Accounting Discourse and Textual Practices of Ruling, a Study of Institutional Transformation and Restructuring in Higher Education

grantor: University of TorontoThis is a study of accounting as a documentary practice of knowledge. It is also a study of organizational change and institutional transformation in postsecondary education. These two themes are combined through an investigation of the use of accounting texts in restructuring in the Ontario college system. The analysis is organized into two main parts. The first part sketches an historical overview of accounting as a text-based form of knowledge that has developed concomitantly with capitalist economic relations. The present-day organization of accounting as a conceptual and textual practice of representation is also examined, with a focus on the kinds of visibility produced in accounting statements and the ways these texts mediate organizational work processes and inter-organizational relations of property and obligation. The second part uses an institutional ethnography approach to investigate the use of accounting as a practice of knowledge in the administration of the Ontario college system in the early 1990s. State policies of privatization and fiscal retrenchment were promoting a competitive market in adult vocational training. Colleges were pulled into this market in pursuit of federal funds and, from the other side, pushed by budget freezes and cuts in provincial funding. College administrators responded to these changes, and tried to participate successfully in market relations, by positioning their colleges to be more "entrepreneurial," "efficient," and "businesslike" in operation and orientation. Accounting played a central role in this restructuring. New practices of managerial accounting produced the observability of organizational work processes in ways that fitted them to the new interpretive frame of "efficiency" and "customer orientation." How they did this is explored through a close focus on one college's introduction of program costing, an accounting exercise that establishes unit costs for each academic program. This examination of the production and use of a new documentary form of knowledge offers a view of restructuring as it occurs through the text-mediated activities of actual people.Ph.D