Reviewed by Paul F. Williams North Carolina State University

Ten — the number of digits on our hands and feet; ten — the basis of our number system, which forms the metric system of the scientific laboratory and also the way most of us count money; ten — the number of commandments that order many of us about what is right and wrong; ten — the perfect Olympian score. Ten papers, originally published in 1994 as a special issue of Science in Context, comprise this superb book which explores the relationships between accounting and science. Michael Power has brought together a multidisciplinary group consisting of persons from the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, law, philosophy, economics, and accounting to produce an excellent prepositional treatment of accounting and science. The book contains essays about accounting as science, science as accounting, accounting by science, accounting for science, etc. These essays explore the richness that results from the intermingling of accounting and science both as practices and as metaphors. Regardless of your particular interest in how science and accounting may appear in the same sentence, this collection of essays will contain something of special interest to you.

The essays in the book are all excellent, each worthy of extensive discussion. Obviously, in the short space of a book review I cannot do them justice. I can provide only a sketch that I hope will inform just a bit while avoiding any injustice.

Michael Power provides the introductory essay (“Introduction: From the Science of Accounts to the Financial Accountability of Science”) in which he provides “… a schematic guide to an emergent field of inquiry: science and accounting” [p. 3]. All of us domiciled at universities with significant research missions are well aware of the changes that are occurring in how science is funded, what it is expected to do, and how its success is determined. “Science” is undergoing reconstruction through economic calculation just as economic calculation is reconstructed via “science.” The first essay provides the historical context of the emergence of the new relationships between science and accounting and reviews the varied issues pertaining to it that are the themes of the remaining papers in the book.

“Making Things Quantitative,” essay two by Theodore M. Porter, provides a brief history of quantification, followed by a discussion of the relationship between power ami quantification. Porter notes that quantification can destroy meanings but also plays a constructive role because of its transformative possibilities. Our practical quantifying impulses have “… contributed in several important ways to the pervasiveness of numerical reasoning even in physics. Everywhere it assists the enforcement of a certain discipline and hence is active on the level of power as well as knowledge” [p. 51].

The next two essays are historical examinations of specific episodes in the relationship between accounting and science. Myles W. Jackson (“Natural and Artificial Budgets: Accounting for Goethe’s Economy of Nature”) recounts Johanri Goethe’s attempts to utilize his concept of “budgets of nature” as a guide to developing budgets of administration. For Goethe the concept of the budget represented the unifying link between nature and culture — a story which is unfamiliar to many accountants, ably told by Jackson.

Timothy L. Alborn (“A Calculating Profession: Victorian Actuaries among the Statisticians”) applies Andrew Abbott’s [1988] thesis to chronicle the development of the actuarial profession. The tale focuses on the uneasy relationship between statistical science and insurance statisticians, and how exploitation of that relationship over time produced a group that, by tne end of the 19th century, had produced its own realm of knowledge over which it exercised jurisdiction.

170 Accounting Historians Journal, June 1998
Peter Miller and Ted O’Leary (“The Factory as Laboratory”) bring us to the midpoint of the book with their case study of how Caterpillar, Inc. redesigned the floor of one of its manufacturing plants. They provide an analysis of how, in this one factory, the grander transformations embedded in Deming’s idea of worker as scientist were effectuated. Through particular “regimes of practices,” Caterpillar made the Japanese “threat” visible and, thus, was able to construct new forms of discipline (the Assembly Highway) in the plant.
The next three papers deal explicitly with the changes in science occurring as a result of mainly political attempts to make science more economically accountable. Keith Robson (“Connecting Science to the Economic: Accounting Calculation and the Visibility of Research and Development”) describes the shift in the U.K. during the 1980s to connect university research more closely to commercial applications (parallelling developments in the U.S.). Robson analyzes how accounting for R&D became a mechanism through which agencies promoting R&D “acted at a distance” to guide corporate managers into undertaking R&D activities.

Brad Sherman (“Governing Science: Patents and Public Sector Research”) discusses another aspect of the increasing pressure for the economic accountability of publicsector science. Patents are becoming an increasingly more significant means through which science is governed. Sherman notes a significant ramification of this growing juridification of science is the shifting of its direction from asserting knowledge claims to developing property claims. John Law and Madeleine Akrich (“On Customers and Costs: A Story from Public Sector Science”) complete the triad with a case study of Daresbury Science and Engineering Research Council Laboratory and how it was altered in response to the marketplace rhetoric of the 1980s. This story will resonate with accountants; it is the tale of restructuring through redefining mission in terms of developing “good customers” and reconfiguring through the creation of “cost centers.” This paper would make an excellent reading for any advanced cost/managerial accounting class, particularly for disabusing accounting students of the notion that accounting is a neutral, calculative technology.

The penultimate essay is by Philip Mirowski (“A Visible Hand in the Marketplace of Ideas: Precision Measurement as Arbitrage”) . Noting the increasing fascination of sociologists of science with economic analogies, Mirowski treats the basic issue of measurement of physical constants with the analogy of price inconsistencies and their stabilization through the action of arbitrage. Mirowski takes issue with the methodological individualism of both the NeymanPearson and Bayesian accounts of the treatment of measurement error. He recounts the history of quantitative error up to the work of Raymond Birge, who made explicit “the ineluctable social character of error and thus precision” [p. 233].

The final word goes to Steve Fuller (“Toward a Philosophy of Science Accounting: A Critical Rendering of Instrumental Rationality”), whose essay is devoted to the issue of giving accounts of science. He notes that “deconstructive” and “constructive” are the two kinds of science accounting. He develops a case for and provides a historical illustration of a kind of constructive science accounting he labels criticoinstrumental rationality. This is defined in terms of four accountability conditions — discernibility, transcendence, responsibility, and revisability. Sorry, but you will have to read the paper to find out what each of these conditions means.

REFERENCE

Abbott, A. (1988), The System of Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).