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Critical Perspectives on Accounting MANAGEMENT, IMAGE AND MANAGEMENT
ACCOUNTING
PETER ARMSTRONG†
Department of Management, Keele University, Newcastle-under-Lyme,
ST5 5BGThis https://www.51lunwen.org/business/paper considers management accounting technique, specifically activity-basedcost management, as a modelling process. Particularly in Anglo-Saxon capitalism,various institutional pressures have worked to dissociate management fromexpertise in the managed process. Managementof this character can only engagewith concrete processes by modelling them in terms which it can comprehend and
with which it can engage. The result is a market in management and accounting
techniques for producing these simplified representations. Those discussed in
this paper consist essentially of a reporting framework which is imposed on the
expert practitioner, so that the process is redescribed in modelled form. Precisely
because the resulting models are simplified, however, the consequences of
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 managing through them are dysfunctional in various ways.
In order to show the underlying similarities between apparently unconnectedinstances of this process, the paper discusses some attempts to open up aestheticdesign to management control before proceeding to the analysis of activity-basedcost management.

c 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Over the past decade, papers such as Gareth Morgan’s “Accounting as RealityConstruction” (1988) and Ruth Hines’ “In Communicating Reality, We ConstructReality” (1988) seem to have lost much of their critical force. Once it is establishedthat accounting does not mirror some objective reality, little more follows fromthe mere fact that it is socially constructed. Since all knowledges are sociallyconstructed in the sense that they are products of human understanding andsocial acceptance, it becomes uninteresting to say the same of accounting. Theinterest lies in the questions of how, why and with what consequences it is socially
constructed.In this paper, I suggest that activity-based cost management (ABCM) is one ofa class of techniques which has been constructed so as to appeal to a particularmarket for ideas. Particularly within Anglo-Saxon capitalism, that market has been† E-mail:  8 April 2000; revised 22 November 2000; accepted 26 February 2001
2811045–2354/02/$ - see front matter
c 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
282 P. Armstrong
conditioned by institutional pressures within management education, consultancyand labour markets which have worked to create a sharp distinction between“management” and what French and Raven (1959) once called “expert power”.
The result at the level of ideas is an abstract and generalized conception ofmanagement which is detached from expertise in any particular process and can, inconsequence, be applied to any and all processes1. At the human level, the result isthe creation of a managerial cadre whose stock-in-trade is management-in-general
rather than expertise in the processes to be managed (see Armstrong, 1986, 1996).For the one to control the other, for managers of this kind to control a particularprocess, it is necessary for that process to be constructed in a form which they find
comprehensible and amenable to purposive intervention. Many of the procedures
which are grounded in management knowledge aim to d本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。