A Post-ANT Study of the Translation of a Performance Management System

This dissertation consists of three individual research papers that push the boundaries on the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of the actor-network-theory (ANT) pertaining to its mobilization in sociological and organizational accounting research. All three papers anchor on an ethnographic field study wherein a team of two consultants developed a new performance management system (PMS) in a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China. Chapter 1 introduces the overarching theses in this dissertation, which are characterized by the ontological boundaries of ANT that the three papers push and the new dimensions of accounting research it opens by pushing such boundaries. Paper 1 (Chapter 2) explores the ways in which accounting enacts multiple reality in the organization by mobilizing the notion of multiple reality contributed by Actor-Network Theorists Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002) and others (Dugdale, 1999; Law, 2002; Law & Singleton, 2005), and seek to extend our understanding of the roles of accounting by explicating how accounting practices enact, circulate, sustain, and erode multiple reality; how the multiple reality coexisted, relied on, opposed to, and were outside and inside one another; as well as how accounting translation is executed when the reality is multiple. Paper 2 (Chapter 3) probes the theoretical and methodological dilemma posed by ANTs flat ontology: how to approach institutionalized contexts with the vocabulary of ANT. Through examining the roles that SOE context plays in the translation processes of accounting technology, I identify context roles in the actor-network as black boxes, discursive resources, devices of interessement, and performative actants. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notions of genre and intertextuality, the third paper (Chapter 4) examines the role that linguistic gaps can play during the introduction and formation of management accounting practices. These linguistic gaps involve the cross-language gap between different languages, the generic gap between speech genres suitable for particular purposes or communicative situations, and the performative gap between text and verbal performance. These gaps, on the one hand, contribute to the incompleteness of performance measures by enabling interpretive and performative spaces; and on the other hand, can be mustered as a rhetorical strategy by actors to persuade and recruit others during the formation of accounting objects. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by bringing a critical spirit into ANT-inspired accounting research.