Practices and Responsibility of Accounting: Examining the politics of data codification

The oscillation between action as determined and action as determining has been a prominent \ndebate and one which many theorists have tried to overcome within their work. For example, rather \nthan reducing action merely to an individual agent or member of a collective, or to the effect of the \nstructure or system, action is viewed as performance of the specific collective, in which cognitive \ncapacities of humans could migrate to objects (Gomart & Hennion, 1999). This places an emphasis \non the process of mediation and the way in which object-mediators --rendered as prolongations of \nactions already initiated elsewhere within a network of relations-- do not merely relay and repeat \nactions, but also transform them in different and sometimes surprising ways. Such a view allows for \na focus of that which occurs rather then who acts. It points to organisational events, which are \nneither limited to their origins and determinants, nor to their effects. Assumedly this is the case and \nagency is distributed throughout locally produced networks of relations, how can than accounts of \norganisations be provided which are able to comment on the issue of responsibility/accountability \nwithin specific situations? Moreover, how does one event relate to another and what role do \ninformation technologies have in this? Based on an ethnographic style of investigation of a local \nhealth care providing organisation that has been adapting to national policy changes, it is argued \nthat accounts of its own performance are related to other events (e.g. regrouping of diseases and \ncatchment areas) that rely on codification and classifications which in turn are inscribed in \ninformation technology used for monitoring its performance. The introduction of a new \nclassification system, then, leads to a form of disorganisation, where it is impossible to directly \nrelate previous events to each other or to present situations. This notable absence of a time \ndimension appears to be an organisational strategy that is deployed in order to deal with the flux \nthat occurs along with the perpetual changes at a policy level. Becoming organisation, in this sense, \nis not characterised by a sequence of events that could speak for themselves, but by a momentarily \norganisational existence through the representation of subdivisional events. This, it is argued, has \nproblematic implications for the practices and responsibility of accounting, as the absence of a time \ndimension does not allow for the proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction of events. The \nresulting impossibility of documenting sequences of organisational changes, due to other occurring \nevents within a network, points to the way in which competing truths undermine, support each other \nwithin complex networks of relations and raises the question of the possibility of providing credible \nand principled accounts of an organisation.