Management accounting, control and microfinance operation—three papers

This thesis concerns the ideas of management accounting and control, as it examines poverty management, oral accounts and social control perspectives in a Bangladeshi Microfinance Institution (MFI). It traces how poverty management technologies are put in place and traditional oral accounts and social control mechanisms are expropriated for microfinance operation in the village. It ultimately seeks to understand how an alternative form of management accounting and control was made operable in a rural setting. The research involved intensive ethnographic fieldwork with in-depth interviews, direct observations, and documentation reviews. Drawing on the theoretical notions of the ‘society of control’ and ‘ethopolitics’, it illustrates how microfinance technologies are put in place to work especially in the emerging terrain of a control society; whether microfinance toolkits form a set of disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms for the management of poverty; how local networks, social relations etc. are materialised in the making of a particular version of control society; how oral accounts are produced in such settings; how community ethos and values act as important aspects of ethopolitical social control systems; and how social controls are accommodated, reproduced and sustained for management control purposes in microfinance operation. It was the emergence of MFIs that integrated management accounting and control with household and village exchange relations, their social structures, and associated values and beliefs. This analysis makes several contributions to management accounting and control: first, by revealing poverty management technologies that MFIs design, modify and retain to monitor, report and evaluate the lives of poor people; second, to the discussion of accounting presence and absence; third, to the oral and verbal use of accounting; fourth, to the discussion of social control mechanisms; and finally, to the issues of microfinance in accounting. The thesis also has some theoretical contributions: first, it adds to the discussion of accounting in post-panopticon organisations; second, it shows the existence of alternative mechanisms of control while the organisation is in the becoming process; and finally, it employs ethopolitics as a governmental strategy which is unique in the accounting literature