Accounting: Economising failure and assembling a failure regime

Professor Peter Miller, London School of Economics

'Economising Failure and Assembling a Failure Regime' (co-authored with L. Kurunmäki & A. Mennicken)
Wednesday 9 March, 1.30pm-2.45pm
Zoom online seminar

Abstract

Sociologists have largely neglected the topic of failure, and particularly the economising of failure, notwithstanding notable exceptions. This is puzzling, given the many adjacent literatures that have addressed the practices and processes of economising, the “New Public Management” and “Audit Society” literatures, as well as writings on the “governing of economic life”. This is particularly puzzling, given that an economised category of failure now saturates public life, and given that failure defined as exit from the market game takes us to the heart of economising and the phenomenon that has been dubbed neoliberalism. Four features define our approach to analysing the economising of failure. First, we argue that failure has none of the objectivity or inevitability often attributed to it, whether in the corporate sphere or the public sphere. Second, we suggest that failure be viewed as a variable ontology object, that researchers attend to the gradations in the stability of entities, agents, and infrastructures through which failing and failure are acted upon. Third, we call for attention to the calculative infrastructures that operationalise the ideas of failing and failure, and enable them to be acted upon. Fourth, we emphasise the importance of distinguishing between failing and failure. The paper proceeds in three stages.

Biography

Peter Miller is Professor of Management Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Senior Research Associate of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. He is a Consulting Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society, a member of the Editorial Board of The British Accounting Review, and has published in a wide range of accounting, management and sociology journals including The Academy of Management Annals, Accounting, Organizations and Society, British Journal of Sociology, Economy and Society, European Accounting Review, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Financial Accountability & Management, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Cultural Economy, Foucault Studies, Management Accounting Research, and Social Research. He co-edited The Foucault Effect (1991), Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice (1994), Accounting, Organizations and Institutions (2009), and, jointly with Nikolas Rose, Governing the Present (2008). In 2019 he co-edited Thinking Infrastructures. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Paris, Dauphine in 2014 and 2015 respectively, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018 for his contribution to humanities and social sciences.

Further information: business-events@glasgow.ac.uk

First published: 14 February 2022

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