Paper short abstract:

Highlighting the divergent concerns provoked when analysts value a project, the paper problematizes the equation of ‘knowing’ and ‘accounting’. Drawing on Deleuze, it proposes to see accountability work as a process of morphogenesis rather than an input-output procedure of production.

Paper long abstract:

With New Managerialism's spread accounting is gradually becoming the preferred way of public organisations to know, reflect, evidence, or refer to their worlds. When studying evidence-making and accountability practices in a public management consultancy in North England, it became apparent that accountability work is driven by, directed at, and provoked in a multiplicity of accountability spaces all at once. From certain angles, 'accountability entities' (numbers, rations, tables, analysts, the futures of a project, etc.) emerge through a concern with accuracy. From others, accountability enacts not accuracy but adherence to standards, methods and rules. Yet from others, it is effectivity, or organisational impact that seems to be at stake. And as these are not necessarily commensurable, the very possibility of equating accounting with knowing becomes problematic.

This paper engages with the disjunction of knowing and account-making by asking how should we imagine these ways of knowing which bring about divergent kinds of objectivities and subjectivities? To address the question head-on, it closely unpacks an episode when analysts value a policy project and 'credible', 'big', or 'working' numbers surfaced and were challenged.

The paper builds on an 18-month ethnographic study and draws on Deleuze's metaphysics to call into question traditional imagining of accounting as an input-output process of knowledge production (discreet things go into devices and out of them). It concludes by suggesting viewing accountability work as a process of morphogenesis, one not reliant on 'producer' or 'products' of knowledge and which can open new venues for accountability to be made from.