Research seminar by Matthew Sorola from Toulouse Business School
Matthew SOROLA & Marianne STRAUCH
Toulouse Business School, Toulouse, France
Accounting has long been depicted as a tool of control deployed by managers to rationalise production, measure performance and standardise practices. In this way, accounting shapes the everyday lives of workers, which has only been exacerbated by the push for digitization and automation. In this research, we explore the complex reality in which accounting technologies are adopted and deployed to surface the nuanced ways in which these tools are integrated into workers’ daily lives. Drawing on Jasanoff and Kim's (2009) concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, this paper explores how collective visions of desired futures—shaped by scientific and technological advancements and imbued with technoliberal ideals (Malaby, 2011; Pfister and Yang, 2018)—dictate how digital accounting technologies are expected to transform work.
To explore these dynamics, our research focuses on dairy farming as an empirical site in which accounting technologies are increasingly used to mediate practices, and how farmers are responding to these intensifying demands for digitisation and automation. Comparing interview data from dairy farmers in France and Aotearoa (New Zealand), we discuss the nuanced ways in which control is enacted and resisted by farmers. Ultimately, we discuss how accounting technologies restructure labour not by reducing work, but by shifting its very nature—substituting physical constraints with data-driven regimes of self-surveillance, aligning with critical literature on neoliberal responsibilisation (Lehman et al., 2016).
Cheryl Lehman Marcia Annisette Gloria Agyemang , (2016),"Immigration and neoliberalism: three cases and counter accounts", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 29 Iss 1 pp. 43 – 79
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119–146.
Pfister, D. S., & Yang, M. (2018). Five theses on technoliberalism and the networked public sphere. Communication and the Public, 3(3), 247-262.
Malaby T. M. (2009). Making virtual worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Matthew Sorola is an accounting professor based in Toulouse, France. Originally from Texas, he has spent more than a decade living and working across four continents, providing him with a range of insights into different cultures and causing him to reflect on his own values. The ways in which he approaches his teaching, engagement and research, reflect these understandings.