Organizational Change and Accounting: Understanding the Budgeting System in its Organizational Context

This paper utilizes Foucault's framework of power/knowledge relations, but tressed by work on the sociology of translation (Callon 1986; Latour 1987), to examine the extent to which the budgeting system is implicated in a process of organizational change. The analysis is based on a field study in which a change initiative was developed by top policy-makers (the Centre) in a U.K. university against a background of reduction in funding by the state. The budgeting system is perceived to have relevance in this context at two levels: (i) as the vehicle through which reallocation of resources is effected, and (ii) as a means that provides actors with technical knowledge which can be utilized in the context of power relations. The analysis demonstrates that the Centre failed to deploy the budgeting system as a disciplinary regime in the sense of making it possible for the proposed resource reallocations to be implemented. The analysis also shows how the groups opposed to the proposed change: (i) through their technical knowledge successfully deployed arguments from within the accounting discipline to render the Centre's calculations 'incorrect' or at best debatable; (ii) combined these technical accounting arguments with arguments from outside the accounting discipline to cast strong doubts on the ethical and professional underpinnings of the Centre's proposals; and (iii) evolved, and promoted, a 'more viable' strategy to cope with the reduction in funding at the Centre's university.