and effects (Rose 2008: 12). There are occasional hints at a kind of origin and a sort of death. How, Peter Miller asks rhetorically, might one describe the swarming multiplicity of actors, agents, practices, tools, instruments, inscriptions and ideas that forms from time to time, and that is defined by the temporarily stabilized networks of relations between its constituent parts, the abstract lines that pass between its components, rather that the contours that surround them? To ask the question, however qualified, is to suggest that an answer is possible, at least in principle. If that is to allow some question of birth, then Miller also suggests that it is legitimate to investigate the process by which an assemblage ceases to exist? (Miller 1997: 355)

The allusions to national debates about the renaissance of American manufacturing that become refracted onto the Caterpillar shopfloor echo the governmentalists discussions of early twentieth century debates about national economic and social efficiency, eugenics and scientific management. The implicit suggestion is that national debates about the balance between individual freedom and the states responsibility of the population infects, for instance, how employment and productivity is conceived of in the firm. The mechanisms of just how such philosophical and practical transfers are made is, for the London governmentalists, a second-order problem of little theoretical interest and marginal empirical importance. On the contrary, understanding the dynamics of such processes is precisely what Foucault had in mind with his concept of governmentalisation. In practice, of course, Foucault was equally unconcerned with specifying the mechanics by which disciplinary languages and practices were diffused between institutions, countries or over time. In The Eye of Power (1996: 226-7) he recalled that during his research for The Birth of the Clinic, he was under the impression that systems of centralised surveillance based on separating, categorising and observing bodies were specific to medicine (Foucault 1975). It was only during his research into the rise of the prison that he appreciated that this discourse was dominated by references to Jeremy Benthams Panopticon, an organisation of architectural and social space that created and enabled a new optic of power. After providing a few examples of architectural systems that embodied surveillant principles, he remarked, somewhat off-handedly, that it was Samuel Benthams account of the Military Academy in Paris, built in 1751, that triggered Jeremys popularisation of the Panopticon: Bentham told how it was his brother who first had the idea of the panopticon while visiting the Military Academy. In any case, the theme was clearly in the air at this time (McKinlay 2006).

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The London governmentalists insist that a case cannot be understood as determined by its context but rather that the technological or social project creates its own context, spawns its own systems of calculation that intersect with a multitude of other agencies, professions and so forth. The task as Peter Miller has acknowledged is not to examine only the perfect, abstract programes of government but, more properly, to follow the actors that establish the context, to pry into the micro-politics of the

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14 project, to establish the connection between different actors and their competing and complementary logics and practices (Miller 1997: 358). In other words, the task should be to study the process of governmentalization. Little is said of which professional groups or consultancy companies were active inside Caterpillar: who designed the new factory lay-out; what role, if any, did the manufacturers of the flexible capital equipment play? In short, what were the dynamics of the internal political processes, how did different corporate and operational levels interact? Were there events that constituted watershed moments in this process? Indeed, this absence of actors mediating these high-level political debates and the shopfloor conflicts with Millers (1997: 360) contention that: Bureaucrats, accountants and managers are the Einsteins of society. For it is they who make commensurable and translatable frames of reference that are incommensurable. That is, there is a complex mediation from programmes to the shopfloor, a process that involves many professions, not all of which support the emerging discourse but which may have to construct discourses, measures and practices which they find tolerable if outright resistance is impossible (Miller & OLeary 2002: 93). In an even more arcane metaphor, Miller (1997: 363) discusses the practical difficulties of following a governmentalist methodology. While the territory of a project may not be limitless, neither is it clear-cut The linkages do not just stop at a certain point. The cat-walks do not come to a dead-end. They just get flimsier, more difficult to discern in the failing light, until at some point they crumble beneath ones foot. A multitude of actors inhabits the penumbral halfworld of a project, scurrying about in the shadows, barely perceptible. Yet the influence of some of these half-glimpsed figures can be decisive What might this metaphor mean? This is an image that speaks of a cultural process that is irreducible to rational, narrowly economic calculation. But that is not the same as arguing that strategic judgements about markets and competitiveness are entirely free of rational calculation. Just as the images projected by haut couture catwalk models are adopted, altered and made practical for street fashion, translating the recipes of management gurus into practical routines to be enacted inside the factory is an extended cultural process based around the ingenious labour of everyday Einsteins.

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The London governmentalists never refer to individual decisions-makers, specific decisions or how these constitute strategies. That is not to say that there is no strategy. Far from it: the various governmentalist accounts are saturated with strategies. So strategy does not exist. The actors do not have a strategy; they get their battle plans, contradictory ones, from other actors. For the actors in a technological project populate the world with other actors, whom they endow with qualities, a past, motivations, visions, goals, targets, and desires. That is why they are called actors: they create their society, their language and their metalanguage; and they define how the populating will come about, and how to account for it (Miller 1997: 359). In short, it is the prosaic practices of managing and accounting that broker meaning, that translate abstract arguments about competitiveness, productivity and quality into the languages and measures that penetrate onto the shopfloor. Tracing how this prosaic, yet profound, arbitrage process works in practice is vital if we are to understand the remaking of organisation, work and employment. Exactly this question has dominated organisation studies for over forty years. From Strauss notion of negotiated order to contemporary critical management studies that is dominated by discourses that individuals co-opt, use, and develop to understand their place in new organisational narratives.

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15

The Caterpillar case highlights the power of the London governmentalists to uncover the cultural meanings of rational economic calculation. However, by stopping at the programmatic level the governmentalists deny themselves the possibility of understanding the dynamics of governmentalisation as a process. The governmentalists neglect,first, the complex translation of abstract programmes of governmentality into local meanings and actions. Second, the governmentalists leave no space for new forms and cultures of grassroots resistance, whether individual or collective. Both shortcomings can be overcome by considering the process of governmentalisation and locating the continuities of this new corporate project with Caterpillars historical formation. First, Caterpillars deep-seated hostility to union representation; second, the attempt to stifle lay union opposition to production restructuring; thirdly, the rout of the UAW allowed the use of core and periphery employment contracts to undermine the established systems of seniority that regulated the corporations internal labour market. To all of this the governmentalists would reply that this does not diminish the new ways that management were thinking about the workplace and employee relations. But it is a strange, thin sort of polity that denies the possibility of representative democracy or that citizens should have any say in devising the systems that form and articulate their collective voice. In an important sense, restricting voice to manufacturing cells was the logical conclusion of a corporate strategy developed during the two decades after 1945 (see Fones-Wolf 1994; Franklin 2001). From 1945 the UAW pursued an overarching bargaining agenda for Caterpillar as a whole, the corporation successfully defended plant bargaining until the mid-1960s. Dissolving the bargaining unit down to the cell was, then, the realisation of a dream that Caterpillar management had for decades, not an abrupt response to or anticipation of - a competitive crisis. The real advantage of the governmentalist account is that it registers the central importance of management change as a cultural project. Nor is there any great mystery about the internal sources of Caterpillars pursuit of a values-based change programme. In the mid-1980s Caterpillars CEO completed his MIT masters on Japanese production organisation; the vice-president for the tractor division had been the managing director of production administration in Caterpillars joint venture with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan from 1974 to 1980 (Despain & Bodman Converse 2003). Similarly, for other major American corporations, joint ventures with Japanese manufacturers, proved an important formative moment in the Japanisation movement that gained momentum through the 1980s (Starkey & McKinlay 1993). Nor was the diffusion of cultural change left to chance. In Caterpillar, managements cultural project the organisations values journey was highly orchestrated, top down, and wedded to pragmatic operational objectives. In a two-year process, Caterpillar cascaded the cultural project from the boardroom to the shopfloor, always in pursuit of pushing problem-solving responsibility down to the lowest possible level. Nor was this cultural project bloodless: middle management ranks were thinned out and the established skew towards technical expertise was redressed by new hires recruited for their skills in managing teams. All managers were subject to 360-degree feedback in terms of their consistent embodiment of the corporations nine Common Values, that they might improve their values-based leadership skills. Caterpillar did not systematically measure employee behaviour and attitudes or link these to, for instance, changes in quality or efficiency. The links between

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16 cellular manufacturing, attitudinal restructuring, quality and flexibility were assumed, not tested.

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The central figure in Caterpillar managements programme for a new workplace was the economic citizen, the individual worker who gains certain, limited decisionmaking responsibilities inside their team. Cellular manufacturing can only be effective if the newly enfranchised economic citizens fully embrace their democratic responsibilities. Where the assembly line required nothing more than dull compliance, cellular production depends upon active involvement. The new economic citizen cannot abstain or pour scorn upon Caterpillars democratic polity. Only active involvement grants the citizen the right of dissent, and even then this must be restricted to specific decisions not to the nature of the regime itself. On the shopfloor, Caterpillars newly enfranchised economic citizens were subjected to sharp increases in workloads and, especially for temporary, non-union labour, real cuts in wages and contract protection. The UAW used legal bargaining, informal work to rules, and wildcat strikes to counter Caterpillars drive to marginalise te union and to erode customary work practices. Between 1996-98 Caterpillar intensified its campaign against the UAW, dismissing individuals for wearing union badges and subjecting activists to a barrage of petty, but relentless, discrimination (see McCall 2008: 156-72). The 1998 Caterpillar-UAW contract ended the cycle of strikes with marginally improved conditions but, for the union, re-established the principle of workplace union representation, albeit at huge cost to the union organisation at plantlevel (Cohen 2003; Devinatz 2005). The limits of reading only programmes of government rather than attending to the process of governmentalisation, is evident in the Caterpillar case. Over a decade of conflict, there was no attempt to turn the tables on Caterpillar by recasting the nine values into union campaigning slogans. But corporate restructuring did produce unexpected, and in some ways novel forms of union mobilisation. The union language was of solidarity, equity, and struggle. For the UAW, the form of the Caterpillar campaign was novel in its use of in-house tactics of working to rule, abstaining from voluntary cultural change activities and demonstrating solidarity by workgate meetings and, most dramatically, by individualised and workgroup defiance. This defiance took the form of wearing UAW shirts and badges, embodying a recalcitrance that drew severe management reprisals. Indeed, otherwise incomprehensible acts of management pettiness, underscores the centrality of Caterpillars vision of a different kind of employee, a vision that was affronted by a union button: a confirmation of the London governmentalists central observation of the need to take seriously the cultural assumptions that underlie what purport to be entirely rational economic calculations.

The introduction of new forms of work organisation is a process in which management have preferred to ignore, side-step, or co-opt collective bargaining, preferring wherever possible to target the individual unmediated by trade union representation. To be against new forms of work organisation has proved intensely difficult, for how can one be anything other than for greater individual autonomy and responsibility, greater involvement in routine decision-making and a more competitive organisation? This is a language of democracy that recognises and articulates direct, seldom participative, and never representative democracy. The managerial language of change and empowerment, much like efficiency, is vacuous

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17 or, at least, sufficiently elastic that it can accommodate a host of competing, contradictory definitions. Conclusion The singular achievement of the London governmentalists is the development of a coherent, sustained research programme that has generated new theoretical and empirical insights about a wide range of topics from marketing to social welfare and spanning two centuries. While we acknowledge that this radical reimagining of the social world has proved enormously influential significant theoretical and empirical limitations remain. Specifically, we have argued that the governmentalists have taken Foucault seriously when he suggested that the central importance of the how of power rather that the why. The London school offers a partial, if highly productive, reading of Foucault. Foucault did not pretend to offer a theory that encompasses management. The London governmentalists fundamental insight is that management, in the broadest sense, can be thought of in terms of how it attempts to manage at a distance, constructing images of the citizen, consumer, employee and systems of measurement that both represent and produce significant social effects. Gains systems of governmentality do not just produce certain behaviours and prohibit other. Systems of governmentality are themselves predicated upon notions, however ill-defined, of individuals: empowered workers, active citizens, ethical consumers. In terms of business, management and accounting history, we should attend to the administrative and knowledge systems rather than reading off change from market dynamics or class struggle. This radically alters how we think of strategy in its institutional setting: strategy is no longer something that is confined to executives and imposed on others. Strategies become altogether more pervasive, less authoritative, and less predictable. Over the last twenty years particularly, the combination of decentralisation and calculative capacity has made organisational boundaries much more porous. In turn, the restless pursuit of disciplinarity is destabilising, generates ephemeral managerial interventions and non-cumulative patterns of measurement and monitoring. Indeed, the churn of measurement can undermine the legitimacy of the very possibility of performance management.

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There is a sense in which the London governmentalists retain the centrality of the state, albeit as smaller, but operating in a more strategic, brokerage or commissioning role. For Foucault, however, one examines governmentality projects, the process of governmentalizing, processes that are never singular, pure, or complete. The object if research is not a fictive steady state of governmentality but the flux of governmentalization. To study processes of governmentalization requires us to attend not just to the programmes of the powerful but to their operation and to the manifold ways that individuals, groups and populations absorb, comply and resist these projects. The question becomes not how the state or the firm - rolls out governmental projects across society but how it governmentalises itself. By refusing to consider the extensive literatures on the management of change, on the restructuring of innumerable labour processes, the impact of teamworking on employee subjectivity, the London governmentalists can only speak of abstract programmes, and never about the diffusion of practices, the dynamics of resistance, and how this in turn effects management conceptions of the employee and the social relations of production. The Caterpillar case suggests some important difficulties

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18 with the development of the London governmentalists. Governmentalism is cut from wholecloth making it impossible to isolate and then subject one element to empirical challenge. Not only has the London school elected to develop quite separately from any other account of, say, the shift away from Taylorism and towards teamworking. Governmentalists refuse to enter debate in anything but their own terms.

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