The calculation of business, or the business of calculation? Accounting as organizing through everyday communication
Bertrand Fauré, Boris HJM Brummans, Hélène Giroux, James R Taylor
Human Relations · 2010 · Volume 63 · Issue 8
Abstract
This article examines the language of numbers as it is used in talk within a contemporary organization to provide a better understanding of the ways speech acts, performed during the construction of accounts, contribute to the process of organizing. Based on an in-depth case study of the site budgetary control process in a French construction firm, it shows that the business of doing calculations through talk generates respective obligations and, in turn, plays a central role in the constitution of the organization. Hence, this article shows how accounting, in all of its manifestations, produces the organization and does not simply occur within it.
Keywords
accounting, communicative constitution of an organization, conversation, keying, organizing, performativity, Speech Act Theory, text, textual agency
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