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Keywords Accounting history, Research methods
Abstract This paper outlines and exemplifies the use of a method for analysing power relations based on the work of French social theorist, Michel Foucault. The overall research aim of genealogical analysis is to produce "a history of the present", a history which is essentially critical with its focus on locating forms of power, the channels it takes and the discourses it permeates. Research combining Foucauldian theorisation and method necessarily involves a selective search for injustice and subjection to reveal plausible alternatives to more pervasively modernist histories, which tend to revere progress, Salient features of a genealogical research method are detailed in the context of an actual research project previously conducted by the authors and reproduced here for the purposes of exemplification explicitly as a genealogy.
Introduction
In this paper, we provide a basis for thinking both broadly and specifically about methods for Foucauldian-inspired genealogical analyses of power relations in the human science of accounting. We claim that accounting's status as a human science makes it amenable to a wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives, and that some of the most fascinating of these focus on the conditions of its formation and use in different contexts -- both complementary to, and sometimes in contrast with, the explanations offered in conventional histories.
Foucault (1977a, p. xiv) argues that the human sciences do not possess any genuine referent because their referent comes into being only through subjection. Moreover, only by maintaining subjection can the human sciences continue to employ a technical, scientific discourse. The new disciplinary bodies of professional accountants which emerged in the nineteenth century can be seen in this light not so much as the faithful recorders or bookkeepers, but as human scientists subjecting their referents to a deindividualising process through their emphasis on recognition and measurement. In our bid to provide a more reflective criticism of the practices of accounting as an institution of society, we advocate the adoption of a Foucauldian-inspired genealogical method to, among other objectives, unmask the political violence, which has always exercised itself obscurely" (Foucault in Elders, 1974, p. 133).
As a focus of research, the emergence and development of the discipline of accounting in particular contexts are well-suited to theorisation...