Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495

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Critical Perspectives on Accounting

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa

Accounting for Foucault

Alan McKinlay a,b,∗ , Eric Pezet a,b
a
University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
b
CGS, Ecole des Mines, Paris, France

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality has been central to critical accounting
Received 30 August 2005 research for two decades, a centrality that has placed systems of calculation as the starting
Received in revised form 25 January 2008
point of discussions of the state, the firm and the market. We begin by outlining the devel-
Accepted 1 May 2008
opment of governmentality in Foucault’s 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 intro-
duction 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 per-
formance, not simply uncovering previously obscure or hidden social realities. Moreover,
accounting history studies the production of targets and measures of progress towards util-
ity 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.
© 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Foucault and governmentality

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 newly established 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 Foucault’s philo-
sophical 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 individu-
alisation, and the notions of the individual’s 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).

∗ Corresponding author at: School of Management, University of St Andrews, The Gateway, The North Haugh, St Andrews KY16 9AL, United Kingdom.
Tel.: +44 01334 462800.
E-mail address: am53@st-andrews.ac.uk (A. McKinlay).

1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2009.08.006
 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495 487

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 state’s competence and motives are never 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 population’s
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 Bentham’s 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 continuously 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 population’s welfare. The state’s ability to protect and increase social welfare becomes the acid test for any
administration in terms of achievement and means. The growth in the state’s 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 state’s
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 governmentality 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 governmentalisation of the state
is immeasurably more important than the etatisation of society (Foucault, 1991: 103; Lascoumes and 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 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 monarch’s 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.
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 individual’s 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).
A central theme of Foucault’s 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 indi-
viduals 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 interven-
tions. By remaining at a distance the state is able to measure its efficacy and to maintain the separation from the individual
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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.

2. 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 Foucault’s
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 state-centred analyses of politics and economics.
Politically and intellectually, the ‘London governmentalists’ were shaped by their engagement with the French structural-
ist Marxism of 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 read-
ing 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 Althusser’s 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 man’s 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 Thompson’s determination
to recover the neglected voices of the common people. None of Thompson’s project to rescue grassroots experience from
the condescension of history was retained by the governmentalists. The ‘London governmentalists’ share Althusser’s scep-
ticism about any humanist imperative to examine popular experience; 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 (O’Malley et al., 1997).
Foucault’s 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. In Britain, the
journal Ideology and Consciousness formed a theoretical bridge between Althusser and Foucault. Ideology and Consciousness
was established to form an open, transdisciplinary space to permit departures from, rather than rejection of, Althusserian
Marxism (see Miller and Rose, 2008: 2–5). Initially, Foucault was a parenthetic figure. Ideology and Consciousness increas-
ingly 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 Rose’s (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 man-
agement and the democratic legitimacy of the managerial corporation. This article’s 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 and Consciousness. Initially, Fou-
cault 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 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
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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 distractions of conventional academic debate, almost as if it were a form of static
that would impede the development of the theory of governmentality.
The context of the early 1980s was vital for the emergence of Foucault as a key resource for critical accounting history
(Carter, 2008; Rowlinson and Carter, 2002). 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 state’s 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, 1990; 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 and 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 con-
ceptions 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
(Huczynski, 2007; Peters and Waterman, 1982). 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 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 cul-
tures of organisation, the scope and depth of individuals’ endorsement of new techniques such as TQM (Mueller and 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 and Carter, 2007), and the innate commitment
of the employee (Miller and Rose, 1990, 1995a,b). 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, organ-
isational 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 recon-
structions 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 naïve 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 et al., 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
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making individuals and certain of their behaviours calculable (Miller and O’Leary, 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).

3. 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 and O’Leary, 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 management’s post-war construction
of ‘the governable process’, a process that accelerated from the early 1980s (Miller and O’Leary, 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, Elger and Smith, 2005;
Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992; Starkey and McKinlay, 1993). 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 and O’Leary, 2002: 113).
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 O’Leary’s account of the restructuring of manufacture and the rhetoric of flexibility, employee
participation and corporate competitiveness. Miller and O’Leary’s account neglects shopfloor employees’ experience of
Caterpillar’s 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 union’s representative functions. The language of ‘economic
citizenship’ highlighted by Miller and O’Leary 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 company’s 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 Caterpillar’s 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 (Knox and McKinlay, 1999; Woolfson and Foster, 1988: 2). 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.
 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495 491

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 doesn’t weigh on
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 O’Leary 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 et al., 1998: 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.
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 (Miller, 1997: 362; Rose and Miller, 1992: 177):
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 question-
ing, because it almost certainly represents a major transition for those involved? Caterpillar executives did have a concept
of the organisation’s ‘interests’, a sense that sustained capital investment in flexible manufacturing technology had not
delivered the anticipated gains in innovation, 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 seems 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’.
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 Caterpillar’s executive
decision-making: 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:
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.
492 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495

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 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 stabilised 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 state’s 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
Bentham’s 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 Bentham’s account of the Military Academy in Paris, built in 1751, that triggered Jeremy’s
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).
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 programmes of government but, more properly, to follow the actors that establish the ‘context’, to pry into the micro-
politics of the 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 governmentalisation. 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 Miller’s (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 and O’Leary, 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
 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495 493

one’s foot. A multitude of actors inhabits the penumbral half-world 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.
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.
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 possi-
bility 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 Caterpillar’s historical formation. First, Caterpillar’s 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 corporation’s 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 man-
agement 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 Caterpillar’s pursuit of a values-based change programme. In the mid-1980s
Caterpillar’s 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 Caterpillar’s joint venture with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
in Japan from 1974 to 1980 (Despain and 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 and McKinlay, 1993). Nor was the diffusion of cultural change left to chance. In
Caterpillar, management’s cultural project – the organisation’s ‘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 board-
room 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 corporation’s 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 cellular manufacturing, attitudinal restructuring, quality
and flexibility were assumed, not tested.
The central figure in Caterpillar management’s programme for a new workplace was the ‘economic citizen’, the individual
worker who gains certain, limited decision-making 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 Caterpillar’s 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, Caterpillar’s newly enfranchised ‘economic citizens’ were subjected to sharp increases in workloads and, espe-
cially 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 Caterpillar’s drive to marginalise the union and to erode customary work prac-
494 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495

tices. Between 1996 and 1998 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 plant-level (Cohen, 2003;
Devinatz, 2005). The limits of reading only programmes of government rather than attending to the process of governmen-
talisation, are 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 central-
ity of Caterpillar’s 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 represen-
tation. 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 compet-
itive 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 – or, at
least, sufficiently elastic – that it can accommodate a host of competing, contradictory definitions.

4. Conclusion

The singular achievement of the ‘London governmentalists’ is the development of a coherent, sustained research pro-
gramme 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 gov-
ernmentalists 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.
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 governmentalising, processes that are never singular, pure, or complete. The object if research is not a fictive
steady state of governmentality but the flux of governmentalisation. To study processes of governmentalisation 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 diffu-
sion 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 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.
 A. McKinlay, E. Pezet / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 21 (2010) 486–495 495

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