(BQ) Part 2 book "Management accounting in the digital economy" has contents: Management accounting in the new economy - the rationale for irrational controls, management control and e logistics, paradoxes of management and control in a new economy firm, management accounting and the knowledge production process;.and other contents. | Part 2 Re ections on Organizational Shifts This page intentionally left blank 7 Management Accounting Inscriptions and the Post-Industrial Experience of Organizational Control Paul Andon, Jane Baxter, and Wai Fong Chua Introduction The idea that management accounting information may be used to control organizational functioning is not new—indeed, this has constituted one of the cornerstones of our disciplinary discourse (Emmanuel et al. 1990; Horngren et al. 2000). However, given that the so-called post-industrial economy is sustaining ‘new’ modes of interand intra-organizational functioning (Castells 1996; Harvey 1989; Rifkin 2000), the process of organizational control, and accounting's role in it, becomes a topic of renewed interest. Will accounting continue to be connected to organizational functioning in familiar ways or will accounting control emerge in new and different forms? This chapter explores such issues. In this chapter we argue that organizational control, and accounting's role in it, has become an increasingly digitized and technologically enabled process. New ‘centres of calculation’ (Latour 1987: 216) have arisen within post-industrial organizations which, in turn, are facilitating more disembedded and intensified forms of accounting control. We examine and illustrate this post-industrial phenomenon of organizational control within a call centre context. Data have been drawn from a case study of an Australian call centre operation, which processes in excess of 12 million customer enquiries each year. The remainder of the chapter is structured in the following way. We commence with an overview of accounting and control in industrial organizations. This is followed by an outline of the emerging nature of accounting and control in post-industrial organizations. This is then illustrated in the context of the changing practices of the case organization. We conclude by considering the disciplinary implications of this account. Accounting and .
