Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27

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Management accounting as practice

a,* b,1
Thomas Ahrens , Christopher S. Chapman
a
Accounting Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom
b
Saı̈d Business School, University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP, United Kingdom

Abstract

In this paper we outline a distinctive practice theory approach to considering the role of management accounting in
the constitution of organizations. Building on [Schatzki, T.R. (2002). The site of the social: a philosophical account of the
constitution of social life and change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press] notion of arrays of
activity we emphasise the ways in which organisational members actively reconstitute their management control sys-
tems by drawing on them as a shared resource. By tracing the skilful practices through which social actors in a restau-
rant chain understand and mobilise accounting to contribute in specific ways to what they regard as the objectives of
their organisational units, we develop a notion of situated functionality. Situating the interrelationships between tech-
nical and interpretive accounting processes in the wider field of organisational practices we elaborate the ways in which
management control systems as structures of intentionality both shape and are shaped by shared norms and
understandings.
Ó 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Historical and contemporary studies of account-
ing have shed light on the diverse ways in
which accounting has been and is being implicated
in a wide range of activities and social arrange-
ments. Those studies have furthered our under-
standing of the constitutive powers of accounting
in relation to organisations and society which
has become a popular research topic for interpre-
tive accounting research (Hopwood & Miller,
1994). In the endeavour to shed light on the partic-
ular meanings of (and uses for) accounting in spe-
cific locales, interpretive studies have, in some
form or other, sought to explore the ways in which
[. . .] the social, or the environment, as it
were, passes through accounting. Con-
versely, accounting ramifies, extends and
shapes the social (Burchell, Clubb, & Hop-
wood, 1985, p. 385).

*
Here, the orderly properties of the social
Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 0 24 76572953.
E-mail addresses: thomas.ahrens@wbs.ac.uk (T. Ahrens),
arrangements around accounting have been con-
Chris.Chapman@sbs.ox.ac.uk (C.S. Chapman). ceived as a direct outcome of practical activity,
1
Tel.: +44 0 1865 288908. avoiding analytical distinctions between high-level

0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.aos.2006.09.013
2 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
structures and low-level action. Accounting cannot
be understood simply with reference to its sup-
posed functional properties because it is implicated
in the shaping of its own context.
Debunking the hold that powerful structures
were supposed to have on the functioning of
accounting has a distinguished history. Early inter-
pretive studies of accounting have frequently
sought to correct the simplifications of functional-
ist studies. They have shown that organisational
objectives, which, from a functionalist point of
view, should determine the uses of accounting,
are rarely clear-cut and that they frequently fol-
low, not precede, calculation (Cohen, March, &
Olson, 1972; March, 1987). Accounting and
organisational objectives are interdependent in
the sense that objectives are influenced by the
knowledge of potential accountings (Swieringa &
Weick, 1987). Moreover, objectives may be contin-
uously reformulated in the light of new informa-
tion and revised calculations (Den Hertog, 1978;
Hedberg & Jönsson, 1978; Preston, Cooper, &
Coombs, 1992). Accounting thus lends itself to
multiple political uses (Bariff & Galbraith, 1978;
Markus & Pfeffer, 1983; Wildavsky, 1978).
A key insight was that organisational actors
retain some degree of choice between strategic
objectives and specific solutions (Child, 1972).
They can draw on the multiple conceptualisations
of accounting and its uses that circulate in organ-
isations (Ahrens & Chapman, 2002; Boland &
Pondy, 1983; Chua, 1995; Mouritsen, 1999).
Besides being used for the deliberation of future
alternatives, accounting is a vital resource for
making sense of past decisions and the present to
which they have lead (Ansari & Euske, 1987;
Brunsson, 1990). It is as much implicated in deci-
sion-making as in processes of organisational
learning, bargaining, and rationalisation (Burchell,
Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980).
The cumulative effect of such interpretive studies
of accounting has been to establish the flexibility
and variability of accounting (Dent, 1986) and
the unintended consequences of accounting sys-
tems (Burchell et al., 1980; Den Hertog, 1978;
Hedberg, Nystrom, & Starbuck, 1976).
Whilst early interpretive studies were theoreti-
cally well-founded and supported by field research
and archival study, they also portrayed accounting
often as ‘just political’, ‘unintended’, ‘temporary’,
etc., foregrounding its political, symbolic, and
ritual functions. They left relatively unexplored
the practical commercial and strategic uses of
accounting. Understandably, in seeking to correct
the simplifications of functionalism early interpre-
tive studies have tended to downplay the ways in
which accounting can and does help organisations
through its role in the constitution of particular
functionalities. Organisational members may well
be aware of the limitations of accounting and
reporting practices. Nevertheless they draw on
them, for example, to discharge formal obligations,
communicate with colleagues, pursue informal
objectives, avoid switching costs, etc. Through such
uses, accounting can potentially make significant
contributions to the ways in which organisational
motivations take shape and organisations coordi-
nate intentional action.
The interlacing of political, commercial, and
technical uses of accounting has been illustrated
by Bower’s (1970) study of the resource allocation
process for four specific investment projects in four
business units of a large US chemicals company.
He showed in great detail how different business
environments and strategies, the business units’
and the corporation’s formal organisation and
policies (including their accounting systems), and
individual organisational members’ values, desires,
feelings, and judgements of the strategic, commer-
cial, technical, and political potential of their pro-
jects affect their evolution and eventual acceptance
or rejection.
While the evidence reveals the relative unim-
portance of a particular technique of finan-
cial analysis and limited usefulness of the
[theoretical] financial model, it also indicates
that management can control the investment
process (Bower, 1970, p. 279).
The organisational work of contextualising the
projects in ways that disposed other organisational
members favourably towards them lay at the heart
of preparing a successful investment proposal.
Bower was aware of many of the shortcomings
of accounting that later became an important
theme for the interpretive literature but he was
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
more interested in how organisational members
can shape and pursue organisational objectives
with accounting nevertheless. He ended his book
with a call for a ‘‘conditional theory of organiza-
tion’’ (p. 318) to explain the scope of managers
in influencing structural aspects of organisations
in particular contexts.
In a similar vein, and with the benefit of having
witnessed the beginnings of a contingency theory
of accounting, Hopwood (1989) sought to circum-
scribe the practical character of accounting by
articulating a vision of the study of accounting
practices as finely graded, highly specific contin-
gencies in the minds of organisational members
who seek to put them to use for their specific pri-
orities. In three short case studies he sought to
illustrate
[. . .] a deep interpenetration between the
technical practices of accounting, the mean-
ings and significances that are attributed to
them and the other organisational practices
and processes in which they are embedded’’
(Hopwood, 1989, p. 37).
Mindful of the objectives and concerns of senior
accountants and managers, and the forms that
they were given by existing accounting informa-
tion systems, Hopwood sought to characterise
the implication of accounting in the operational
processes of particular organisations. His case
descriptions delineated a particular kind of fit
between accounting, operations, and strategic pri-
orities. Unlike the fit between generic strategic pos-
tures and general accounting system characteristics
found in the contingency literature (p. 27), Hop-
wood sought to convey the practical understand-
ings played out through organisational members’
uses of their accountings. He emphasised the ways
in which accounting illuminated key aspects of
operations for organisational members, such that
they were enabled to evaluate and intervene.
In contingency theory, analyses of the fit
between context and accounting are supported
through questionnaires that collect aggregate
information about organisations and their subsys-
tems. By contrast, practice theory seeks to delve
into the details of the functioning of subsystems.
Practices are about the specific relationships
3
forged between understandings and traditions of
social groups and their aspirations and pressing
problems.
Accounts of order and agreement that refer
to practice presume not passive actors but
active members, members who reconstitute
the system of shared practices by drawing
upon it as a set of shared resources [. . .]
(Barnes, 2001, pp. 17–18).
Like Barnes’ (2001) notion of practice, Hop-
wood’s (1987, 1989) concept of the social embedd-
edness of accounting had a distinctive normative
dimension. Organisational members develop and
judge the shared understandings of accounting
and organisational process, on which they base
their managerial efforts. Accounting, like Barnes’
(2001) practice, is reconstituted in the act of it
being drawn upon as a resource (c.f., Swidler,
1986). Hopwood’s (1987) advice to study the his-
torical layers of accounting systems to understand
the complex relationships between accounting and
organisational priorities over time acknowledged
the simultaneously functional and normative
aspects of managerial agency. Of the myriad
organisational narratives available, he focused on
those that, through the visibilities accorded them
through accounting, had been deemed organisa-
tionally significant by organisational participants,
mostly at the intersection between organisational
strategy, key processes of organisational competi-
tiveness, and accounting information systems.
The successes of prior studies in exploring the
potential reach and roles of accounting practices
notwithstanding, the emphasis on accounting as
a social and not equally strategic and commercial
technology has left an important gap in our
understanding of the interconnections between
accounting and other organisational practices.
Contemporary discussion of management control
(e.g., Kaplan & Norton, 1996; Simons, 1995) fre-
quently seek to address strategic concerns. They
do not, however, tend to elaborate on the specific
activities through which their exhortations might
be taken up. How exactly, for example, are manag-
ers to make, the Balanced Scorecard the ‘‘corner-
stone of a new strategic management system’’
(Kaplan & Norton, 1996, p. 75) and mould it to
4 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
their own ends? The result is an often unhelpful
dynamic in discussions between academic and
practitioner accounts of such developments.
In this paper we will draw on practice theory in
order to attempt to fill these various gaps in our
understanding of management accounting in prac-
tice. Even though they have often been pursuing
highly specific agendas, practice theorists have
been concerned to reflect on the ways in which
action relates to aspects of context—what Ortner
(1984) called ‘‘the system’’—be it primarily politi-
cal, economic, cultural, or technological. Con-
cerned to correct the relative neglect of action in
social theory they have tended to develop theories
of how action arises from and structures context,
resulting in varying degrees of social order (e.g.,
Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984). Neither does an
objective system determine activity, nor can social
phenomena be explained simply through the
aggregation of individual actions.
Through the analysis of a longitudinal field
study of management control carried out in a UK
restaurant chain, we draw on specific lines of prac-
tice theorising, in particular Schatzki’s (2001, 2002,
2005), in order to bring out the regularities in the
uses of, and arrangements around, accounting as
a direct outcome of normative action. Drawing
on discussions and observations drawn from across
the organisational and functional hierarchy we
elaborate the ways in which specific organisational
members sought to use accounting to achieve, if
not grand strategic missions, at least specific sub-
sets of organisational objectives, what one might
call the situated functionality of accounting.
Contextualising the local
The idea to conceive of social order as a direct
outcome of activity is not new in the accounting
literature and has given rise to various specific
notions of practice. In particular, studies of gov-
ernmentality have developed a complex notion of
the practice of accounting arising from a historical
understanding of the disciplinary powers of sys-
tematic bodies of knowledge. Broadly speaking,
they have sought to delineate the conditions under
which accounting became institutionalised in ways
that produced specific systematic effects on the
constitution and functioning of organisations and
states, and thus define what might historically
qualify as accounting practices (e.g., Hoskin &
Macve, 1986, 1988; Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Miller
& Rose, 1990). In so doing, this literature has
moved from the implication of accounting in
organisational politics and sense-making, which
has been an important concern of many studies
of accounting and organisational process, to the
constitution of organisational process itself.
Accounting has been seen to have permeated the
fabric of organisations and social institutions,
not just as a technology to be used in any which
way, but
[. . .] always intrinsically linked to a particu-
lar strategic or programmatic ambition [. . .]
to increase efficiency, to promote economic
growth, to encourage responsibility, to
improve decision making, to enhance com-
petitiveness (Miller, 2001, p. 394).
Miller’s insistence on accounting’s inbuilt pro-
grammatic ambition in many of his works has
helped to establish in the accounting literature
the significance of what Goodwin (1994) called a
structure of intentionality. Discussing a standard
colour scheme used by archaeologists to classify
earth colour, Goodwin observed that,
of all the possible ways that the earth could
be looked at, the perceptual work of students
using this form is focused on determining the
exact color of a minute sample of dirt. They
engage in active cognitive work, but the
parameters of that work have been estab-
lished by the system that is organizing their
perception. Insofar as the coding scheme
establishes an orientation toward the world,
it constitutes a structure of intentionality
whose proper locus is not an isolated, Carte-
sian mind but a much larger organizational
system, one that is characteristically medi-
ated through mundane bureaucratic docu-
ments such as forms (Goodwin, 1994, p.
609).
More generally, charts, maps, and other
schemes can powerfully structure the cognitive
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
practices of social groups, as can accounting.
Accounting rules and categories bias social percep-
tion (Cooper, 1980), and the insistence on the
structure of intentionality enshrined in accounting
convention can obstruct the search for regulatory
solutions (Young, 1996).
Miller’s work on the programmatic character of
accounting has sought to emphasise the highly spe-
cific ways in which structures of intentionality can,
through ‘‘temporary assemblages’’ of people,
accountings, ideas, buildings, material flows, etc.,
come to be contextualised in particular cases.
Rooted in an analysis of the organisational func-
tions of accounting, the governmentality literature,
more generally, has opened a particular vista on
accounting’s broader social significance beyond
the organisation, for example, through histories
that relate the emergence of accounting to the
spread of novel forms of writing, indexing, and
grading (Hoskin & Macve, 1986) or more general
political efforts at standardising different spheres
of social life (Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Radcliffe,
1998).
Studying in this way the conditions under which
‘‘accounting was made practical’’ (Miller &
O’Leary, 1990) has avoided the cumbersome dis-
tinction between macro structures and micro
action by focusing on particular instances in which
accounting was implicated in the production of
social order. But it has also avoided inquiring into
the detailed practices through which accounting is
mobilised by organisational members. The prac-
tice notion of governmentality has primarily been
concerned with the putative origins of action, that
is, its generic ‘‘strategic or programmatic
ambition’’ (Miller, 2001, p. 394), and not action
itself:
[. . .] new calculative practices alter the capac-
ities of agents, organizations, and the con-
nections between them [. . .] As a technology
of power, management accounting is thus a
mode of action that does not act directly
and immediately on others. Instead, it acts
upon the actions of others, and presupposes
the freedom to act in one way or another.
The agent who is acted upon thus remains
an agent faced with a whole field of possible
5
responses and reactions (Miller, 2001, pp.
379–380).
On the whole, the practice approach of govern-
mentality studies did not foreground the ways in
which accountants and non-accountants alike con-
ceive of and conduct their everyday tasks with ref-
erence to accounting and, in one way or another,
seek to advance their particular plans through
accounting. Practices that would be thus infused
with accounting occasionally only shine through
the disciplinary histories, for example, when Her-
mann Haupt, graduate of West Point and newly
appointed engineer at the Pennsylvania Railroad,
changed freight pricing with the help of novel anal-
yses of fixed and variable costs (Hoskin & Macve,
1988, p. 61). Miller’s (2001) notion of practice, in
particular, has steered him away from addressing
in detail the uses and functionings of accounting
in specific situations. For instance, Miller and
O’Leary’s (1994) study of a new manufacturing
initiative at Caterpillar Inc. conceived of account-
ing practices at the level of designing accounting
policies, mainly for investment decision making,
and building accounting information systems.
The relationship between accounting and organi-
sational processes was discussed only to the extent
to which it ‘‘rendered them operable.’’ How, or
even whether, accounting was mobilised in any
particular organisational activity was not dis-
cussed. Accounting remained a potential. More
generally, all organisational practices were
described as successive designs of policies, systems,
and architectures that ‘‘sought to act upon’’ organ-
isational members who were mere users of systems
and occupants of spaces and whose activities were
never described.
To relegate practical activity with and through
accounting to a secondary class of events whose
‘‘modes’’ are determined by the general historical
conditions of the formation of specific accounting
constellations (Burchell et al., 1985) is a particular
case of top-down history. With the emphasis on
the ‘‘temporary assemblages’’ of systems of
accounting and other controls, agents can be left
with ‘‘the freedom to act in one way or another’’
because that freedom is regarded as inconsequen-
tial, not something on which the academic inquiry
6 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
into the functioning of accounting should concen-
trate. Interactions between discourses and prac-
tices are thus stylised as orchestrations whose
potential is determined by successive accounting
systems designs. A more detailed concern with
the activities of agents might shed more light on
the reasons why, and the processes through
which—from among many possible programmes,
discourses, policies, etc.—some end up in tempo-
rary assemblages with particular accountings.
The assembly of accounting designs and sys-
tems has been of keen interest to another large
group of management accounting studies drawing
on actor network theory (ANT) and, particularly,
the work of Latour and his collaborators. Not so
much a theory as a post-humanist ontology to
overcome puzzles of social theory—such as the
duality of agency and structure, for example—
ANT sought to replace notions of social struc-
tures, entities, levels, etc. with the concept of
heterogeneous networks of humans and non-
humans2 (Latour, 1987, 1996; Law & Hassard,
1999). The networks of ANT are not the structures
of traditional sociology. They are not to be con-
fused with the social networks in which humans
liaise and ‘‘network’’ (Latour, 1996, p. 373), nor
do they exhibit the distance-denying instanta-
neousness of the world wide web that gives imme-
diate access to discrete pieces of information
(Latour, 1999, p. 15).
ANT networks come into existence through the
circulation or travel of actants, ‘‘something that
acts or to which activity is granted by others’’
(Latour, 1996, p. 373). These heterogeneous net-
works deform or transform the travellers in the
process. Actants make up networks, but through
processes of transformation the networks also give
actants ‘‘actantiality,’’ i.e., ‘‘[. . .] provide actants
with actions, with their subjectivity, with their
intentionality, with their morality’’ (Latour,
1999, p. 18).
Herein lies an important point of contact
between ANT and governmentality research in
accounting. Governmentality’s built-in program-
2
Computer system architecture (Dechow & Mouritsen, 2005)
or ABC costing systems (Briers & Chua, 2001), for example.
matic ambitions of accounting, and the freedom
of human actors to draw on them, can be traced
as the fabrication of accounting into an actant,
made up of humans, accounting rules, reports,
computers, etc., ultimately lending accounting
actantiality. For ANT, only those people, things,
and networks are worthy of study that leave an
imprint, that possess actor-like qualities.
ANT emerged out of highly specific intellectual
concerns, however. Latour appears to have pri-
marily been concerned not with action as such
but the delineation of the networks that would
allow him to trace action.
It is a method to describe the deployment of
associations like semiotics; it is a method to
describe the generative path of any narra-
tion. [. . .] In itself ANT is not a theory of
action, no more than cartography is a theory
of the shape of coast lines [. . .] (Latour, 1996,
p. 373–4, italics in original).
A stream of studies of budgeting in various
national health systems have drawn on ANT as a
means to explore exactly such generative paths.
Preston et al. (1992) and Bloomfield et al. (1992)
for example studied the introduction and emer-
gence of responsibility accounting in the UK hos-
pital sector. Their choice of research settings
allowed them a particular advantage in following
Latour’s exhortation ‘‘to arrive before the technol-
ogy is fixed, known and unproblematic’’ (Preston
et al., 1992, p. 564). Likewise Chua (1995) empha-
sised the potential contributions of a study of ‘‘the
making up of ‘new’ accounting numbers’’ (p. 115)
in her study of the fabrication of a hospital case-
mix costing and accounting. As with earlier studies
such as Pinch, Mulkay, and Ashmore (1989) and
Preston et al. (1992) her study emphasised the sig-
nificance of processes of enrolment and rhetoric
(see also Mouritsen, 1999).
Latourian analyses have highlighted the chang-
ing and fragile nature of management accounting
systems, but not in the same manner as early
studies of the political and symbolic roles of
accounting that emphasised the variability and
unintended consequences of accounting. The
notion of unintended consequences presumes that
accounting systems also possess intended conse-
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
quences, which in turn allows the study of ‘loose
coupling’ between formal objectives and everyday
action (Berry et al., 1985; Ezzamel & Bourn,
1990). By contrast, ANT was a project meant to
redress the privileging of formal objectives. For-
mal objectives, too, were only a network effect, a
fabrication. They were not believed to have power-
ful implications independent of the details of their
fabrication because ANT does not a priori privi-
lege any network locations.
Law attributed this to a fear of the ‘‘perils of
managerialism’’ (Law, 1991, p. 13) or hero sociol-
ogy. ANT’s ‘‘principle of symmetry’’ (Latour,
1996) seeks to treat the powerful—managers and
accounting system designers, for example—as net-
work members and effects, just like anyone (and
anything) else, so as to trace precisely the origins
and makeup of their fallible powers. We agree
that powerful organisational members inhabit
the same field of practices. Their preferences are
shaped by this field. They are not ‘outside the
network’.
A challenge for ANT in relation to the study of
management control (at least in commercial
organisations) then is that in a management con-
text those who are designing, reading, and inter-
preting management control systems are in fact a
priori privileged. For example, Paolo Quattrone
and Hopper (2005) reported on a Japanese head
office that insisted on maintaining their preferred
accounting configuration when introducing an
ERP system, despite the ERP system’s technolo-
gical imperatives for change. Management may
not win all their games all the time, but they are
nonetheless more central to bigger and more
resourceful networks. Also, their networks and
powers possess special qualities.
Though they are quantitatively different,
they are not only quantitatively different, at
least some of the time. Which means, if we
concentrate [. . .] on this alone, we are liable
to miss out on some of the ways in which
quantity is (reversibly) transmuted into qual-
ity. Or, to put it differently, we will miss out
on the ways in which the great distributions
are laid down and sustained (Law, 1991, p.
14, italics in original).
7
In principle, ANT might discuss the ‘‘great dis-
tributions’’, Law’s shorthand for social structures,
through much comparative tracing of networks
between organisational and extra-organisational,
human and non-human allies. In practice, account-
ing researchers have sometimes restrained the
deconstructive impulse of ANT. Mouritsen
(1999) researched the network of the relationships
between customers, subcontractors, workers, and
products through BusinessPrint’s existing manage-
ment hierarchy, following the leads of the different
managers’ priorities and problems (not those of the
workers, machines, or products), unearthing how
their different capabilities, interests, and objectives
gave rise to the conflicting notions of management
control and specifically their different concepts of
flexibility. Even though the attempts of the CEO
of BusinessPrint of turning overheads into direct
costs through outsourcing ‘‘[. . .] quickly spiralled
away from [an immediate concern with] indirect
costs into areas such as marketing, production,
new technology, productivity, and political risk’’
(Mouritsen, 1999, p. 47), this did not, as Law
(1991) suspected, invalidate his power or thwart
his subsequent efforts to assume greater control.
Even though management is not omnipotent, the
distributions of power tend to be sufficiently
skewed to begin management control research
with management strategies and hierarchies, and
then see their effects ripple through diverse organ-
isational and extra-organisational processes and
artefacts all the way back to the strategists and
their ongoing attempts at control.
ANT has made an important contribution to
the theorising of practice in management account-
ing. It has shown the significance of actors,
action, and inscriptions in the fabrication of
social order. Its approach to the study of manage-
ment control has been distinctively deconstruc-
tive, however, in the sense that the intellectual
effort has been devoted to untangling processes
of ‘inscription’ and ‘fabrication’—what is fabri-
cated, the fabrications themselves, is treated as
something of a side effect, a moment of temporary
stability that is of little interest in itself. In this we
see another parallel with governmentality research
in accounting, which tends to be more interested
in the programmatic potential of accounting than
8 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
the temporary assemblages of which it actually
becomes part.
In the more recent management control litera-
ture we see studies inspired by ANT rather than
straightforward applications of it. For example,
Briers and Chua (2001) developed important con-
tributions to our understanding of ABC through
an intellectual bricolage. They enriched the flat
ontology of ANT, as set out by Latour, with the
concept of the boundary object (Star & Greise-
mer, 1989). They advanced our insights into
ABC, yet their approach was strictly antithetical
to Latour’s notion of ANT. The concept of the
boundary object allowed traction on notions of
intent and interaction in their study. Analysed as
a ‘‘visionary boundary object’’ that brings
together actors, more than an actant in its own
right, the ABC system allowed for the rendering
of individual actors’ motivations by providing a
context through which these can be seen to inter-
act and affect the shape of the emerging net-
works. Dechow and Mouritsen (2005) developed
this line of reasoning on boundary objects
through their discussion of enterprise resource
planning systems (ERP) as providing ‘‘trading
zones’’ in which organisational actors negotiate
the ways in which a new ERP relates to existing
reporting practices.
The situated functionality of management
accounting practice
The notions of practice inherent in governmen-
tality and ANT studies have provided important
alternatives to conceptualising the functioning of
accounting with reference to social structures, enti-
ties, levels, etc. We share with governmentality stud-
ies an interest in the conditions that render
accounting operable in specific modes—developing
its potential as a structure of intentionality. Equally
concerned with the significance of action, however,
we share with ANT an interest in the heterogeneous
networks of humans and non-humans through
which accounting is fabricated as an actant. In our
discussion of management control as practice we
would like to give greater prominence to the con-
struction and functioning of managerial intent
and some of the ways in which they relate to the sit-
uated functionality of accounting. To those ends,
we adopt Schatzki’s (2002) definition of practices
and their role in social order. For him,
[. . .] the site of the social is composed of nex-
uses of practices and material arrangements.
This means that social life inherently tran-
spires as part of such nexuses. By practices,
I mean organized human activities. Exam-
ples are political practices, cooking prac-
tices, educational practices, management
practices, shop floor practices, and design
practices. Any practice is an organized,
open-ended spatial-temporal manifold of
actions (Schatzki, 2005, p. 471).
People live meaningful lives by engaging in prac-
tices, which are connected with material arrange-
ments. The recognition of material arrangements
in social research is familiar from ANT, but how
do we know to which practices certain actions
belong?
The set of actions that composes a practice is
organized by three phenomena: understand-
ings of how to do things, rules, and teleoaf-
fective structure. By rules I mean explicit
formulations that prescribe, require, or
instruct that such and such be done, said,
or the case; a teleoaffective structure is an
array of ends, projects, uses (of things), and
even emotions that are acceptable or pre-
scribed for participants in the practice
(Schatzki, 2005, pp. 471–472).
Understandings, rules, and the engagements of
teleoaffective structure organise chains of
action—in Schatzki’s phrase, ‘‘arrays of activity’’
(Schatzki, 2001, p. 2)—which make up practices.
Practices are constituted in activity and inherently
normative. We are reminded of the programmatic
nature of Miller’s (2001) accountings. However,
our practice perspective emphasises the role of
action in the constitution of such programmes.
In this we share the concerns of ANT, but suggest
that Schatzki’s (2002) site ontology offers advanta-
ges in the study of management control practice
because it is more accepting of structures of
intentionality.
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
Management control as practice is understood
as a bundle of practices and material arrangements.
Situated in offices and workshops, using configura-
tions of machines and computers, organisational
members negotiate strategies, budgets, and perfor-
mance targets, they discuss ways of realising them,
alert others to contingencies, give orders, follow,
dispute, or circumvent instructions, generate
reports and make comparisons, give and receive
advice, find excuses, take corrective action, etc.
Those activities occur in chains of actions and
within management control practices. They ‘‘[. . .]
also transpire[] as part of these practices: the
actions involved help compose the practice’’
(Schatzki, 2005, p. 472, emphasis in original). Also,
the ends that organisational members pursue in
performing these actions, are contained in the tele-
oaffective structure of management control prac-
tices (such as the desire for commercial success,
for example). Acting in those ways is to be carrying
on the practice. In this way practice theory offers a
way of understanding volition conditioned by sys-
tems, but as played out in the moment of action.
This intertwining of the explicit rules, proce-
dures, standards, etc. set out in management con-
trol systems, with shared normative judgements
as to the appropriateness of particular instances
of action, holds the promise of locating the much
commented upon fluidity and variety of everyday
accounting activities (e.g., Burchell et al., 1980;
Dent, 1986; Den Hertog, 1978; Hedberg et al.,
1976) in a context of shared engagements. The nat-
ure of their sharedness lies not in the similarity of
activities but in the ways in which actors under-
stand relations between ‘‘ends, projects, uses (of
things), and even emotions’’ (Schatzki, 2005, pp.
471–472). Management control is thus skilful prac-
tical activity that represents an aspect of social
order because of and notwithstanding its fluidity.
A practice understanding of management control
actively looks for such fluidity, recognising that
actors’ accounts of their own activities (and repre-
sentations of them) are categorically unlike the
complex cognitive processes through which they
go about accomplishing them.
Thus when our informants honestly say ‘this
is why we do such things’, or ‘this is what this
9
means’, or ‘this is how we do such things’,
instead of being pleased we should be suspi-
cious and ask what kind of peculiar knowl-
edge is this which can take such an explicit,
linguistic form? Indeed, we should treat all
explicit knowledge as problematic, as a type
of knowledge probably remote from that
employed in practical activities under normal
circumstances (Bloch, 1991, pp. 193–194).
Compared to the actor’s unspoken mastery of
certain situations, explicit decision rules seem
unwieldy and, very often, unrealistic. At the indi-
vidual level, expert actors tend not to articulate
explicit decision rules and ‘apply’ them to situa-
tions like a novice would (Dreyfus & Dreyfus,
1988). Novice management accountants tend to
lack the ability to think through organisational sit-
uations with the conceptual schemes that they
studied during their training (Ahrens & Chapman,
2000), for example. The usefulness of those
schemes for practice only becomes apparent
through experience. The ‘‘primacy of practice’’
(Archer, 2000) suggests an analysis of cognition
hinging on what we can do, rather than on the
application of general rules that seek to describe
(or constrain) action.
[. . .] order per se cannot be identified with
regularity qua repetition of the same. Recall
Wittgenstein’s example: a variety of different
activities count as games, and in this sense
compose an order, even though what in the
world corresponds to the state of order is
not the uniform repetition of specific fea-
tures, but a tangle of samenesses and similar-
ities among the activities involved.
Observations such as this suggest that there
is more both to the ordering of things and
to cognition (including scientific cognition)
than regularities and their apprehension
(Schatzki, 2001 italics in original).
The consequences of such analysis calls into
question an analysis of management control sys-
tems as a means to transplant particular models
of conceptual analysis from powerful centres to
controlled peripheries (Latour, 1987). A num-
ber of laboratory experiments in the accounting
10 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
literature have worked with the situated nature of
the cognitive processes associated with manage-
ment accounting and control tasks (e.g., Vera-
Muñoz, 1998; Vera-Muñoz, Kinney, & Bonner,
2001). In her stylised business resource allocation
context, Vera-Muñoz (1998) showed that particu-
lar norms of presentation and analysis of subjects
with more extensive accounting training came to
the fore, inhibiting the application of opportunity
cost principles. Those same individuals, however,
did apply opportunity cost principles in a stylised
domestic setting with the same calculative task
characteristics. These studies thus gave support
to those who drew on notions of cognition in prac-
tice to question the idea of transferable skills per se
(e.g., Lave, 1988).
Key to understanding cognition in practice is
that it is distributed over the environment of the
actors and that elements of it take place outside
their heads, through the meaningful interaction
between, for example, charts, images, gestures,
or—in relation to this paper—management con-
trol systems.
Through such mapping, elements of the
chart become dynamic, transportable struc-
tures. In comparison to the static form of
the chart (when the chart is considered to
be a self standing, isolated form), the com-
pound multimodal structure is less perma-
nent, but a more powerful, dynamic
process. Because this process is largely
instantiated in the environment, we can see
it and examine its unfolding through time
in detail (Alac & Hutchins, 2004, p. 650,
emphasis in original).
The act of explaining brain functions in this
observation was not just relying on an assortment
of material props that happened to lie around
when the expert explained the brain mapping.
The neuroscience chart, for example, was a prod-
uct of, and contributed to, the wider social context
of teaching practices in the laboratory in which it
was observed. What looked like the achievements
of an individual scientist was really an outcome
of the interplay between cognition and specific
practice arrangements bundles. The functionality
of certain techniques for certain actions could only
be established with a view to the practices that
were constituted by those actions. For the field-
work researcher it is important to recognise indi-
vidual actions as part of larger arrays of activity
(i.e. practices) and to engage in an ongoing refine-
ment of the descriptions of certain practices
through ongoing reflection on those actions.
To summarise, practice arrangements bundles
can be related to each other, to other material
arrangements, and to other practices. As a totality,
the nexus of interdependent practices can be called
the ‘field of practices’. Thus,
the social is a field of embodied, materially
interwoven practices centrally organized
around shared practical understandings.
This conception contrasts with accounts that
privilege individuals, (inter)actions, lan-
guage, signifying systems, the life world,
institutions/roles, structures, or systems in
defining the social. These phenomena, say
practice theorists, can only be analyzed via
the field of practices. Actions, for instance,
are embedded in practices, just as individuals
are constituted in them. Language, more-
over, is a type of activity (discursive) and
hence a practice phenomenon, whereas insti-
tutions and structures are effects of them
(Schatzki, 2001, p. 3).
Practice theory does not need higher-level
aggregations above practices and practice arrange-
ments bundles. A management control system is a
bundle understood as management control prac-
tices plus material and technical arrangements. It
sees institutions and structures as effects of action
as much as the other way around, yet unlike
ANT, practice theory assumes that actions are
organised around practical understandings, rules,
and engagements that define and connect agents
qua practitioners.
From the perspective of this practice theory
approach, the perceived usefulness of manage-
ment control practices and systems is of para-
mount importance for researching management
control and management accounting more
generally. In this paper we set out to understand
the constitution and implications of normative
aspects of practice as they are observable both
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
in activities and through relatively enduring
aspects of organisation, such as distributions of
power, played out through management control
systems. As such our practice approach is sugges-
tive of new insights into the mutual constitution
of individual and organisational intent through
its theorisation of individuals’ skilful activity as
enactments of situated functionality. We seek to
demonstrate this through a detailed analysis of
various aspects of management control practice
that we observed during a longitudinal field study
of a UK restaurant chain.
Field study
Restaurant Division was one of the largest full-
service chain restaurants in the UK. All restau-
rants were wholly owned by the company and
were run by salaried managers. Restaurant Divi-
sion had enjoyed substantial returns on sales and
sales growth over a period of years. This growth
had been attained partly through acquisition of
smaller chains but mainly through addition of
new units. More than 200 restaurants were organ-
ised as profit centres which reported into areas
Group board
of directors
Restaurant Division
managing director
Operations Marketing
director director
Operations
regional managers
Commercial
Area managers
Based away from head office
Restaurant
managers
Fig. 1. Restaurant division organisation chart.
11
and then regions of operational management.
Restaurant Division was wholly owned by and
reported to a leisure group quoted on the London
Stock Exchange, but it was also registered as a
company with limited liability and had its own
board of directors (Fig. 1).
Our fieldwork over a period of a little over two
years involved interviews, examination of archival
records, and direct observation of meetings and
workshops. Table 1 details what might be thought
of as formal data collection. Our efforts to delin-
eate the organisation’s structures of intentionality
began with questions aimed at eliciting a basic role
description from interviewees (from waiters to the
managing director). We then asked questions to
find out which (if any) performance information
interviewees drew on and or worked around in
their day-to-day activity.
Interviews lasted about seventy minutes on
average. Most of them took place with both
researchers present, were tape-recorded and subse-
quently transcribed. Where this was not possible
notes were taken during the interview, and more
detailed notes were written up as soon afterwards
as possible. Over the course of the study we inter-
viewed the entire divisional board and executive
Central financial
services
Finance & Human resources
commercial director
director
Finance MIS
12 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
Table 1
Information on formal fieldwork activity
Functional breakdown of interviews carried out
Central financial services
Head office – Commercial
Head office – Finance
Head office – HR
Head office – Managing Director
Head office – Marketing
Head office – MIS
Head office – Operations
Area managers
Restaurant managers
Observations and attendance at meetings
Area business development meetings
Cross functional meeting to discuss
the food margin
Eating of ‘control’ 3 course meals by
both researchers
Area manager-Restaurant manager performance
reviews (held at individual restaurants)
Observation of kitchen operation
Residential control workshops
Various finance meetings
committee,3 other head office managers and staff
specialists from different functions. In the opera-
tions hierarchy we interviewed regional and area
managers, and restaurant managers.
We reviewed internal planning, control and
financial documents, materials used in internal
training, computer data entry and reporting
screens, etc. These materials were often presented
and discussed during interviews, giving interviewees
opportunities for talking us through their work.
We carried out observations at head office and
in restaurants, as well as several residential train-
ing sessions. We made visits to 15 restaurants,
sometimes more than once, where we either
observed performance reviews between restaurant
managers and their area manager or interviewed
restaurant managers and had shorter meetings
with various assistant managers, chefs, and wait-
ing staff. We also took the opportunity to observe
3
Comprising all the managers who reported directly to
members of the board of directors.
restaurants (including kitchens) during opening
hours. On two occasions we ordered the same
three-course meals in order to assess the standar-
1 dised nature of portions and presentation.
6
11
Informally, our presence at coffee breaks and
4 meals during and after our formal observations
1 and interviews meant that we could listen to par-
5 ticipants’ observations of, and reactions to, the
2 meetings themselves. On such occasions we also
4
2
learned about a rich stream of organizational gos-
9 sip, jokes, and stories, which we used to test our
developing understanding of the role of manage-
45
ment control systems in Restaurant Division.
Our various modes of analysis were overlapping
2
and iterative (Ahrens & Dent, 1998). Interview
1
transcripts and field notes were organized chrono-
2 logically, and the common issues in the accounts
were analysed to understand areas of agreement
6 and disagreement between organizational actors
and groups. Archival records were used to elabo-
2
2 rate and confirm issues that arose in interviews
4 and observations. We dissected and reorganized
the original transcripts around emerging issues of
19
significance to our understanding of management
control systems. Findings that did not appear to
fit emerging patterns identified in this process were
marked for subsequent discussion as the research
continued.
In the following section we present field mate-
rial that illustrates management control practices
in a way that brings out the fluidity and the direct-
edness of purposeful interconnected social activi-
ties in a large and complex organisation. Heedful
of Bloch’s (1991) warning against linear explana-
tions of practice, we have worked to intersperse
our interview excerpts with information about
complementary organisational practices gathered
from observation, other interviewees, and docu-
ments. As such the interview excerpts do not stand
alone as descriptions of practice but are intended
as part of a more encompassing ensemble—within
the inevitable constraints of textual representation.
Menu design as management control practice
Since the foundation of Restaurant Division,
the concept of branded eating out had lain at the
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
heart of its strategy. Head office staff designed a
food offering and a restaurant ambience for a
target clientele, sourced and distributed the dish
ingredients, and controlled restaurant perfor-
mance. Each restaurant sourced its food through
the central supply chain. Based on their weekly
sales forecasts, the restaurant managers ordered
raw materials electronically and the group’s fleet
of chilled and frozen food trucks delivered them
directly from the division’s central warehouse. In
the restaurants, the electronic cash registers
recorded the sales volume of each dish. Weekly
restaurant reports showed which restaurants had
kept within the standards for raw material con-
sumption given the actual dishes sold during that
week. The resulting gross profit margin on food4
was calculated both in cash and percentage terms.
At the time of the research, profit expectations
were 20% of divisional turnover, and, like the
group’s other restaurant businesses, Restaurant
Division was expected to achieve about 67% food
margin. The centrally designed menu, which spec-
ified dishes, prices, costs, and sales mix for all of
Restaurant Division’s outlets, was a key functional
element to realising its commercial objectives. As
the number of dishes on the menu grew over the
years, increasing analytical effort went into design-
ing a menu that could be expected to achieve finan-
cial results in ways that fit with the existing
customer base, brand proposition, personnel, and
technologies, but also supported planned develop-
ment of these.
Menu design was the responsibility of the mar-
keting planning manager. He worked to produce a
commercial proposition that would satisfy Restau-
rant Division’s diverse strategic, financial, and
functional objectives. Starting with a new menu’s
planned financial performance he developed fore-
casts of the consumption of different groups of
menu items.
From our perspective it’s obviously impor-
tant that every menu that we put out
achieves a certain margin, at the moment
4 5
Gross profit margin on food was calculated in terms of
contribution (i.e. revenue minus food costs). Hereafter, we refer
to it simply as food margin.
13
that’s about 67, 67.3% [. . .] looking at the
menu as a whole. Clearly, within that menu
you have got some items that are low margin
and some items that are higher margin [. . .]
our food development team in marketing
along with [the commercial manager] and
his team will decide which products will get
onto the menu. We balance a certain element
of new products with a mix of, like the old
favourites. And what we’ll do, we split that
into starters, main courses, younger guests,
sort of children between the ages of 7 and
14, [. . .] the under-fives, side orders, which
we call extras, and desserts [. . .] My role in
all of this is to estimate how many people,
what percentage of people will have which
dish, and we call that sales mix [. . .] this is
where [starter] penetration comes in.5 [He
points at a large spreadsheet.] This is the
total number of people coming into [Restau-
rant Division], I am predicting that 61.8% of
all people who come into [Restaurant Divi-
sion] will have a starter [. . .] or, 11.9% will
have a soup. That’s partly because it’s the
cheapest dish on the menu [. . .] It’s also very
seasonal, like soup goes up in winter and
down in the summer, so there’s that sort of
factor to consider as well. So, I predict each
individual dish. So, we have a target in terms
of overall penetration, obviously main
course and younger guests is going to be
100%, we assume that everyone who comes
into [Restaurant Division] will have a main
course. And then about 61% will have a star-
ter, somewhere in the region of 17% will have
a side order, and about 62% will have a des-
sert. Marketing planning manager
Achieving the target food margin of the menu
as whole, given the marketing objectives, required
considerable analysis of the financial profile of the
individual dishes. Calculative rules and routines
Much emphasis was placed on starter penetration because
starters had greater percentage food margins than main courses
and they were an important way of increasing spend per head.
14 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
quickly became bound up with collective norma-
tive assessments of customers perceptions of value
for money.
[. . .] if you’re selling a main course for £15
then looking to make 75% margin on that
might be a little bit greedy whereas if you’re
selling something for £6 maybe you should
be looking to make 75% margin. Commercial
manager
[. . .] now, another thing is price points, mak-
ing sure we’ve got a range of products within
£6–7, making sure that we are not shifting
prices up too far. We are concerned with
value for money, we don’t want to push
prices too high. Marketing planning manager
The calculation of an overall target margin for a
menu does demonstrate the combinability (Rob-
son, 1992) of diverse dish characteristics as inscrip-
tions of revenue and cost. However, in practice,
the functionality of such inscriptions for the
practice of menu design did not lie primarily in
being Latourian ‘‘immutable mobiles’’ through
which senior managers exercised control at a dis-
tance. Evaluations of price, value for money,
branding, logistical and operational appropri-
ateness were subject to ongoing debate and con-
tinually reworked through an ongoing array of
activities. The financial parameters of individual
dish designs inscribed in the head office spread-
sheet were thus results of discussions and negotia-
tions through which the marketing planning
manager sought to co-ordinate the financial per-
formance of the overall menu. This involved an
array of activity stretching over multiple partici-
pants within Restaurant Division, its suppliers,
and customers over successive menu periods.
So [the commercial analyst], having decided
we want a steak and kidney pie, and that it
should be something that we would want to
sell for £8.99, and therefore this is the sort
of cost we would be looking for, [. . .] would
then brief [the buyer] on that, and she would
go off and brief suppliers [. . .] Commercial
manager
[. . .] the items that tend to be higher margin
are the ones that have been on the menu
for some considerable time, therefore have
achieved economies of scale through our
suppliers because they got better at making
them. And also we buy in bulk, so get a rea-
sonable discount. Whereas with new prod-
ucts we try them first in certain areas,
therefore buying a lot less quantity. Market-
ing planning manager
The work of co-ordinating various dish-related
activities around the menu design process was
complicated by the fact that each dish could only
contribute to profitability as part of the overall
menu. Was a dish underperforming because it
was expensive or unappealing, or because there
were there too many similar dishes on the menu?
Were dishes set against other dishes that offered
a much better value proposition? Could the price
(and margin) of a dish be reduced such that its
increased volume increased organisational profits
without poaching custom from other high margin
dishes? Could those volume increases be translated
into bulk buying discounts which would partly off-
set the margin losses?
Through the activities that were concerned with
answering such questions, distinctive functional
understandings were brought to bear on the organ-
isational objectives of profitability and brand man-
agement. The shaded boxes that highlighted certain
dishes on the menu were an illustrative example.
Restaurant Division managers had found out that
putting a shaded box under a menu item increased
its sales. From the point of view of the finance man-
agers it would have made sense to highlight the
high-margin items. But that did not happen. The
marketing managers had argued that doing so
would increase the sale of dishes that most custom-
ers would not regard as good value for money. On
average they would leave the restaurant feeling that
they were overcharged and would not return.
Therefore, the boxes actually highlighted the best-
selling items. The rationale was that the boxes
would help undecided customers choose what most
people liked, thereby, on average, contributing to
satisfying those customers.
Menu design as management control practice
meant ensuring that besides yielding good finan-
cial performance of the dishes as a group, new
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
menus reflected, but also developed further, the
tastes of Restaurant Division’s customers. During
our research an important menu design objective
was, for example, to begin to ‘‘Italianise’’ a still
overwhelmingly traditional British menu. This
involved
[. . .] deciding, you know, whether we’ve got
too many chickens [chicken dishes], or, you
know, need another vegetarian. Commercial
manager
[The commercial analyst] would work with
[suppliers] to come up with a product that
looked like the sort of thing we wanted.
[Our buyer] is a food-eater, white-coat per-
son and understands all these technical
things like, you know, you put some paprika
on top of it and it’ll brown in the oven better.
Commercial manager
Central to the practice of menu design and
management were an ongoing refinement of
understanding customer expectations as much as
an active management of those expectations
(Ahrens & Chapman, 2005).
Designing a new menu thus brought together a
multitude of perspectives and possibilities. In fol-
lowing the activities involved we see how Restau-
rant Division’s strategic agenda was enacted
in situation-specific ways. In the process of menu
design abstract strategic notions such as ‘‘We must
Italianise our menu’’ took on concrete form
through the attempt to introduce specific dishes
that might contribute to achieving this end.
Whichever came first, a dish suggested by suppli-
ers, or a calculative spreadsheet entry that trig-
gered a call to suppliers to meet a new found
need, the dish and its calculative presence in the
spreadsheet became mutually constitutive during
the menu design process.
As a factor in the financial calculus of the target
margin a new dish emerged from arrays of dish
design, market research, and budgeting activities.
Those chains of action were skilfully organised
through arrays of understandings, rules, and
engagements, constituting the practice of manage-
ment control. In turn, the design of the man-
agement control systems—that is, management
control practices plus material and technical
15
arrangements, such as the electronic dish data-
base—sought to arrange the understandings, rules,
and engagements that organised the organisational
members’ actions. Management control func-
tioned as structures of intentionality, not coer-
cively, but by enabling (Ahrens & Chapman,
2004) the managers in Restaurant Division to
think through the strategic potential of past and
potential actions.
Management control practices in restaurants
Management control activity in the restaurants
focussed on the weekly business development
meetings between restaurant managers and their
area managers. These provided a regular opportu-
nity to discuss a standard commercial agenda,
including financial information, kitchen, bar, and
restaurant operation, personnel issues, customer
satisfaction and ratings, local competitor activity,
etc. Most restaurant and area managers whom
we met, regarded going through the standard com-
mercial agenda as a helpful rule for the business
development meetings that helped them in their
objective of meeting the restaurants’ budgets. It
was understood that the role of the area manager
in business development meetings was ambivalent,
frequently moving between coach, mentor, and
enforcer in just one meeting.
The following are excerpts from a business
development meeting that took place in restaurant
#1 between the area manager and the couple who
managed it, Janet and Andrew.
Area Manager: What happened to your food
margin? [Regional manager] said, this is
rubbish.
Janet: We had a problem with charcoaled
[burnt] steaks. . .
AM: Did you log that?
Janet: I’ve got a restaurant log [for recording
the loss of high value food items like steak].
[. . .]
AM: When was the last time you went through
the specs [dish size and ingredients specifica-
tions] with the kitchen team. [. . .] They’re
over-portioning somewhere.
16 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
Andrew: I’m wondering what it is. . .
AM: . . . The waitresses know that big desserts
mean big tips. A specs check with kitchen staff
is always good. Lots of opportunities for sav-
ings. You made some good savings in the lower
parts of the P & L. You need to keep that going.
[. . .] Use the Gold Scheme [divisional service
quality scheme] to set targets and link it in.
And in August set new targets [. . .] We don’t
need new customers, we need to mug the ones
we’ve got. Sell more desserts, wine. . .
Janet: Maybe get a drinks waiter who goes
around. . .
[. . .]
AM: Profit conversion was brilliant last week.
[X]% last week.
Janet: What about the price banding for drinks
from September?
AM: [Pub Division] have gone up 4 pence per
pint, but nothing is set in stone on pricing.
[. . .] We don’t need to be cheaper, no point,
it’s not driving sales.
In this conversation the participants identified
chains of activities, such as advising, signalling con-
cern, demonstrating willingness to improve, priori-
tising information, motivating, framing local issue
in the strategic context, etc., all geared towards
enabling Janet and Andrew to meet, or possibly
exceed, their restaurant budget. Diverse pieces of
information on the food margin, the profit and loss
account, human resource management practices,
and pricing were mobilised in order to support rec-
ommendations for improving restaurant manage-
ment. Whether or not they were mobilised
depended on their perceived functionality for
improvements. Discussions of financial results
and their causes iterated rapidly with proposals
for concrete activity. Through such interactions
organizational members constituted the practice
of management control as skilful practical activity.
Area manager: There is healthy sales growth.
Janet: The flyers are down in the bed and break-
fast down the road.
AM: You done that? How do you measure it?
Janet: I put a stamp on the back. We also gave
privilege cards to big companies.
AM: It is difficult to get out of those later. It is
better to have vouchers, something personalised.
Andrew: We could do that.
AM: It is just something that worked well for
[other restaurant].
[. . .]
AM: The school thing6 worked well. What do
you have to follow it up?
Janet: School visit? Halloween party? Bonfire?
[. . .]
AM: Anything else on sales?
Janet: The Summer-Funday-Sunday! I just need
to order a Caribbean kit please. We’re planning
a low-key, family-type disco.
AM: You should set some financial targets for
that. Sales. . .
Janet: Yes.
Andrew: And we do cocktails and stuff. . .
AM: Yeah, I get the flavour.
Andrew: And prizes to give away. . .
[. . .]
Janet and her area manager wanted other res-
taurant staff to understand the ways in which indi-
vidual local activity might be orchestrated in line
with Restaurant Division’s service quality
objectives.
AM: The service quality report is good. No
comparison to what we had in January [. . .]
Give your staff a bit of a lift, don’t wait for
the official [announcement from head office].
Janet: It’s been a good piece of work in hard
times.
AM: Have you done something like key tasks
for Linda [support manager]? Give her a train-
ing plan. Better still
Janet: [interrupts] Get her to do it.
They agreed that Linda should develop an
induction programme for herself.
AM: From her point of view, what’s the
benefit?
Janet: She can tick things off.
AM: What’s the danger?
Janet: She’s not learning it really.
6
Local school children had decorated an artificial tree in the
restaurant with butterflies that they had made in class.
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
This discussion gave insight into the practical
effects of Restaurant Division’s management con-
trol systems as structures of intentionality and
the skills of the restaurant and area managers at
mobilising them for their diverse ends. As with
the menu design process, the management control
systems provided the motivation, timing, and the
fundamental parameters of this conversation.
Conceived of as an array of activity that was dis-
tributed over all of the division’s restaurants, area
and restaurant managers, performance reports,
and movements of physical inventory through
the kitchens, etc., the conducting of business devel-
opment meetings was a practice which was defined
by, but also developed further, certain understand-
ings, rules, and ends, thereby clarifying important
aspects of the roles to which individual restaurant
managers aspired as well as their relationships
with their area manager.
Whilst working within a nexus of practices and
arrangements that had great influence over how
food was prepared and service delivered in order
to meet business objectives, individual restaurant
managers retained distinctive yet systematic ideas
about their own restaurant management activities.
In discussions with us, and their peers, they would
frequently compare and contrast their current and
past restaurants in terms of their preferred man-
agement style. By all accounts, the couple in res-
taurant #2 represented an extreme approach to
restaurant management. One of the many husband
and wife management teams in Restaurant Divi-
sion, Armando and Elena had worked for the
company for 18 years. Their enthusiasm had
earned them a reputation for opening new Restau-
rant Division outlets and building the business to
maturity until another manager could take it over
from them. ‘‘If Elena lets me, I will have one more
go at opening the perfect [Restaurant Division
outlet].’’ They also had a reputation for over-
spending on food and labour.
You can grow a business or kill a business. . .
Managers who are running a food surplus
underportion or serve rubbish. In the five
years we were at [newly opened restaurant]
our food deficit was £2500 per year. We
had a deficit of £50 per week. You will see
17
kitchens where the chef goes ‘ooops the
beans are too soft. . . just serve them. . .’
Waste will happen with human error! It’s
panic! Now there is one ticket,7 suddenly
there are ten!8 . . . Our chef in [newly opened
restaurant] had 23 years experience. We paid
him £23,000 a year flat salary.9 Without a
chef you’re going nowhere. I don’t care
about costs, we need good chefs! You get
what you pay for and you got to pay them
a living wage. Armando, restaurant manager
Alistair, another restaurant manager in the
South East of England, had adopted a very differ-
ent management approach, but still regarded
Armando and Elena very highly. ‘‘They are the
best managers in the South East. Wherever they
go they get a lot of business.’’ His own approach,
however, differed markedly. He distanced himself
from the work in the restaurant that he managed.
‘‘It’s not my business. I get paid for doing a job.’’
He was one of the few managers whose wife was
not also working for the restaurant and who lived
away from the restaurant and not in one of the
flats that were usually located on the first floor
above the restaurant.
There is a real danger of developing blinkers,
getting too involved [in the restaurant]. You
must keep your eyes on the whole business,
not get sucked in. You can get away with
being involved in a smaller place but [not]
when you manage somewhere bigger [. . .]
Alistair, restaurant manager
Achieving the target labour cost percentage of
sales was an important priority for most of the res-
taurant managers and all area managers with
whom we spoke. But again, restaurant managers
7
A slip that summarises the order of one table. It is printed in
the kitchen after a waiter has entered the order into the till.
8
A common expression amongst Restaurant Division staff
was the ‘‘Ten-Ticket-Chef’’. It referred to a chef who would
keep calm under mounting orders and ‘‘just bang out those
dishes’’ to standard dish specification.
9
This compares with £25,000 per year as the lower bound of
the restaurant managers fixed salary range in 1997.
18 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
had developed distinctive practices for achieving
the percentage in conjunction with their other par-
ticular objectives. For Alistair it was important to
delegate session control to his department heads in
the kitchen, the restaurant, bar and cellar. He
sought to minimise his own interference in their
departments. Armando and Elena, by contrast,
were too concerned with perfecting the service in
their restaurant, and with avoiding staff turnover,
to let staff learn from their own mistakes.
When we opened here we took on inexperi-
enced but polite staff. . . We helped them
out when they struggled and now they still
rely on us. Armando, restaurant manager
The skill of restaurant management lay in
developing workable practices out of diverse com-
binations of restaurant specific resources and con-
straints. Concerns with the chains of activity
required for food preparation, for example, could
thus affect restaurant management practices in
ways that we would a priori have expected to be
dominated by more abstract concerns with dish
profitability. Talking about how to assemble a
set menu for coach parties that would use a restau-
rant for lunch on a day trip, Geoff, the manager of
restaurant #3, said that ‘‘we do what’s easiest for
the chef’’. Instead of using the dish margin data,
he and his wife saw coach parties primarily in
terms of the dynamics of large groups. A success-
ful restaurant visit by a coach party was one in
which the lunch service contributed to a good
social atmosphere. The set menu needed to offer
an attractive, if restricted, choice of dishes and it
needed to be ‘‘manufacturable’’ to serve everyone
at the same time.
Likewise, the management and control of
spaces turned out to be a key consideration in res-
taurant managers’ efforts to run a profitable res-
taurant. Restaurant managers reflected on the
‘‘yardage’’ they felt different waiters were able to
cover, as much as on the proximities and compat-
ibilities between groups of guests that were charac-
terised by their noisiness and desires for
continuous supplies of alcoholic drinks. Restau-
rant managers controlled spaces by appearing
unexpectedly at the side of the grill controller
who coordinated the movements of waiters
between the kitchen and their tables, next to an
overworked grill chef in the kitchen, or behind
the bar. They complained about the layout of res-
taurants which, they felt, required them to be in
too many places at the same time, if, say, the guest
reception desk was on the ground floor and a series
of separate dining rooms on the first floor. Restau-
rant management practice entailed the physical
presence to the managers to survey, remind, and
reassure groups of staff and guests. Management
control practice consisted of targeted, but ulti-
mately unpredictable, chains of action that were
distributed over people, spaces, processes, and
information.
This distribution was not limited to single res-
taurants. It was a collective endeavour that
extended across the chain. In the coffee breaks of
training workshops we observed some of the ways
in which restaurant managers of neighbouring res-
taurants swapped scarce inventory items. Restau-
rant managers in the same areas exchanged tips
on how to make new dishes, like crème brûlée,
work. They kept each other informed on how cus-
tomers reacted to new dishes that they suspected
were badly designed by head office. Exchanges
such as these allow us to speak of Restaurant Divi-
sion’s management control practice as a category
that was made up of organisationally characteris-
tic activities in many sites. What made them char-
acteristic were the meanings with which
organisational members invested them, the rules
they considered, and their various engagements
with particular objectives, uses, emotions, etc.
We are here not referring to repeated activity, as
one might when discussing routines, but meaning-
fully related activity that transpires as (and thereby
helps compose) practice. By highlighting the ways
in which practice is made up of arrays of activ-
ity, Schatzki’s (2002) concept of practice makes
visible orders that are constituted by, rather than
smother, expressions of individual agency.
Diverse forms of managerial power ran through
Restaurant Division’s organisational practices. As
one restaurant manager put it, ‘‘if you enter your
closing inventory and your food margin is way
out, you can expect an unpleasant visit from your
area manager first thing Monday morning.’’
Depending on circumstances and personalities,
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
area managers could coach restaurant managers to
think through their priorities and options as seen
in the conversation observed in restaurant #1.
Alternatively, they reduced individual restaurant
managers to tears or meted out a collective dress-
ing down via email or at area meetings. Such crude
displays of power were performed with reference
to the management control systems’ structures of
intentionality. By the same token, reference to
commercial success could (temporarily) work to
invert the formal hierarchy. Very good chefs could
extract high salaries from their restaurant manag-
ers, just as commercially successful restaurant
managers could attain legendary status even if
there was widely shared, but unproven, suspicion
that they ‘‘ripped off the company’’ by keeping a
share of the revenues to themselves.
He’s been delivering on budget year after
year—it’s uncanny. [. . .] the company has
sort of accepted that he gives us more profit
than anyone else could, so. . . Financial
controller
In most day-to-day interactions, however, area
managers’ ability to define what counted as com-
mercial success in the context of the complex rela-
tionships between financial and non-financial
information constituted an important source of
their power.
Senior managers’ practice-view of management
control
From a practice point of view, the role of the
board of directors was not simply a matter of blue-
print design and the writing of policies. Rather, it
was a question of developing arrays of activity and
understandings that organised the activities of
other organisational members—the manifesting
of structures of intentionality—knowing full well
that those activities were, and should be, informed
acts of skilful practical activity more than expres-
sions of routine understandings of restaurant
management.
When we began our research, the senior man-
agement of Restaurant Division felt that they
played a key role in leading a growth strategy.
19
Having joined the organisation almost two years
before being interviewed,
[The managing director] and I had a totally
different brief [from the previous board of
directors] when we were brought in January
’94. We were told to go back to being much
more expansionist, both physically, so in
other words go out now and buy some sites,
and mentally, let’s start trying lots of things,
let’s start recognising that we did great for
those three years at [. . .] taking no risks basi-
cally. We now take risks, otherwise [Restau-
rant Division] will die as a brand. Operations
director
With their specific strategic brief in mind, senior
managers’ saw that ‘‘going for growth’’ had wide-
ranging implications for operations, and the ways
in which restaurant managers should think about
the nature of the business. In a chain organisation,
which was used to ‘‘pretty bureaucratic, autocratic
process management’’, they saw their task in
bringing about management control systems that
would help restaurant managers develop answers
to questions such as,
how do you grow? What are the symptoms,
what happens to an organisation to say [we
are now] customer led, market led, watch
out for the competition coming round the
corner because, again, historically [the com-
petition had been weak]. Managing director
The board agreed that this presented a signifi-
cant communication challenge. Restaurant Divi-
sion belonged to one of the UK’s largest leisure
groups, with demanding financial targets. But
financial objectives, such as food margin, on their
own were not regarded as suitable for getting
across the board’s expectations to the rest of the
organisation. They were an important motivation
for head office’s strategic concerns but, on their
own, they could not be used to explain those con-
cerns to Restaurant Division’s organisational
members.
An important attempt at communicating head
office’s strategic priorities to the organisation was
the list of specific measures known as the ‘‘13
Key Tasks’’ (see Appendix A for details). Whilst
20 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
senior managers did elaborate the significance of
specific and concrete relationships that they felt
were important in understanding the nature of
Restaurant Division (e.g. the relationship between
high gross profit margin and superior customer
service), they were not directly concerned with
the elaboration of a concise business model.
Instead they sought to create a general awareness
of strategic priorities that they hoped might infuse
locally appropriate activity.
You know that 13 key tasks is an almost
ludicrous number. They are 13 key tasks in
the sense that they are 13 areas on which
we need to focus during the year. And that’s
what we are trying to say to people. . . We are
going to do TV advertising, and therefore we
need to know how we will know if that’s
worked. Now if you are a [restaurant] man-
ager it’s not a key task. It’s going to happen
whether you. . . What it’s saying is be aware
we’re going to be having more customers
and new customers so get your service qual-
ity s*** together. So the issue is if you are a
house manager your issues are service quality
and profit, that’s it, but you need to know
that we’re going on Carlton and Granada.10
Acquisitions, if you are a [restaurant] man-
ager who is not moving to a new acquisition,
it is not an issue for you in the slightest bit.
What we’re saying is that as a company
you should be aware that we’re trying to
open 15 [restaurants] [. . .] Because if you
are aware of that you know the company’s
growing, so there’s an information comfort
there, you’re in a growing company. Sec-
ondly if you’re driving down the road and
there’s a site, then maybe that could be a
[possible site for a new Restaurant Division
outlet]. Thirdly if the [restaurant] is opening
in your area, then we probably want you to
help by taking some of the new staff into
your [restaurant for initial training]. So it’s
not a key task for you if you’re not going
into one, but you need to be aware that that’s
where we’re going. Human resources director
10
Two important television advertising regions in the UK.
The human resources director’s explanations of
the significance of non-financial management con-
trol systems offered a refreshing contrast with con-
temporary musings on the topic. His account of
the possible uses of the ‘‘13 Key Tasks’’ were a
reflection of head office management’s sensitivity
to the connections that they wanted organisational
members to make between performance metrics,
Restaurant Division’s strategic agenda, and res-
taurant management issues in the shaping of daily
activity.
Management control information was only
seen to be useful in the context of specific mana-
gerial intent (c.f., Barnes, 2001). In the previous
quotation we saw that the specifics of perfor-
mance metrics might provide a framework for
the articulation of managerial agendas. In turn,
managerial intent simultaneously shaped the selec-
tive attention required for the overwhelmingly
detailed monthly management information pack
to effectively contribute to management control
practice.
Are you taking about data? . . . We have, I
never go anywhere without it, but I mean
we have. . . where is my Period 7? [searches
for report] There it is! Right, Period 7 [heaves
weighty report onto his desk], and I’ve got
everything in there, all the financial detail
[starts leafing fast through the report], and
I’ve got all the stock, food data, I’ve got all
the distribution account, I’ve got the balance
sheet, I’ve got our service quality informa-
tion, complaints, complaint ratios to covers,
how each region is doing, ah, top ten, bot-
tom ten, ahm, on growth, on service quality,
I’ve got, ahm, food quality data, I’ve got
ahm, you know, financial, MAT11 informa-
tion on food, liquor, etc. [. . .] spend per head,
liquor spend per head, sales mix, TV adver-
tising data, then you move into labour
turn. . ., human resources information,
labour turnover by region, by category of
employee, ahm, etc. [keeps leafing through
pages] ahm [interviewer tries to interrupt]
staff turnover, support manager turnover,
11
Moving average total.
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
ahm, people moves from one restaurant to
another, ahm, training data, ah, I’ve got
information on the training centre, the train-
ing report, so we go into my budgetary
responsibility, which is obviously the HR
budget, how that’s doing, blablablabla
[keeps leafing]. Human resources director
Head office managers were under no illusion
that their strategic visions would easily ‘‘translate’’
into managerial actions throughout the orga-
nisation. They never suggested straightforward
relationships between management control infor-
mation and organisational activity (c.f., Bloch,
1991). For them the larger management control
challenge lay in the creation of roles and forums
in which complex understandings of the ways in
which the strategic agenda of the Division might
feed into day-to-day activity would be fostered
through dialogues that might open up events
depicted through the performance data. Without
wishing to relinquish their strategic or hierarchical
prerogatives, they were sensitive to the benefits of
an approach to management control that sought
to reckon with the intelligence of managers—to
enable them (Ahrens & Chapman, 2004).
Discussion
In a restaurant chain, in which direct food costs
constituted the largest single operating expense, the
food margin reporting system, which was based on
the division-wide menu, took on a particular signif-
icance. Through a detailed discussion of menu
design practice we saw that based on the high level
parameters set out by the board of directors, the
marketing planning manager was implicated in a
complex array of financial, logistical, marketing,
and operational activities and objectives.
The strategic agenda set out by head office staff
provided a starting point in the process of menu
design, offering a series of targets (e.g. attain
67.3% food margin, Italianise the menu, etc.).
These targets provided a poor basis for under-
standing management control in Restaurant Divi-
sion however, since targets on their own did not
provide for an understanding of their practical
21
effects in all but the simplest of settings. In Restau-
rant Division, a target food margin might be
achieved in any number of ways, as might intro-
ducing a more Italian flavour to the menu. A prac-
tice perspective offers a way of understanding the
diverse activities involved in menu design in rela-
tion to each other as an array of activity. Through
such analysis we can see the way in which the pre-
cise nature of objectives (Italianising the menu)
arises from daily activity as much as daily activity
is shaped by those objectives.
Likewise in the weekly business development
meetings, restaurant managers and their area man-
agers reviewed restaurant operations and discussed
the possibilities implied by management control
information. Over the course of their careers restau-
rant managers built up their own understandings of
restaurant operation which provided them with a
ready source of ideas on how to manage their
restaurant. Area managers were to facilitate the
achievement of corporate objectives through
the construction of arrays of activity that incorpo-
rated these with the restaurant managers’ personal
understandings. They were supported in this task
by a series of division-wide financial control work-
shops that propagated an enabling vision of man-
agement control systems (Ahrens & Chapman,
2004).
Focussing on the specifics of management activ-
ity our account foregrounded the ways in which
various managers constructed purposeful chains
of activity stretching widely across the organisa-
tion. We sought to bring out the ways in which
those purposes might more instructively be thought
of as an accomplishment of those actors however,
informed by but also constructive of the financial
and strategic imperatives advertised by senior man-
agement. The key assumptions underlying senior
management’s understandings of their own tasks
and activities were very similar to the practice the-
ory outlined in this paper. The priorities of different
objectives were contingent on ongoing develop-
ments. Performance information was regarded as
complexly interwoven with organisational context.
The functionality of performance information was
paramount to senior management but they were
keenly aware that their notions of functionality
were highly context specific.
22 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
Management control as a practice unfolds its
potential through the ways in which organisational
members draw on it as a shared resource. In seek-
ing to develop our understanding of the ways in
which management control in Restaurant Division
stretches across diverse practices and arrange-
ments we found it useful to build on theories of
cognition in practice. In contrast with, notably,
Hutchins’ (1995a, 1995b) work on cognition in
practice in airplane cockpits and the command
bridges of ships, we addressed task contexts that
were characterised by diverse ideas about the orga-
nisation’s objectives (and subsets of objectives)
and the best ways of attaining them. Management
control is grounded in the power of senior manag-
ers to set agendas, the management control sys-
tems through which they seek to structure
organisational practices, and the responses of
organisational members. As a structure of inten-
tionality, management control is constituted in
cognitive processes that are distributed over peo-
ple, practices, arrangements, and contexts.
Conclusions
It is often not easy to determine what bearing
the diverse purposes of organisations have on the
activities of their members. Central to understand-
ing organisation as practice are the structures of
intentionality, as they arise from the understand-
ings, rules, and teleoaffective structures of practice,
that organise connected activities and arrange-
ments. Management control practices are central
to organising because they help to bring about
connections between the diverse activities of
organisational members. Unlike the communities
of practice literature, which has shed light on the
development of specific spheres of activities within
organisations (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Orr,
1996), management control as practice seeks to
understand a wider and more complex field of
organising practices.
The notion of structures of intentionality relies
on a conception of functionality that is cognitively
distributed over people, practices, arrangements,
and contexts (Hutchins, 1995; Lave, 1988), and
thus situated. What is and is not functional can
only be taken for granted in situations so simple
and stable that they make few demands on organ-
isational skills. The concept of accounting and
management control practice that we seek to out-
line in this paper is all too aware of accounting’s
diverse meanings in the political processes that
surround its uses to submit to the functionalist
paradigm of schematic ends, means, and imple-
mentations. Yet at the same time, we do not think
that technical conceptions of accounting are sim-
ply unrealistic dreams.
For the managers in Restaurant Division, func-
tionality was inherently practical. For example,
enhancing the representational faithfulness of
accounting systems was not their major concern.
The managers mostly seemed to regard their
accounting systems as imperfect but adequate for
the task of rendering visible organisational
members’ daily activity through accounting
inscriptions. For them, the main use of past per-
formance evaluation lay in its potential to help
construct future lines of action. To this end they
were happy to work with approximate representa-
tions of physical and financial flows. We saw that
in actively working with other organisational
members in order to establish a shared under-
standing of what it meant to do well, they drew
on, but were not captured by, performance met-
rics. The meanings of diverse objectives (and
performance metrics) for the activities of organisa-
tional members only became clear to them through
ongoing contextualisation. Function and symbol
cannot but intermingle.
This has implications for our understanding of
the relationship between control and strategy.
The arrays of activity that constitute practices do
not map neatly onto strategic plans. Doings and
sayings are fundamentally different activities
(Bloch, 1991). The notion of strategy implementa-
tion is often misleading in this respect (Ahrens &
Chapman, 2005), as is being recognised in discus-
sions of strategy as practice (e.g., Whittington,
2006). Likewise, our practice perspective highlights
some problematic assumptions that underlie con-
temporary discussions of the spread of innovative
management accounting practices. In the case of
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
the ‘‘transfer’’ of best practices from organisations
to the academic literature, a familiar tale is that of
the field researcher stumbling over an innovative
practice that she merely documents to aid its dis-
semination amongst practitioners and academics
(Kaplan, 1994). ‘‘We just had to recognise a valid
solution when it appeared’’ (Kaplan, 1998, p. 98).
Such tales are misleading insofar as they appeal to
readily articulated, distinct practices ‘‘out there in
the field’’. In reality the discursive boundaries of
innovative practices tend to be blurred. The key
to understanding practices lies in the careful trac-
ing of their constitutive activities.
Furthermore, theoretical accounting concepts
cannot be used by practitioners as ‘‘means’’ to pur-
sue their ‘‘ends’’ because means and ends are con-
structed simultaneously in practice (Lave, 1988).
This is not to subscribe to the concept of emergent
strategy (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret,
1976). Emergent strategy foregrounds local initia-
tive, serendipity, and adjustment to context. Situ-
ated functionality emphasises the potential of
senior management to support local managers’
attempts at pursuing diverse central objectives in
local contexts.
Such harnessing of local management efforts
usually requires great skill and is highly context
dependent. A detailed case description is the best
approach to study it, but it is important to be
aware of its limitations. Our description followed
the various leads given to us by the members
of the case organisation and our own surprises at
the activities and arrangements in this organisa-
tion and the industry more widely. By developing
our case description in terms of ordered activities
and arrangements we sought to delineate the
arrays of activity that constituted management
control practice in Restaurant Division. We hope
to have rendered a plausible account that built
on our observations and insights into the diverse
intentions of organisational members. Ultimately,
however, we acknowledge the primacy of practice
(Archer, 2000). Practices are never fully articu-
lated. The textual representation of our field mate-
rial can only be suggestive of actual ongoing
practice, because practice is sensitive to minute
variations in its components (over which cogni-
23
tion in practice stretches). Description can illumi-
nate activity, but activity cannot be reduced to
description.
For practice theorists social order is real in the
sense that activities belong to practices and that
practices and arrangements can be identified as
sustaining or changing one another. However,
social order is much more complex than simply
the reproduction of action or values. Instead,
social order arises from actors’ ongoing efforts at
developing their actions as part of certain fields
of practices, that is to say, with reference to the
fields’ understandings, rules, and engagements.
Actors may want their actions to blend in or stand
out depending on their judgement of what the sit-
uation calls for. Practices are thus constituted by
‘‘tangle[s] of samenesses and similarities’’
(Schatzki, 2001, p. 42). The connection between
fellow practitioners and their practices cannot be
mechanical, relying simply on repeated activity;
what has sometimes been referred to as routines.
Rather, practices depend on the intended, mean-
ingful relatedness between activities with respect
to outcomes, clients, practitioners, techniques,
resources, strategies, institutions, etc.
The ongoing debates around the concept of cul-
ture have highlighted the dangers of assuming that
encompassing sociological notions can explain all
aspects of social life (e.g., Biernacki, 1999; Rose-
berry, 1982; Swidler, 1986). The notion of practice
in this paper offers purchase on a wide range of
social phenomena. Yet we need to spell out clearly
what is not practice. Practice is shaped through
purposeful activity and as a concept seeks to cap-
ture actors’ skilful working with and constructing
of understandings, rules, and engagements. The
concept is not suitable for analysing situations that
are characterised by an absence of volition and
choice. It has little to add to our understanding
of strict rule-following behaviour. Practice also
does not sit comfortably with notions of behaviour
determined by self-referencing interest, or by a pri-
ori structural conflict.
When understandings, rules, objectives, and
values are understood as acting upon actors, the
diversity of organisational responses to control is
often cast in terms of resistance. Management
24 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27

control systems are certainly used in efforts at that it becomes more suitable for the study of
securing the interests of remote managers or share- practice.
holders, but the real difficulty for management
control practice lies in determining what activities Acknowledgement
can support such ends, how such activities are to
be brought about throughout the organisation, We gratefully acknowledge the comments on
and how such activities can help recast organisa- earlier drafts of this paper from Fiona Anderson-
tional ends. Practice theory is not blind to conflict Gough, Wai Fong Chua, David Cooper, Niels De-
but it does not cast it in terms of control and chow, Anthony Hopwood, Michael Lounsbury,
resistance. Michal Matejka, Peter Miller, Jan Mouritsen,
As such the key question for management Mike Power, Paolo Quattrone, Steve Salterio,
control theory is not how to constrain individu- Tomo Suzuki, Richard Whittington, and Steve
als and overcome resistance. Rather, it needs to Woolgar. We would particularly like to thank
bring into focus the possibilities of management the two anonymous reviewers for their many help-
control systems as a resource for action. Practice ful comments and suggestions.
theory emphasises the role of actors in drawing
upon the rules, procedures, ideals, targets, etc. of
management control practice because interest and Appendix A. The thirteen key tasks
conflict are not given. They are discursive and prac-
tical resources that actors manipulate skilfully to
signal interests, motivations, and achievements.
Our practice perspective emphasises the ways in
which those motivations come to be constructed
through the daily effort of individuals engaging
with each other and management control systems.
Our emphasis on individual skill and intention,
and the complex and ongoing working out of struc-
tures of intent has a direct bearing on the debate
around the capabilities and limits of management
control systems. This debate has developed an
unhelpful dynamic between the writing and think-
ing of academics and practitioners and, related to
this, between notions of individual agency, social
norms, and control. Put crudely, the normative lit-
erature, posing as practically relevant, has often
emphasised agency over context and succumbed
to ‘hero sociology’ (Law, 1991). The more socio-
logically grounded literature has frequently offered
practitioners little advice beyond emphasising the
complexities of purposeful management control.
The contribution of practice theory to this debate
lies in pro- viding a language for talking about skil-
ful practical activity in context recognising the con-
stitution of context through action. Rather than
take the much observed fluidity and unpredictabil-
ity of management accounting and control in
practice as a sign of the feebleness of accounting
theory we should adjust our notion of theory such
 T. Ahrens, C.S. Chapman / Accounting, Organizations and Society 32 (2007) 1–27
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