AAA Spark Meeting of the Regions

Accounting as Disciplinary and Aesthetic Practices: Financial Managers and Struggles with Quality in Danish Healthcare

• In Event: Oversight, Quality, & Earnings

Abstract

This paper describes how financial and other non-medical managers engaged with accounting and other devices intended to measure and manage quality in the Danish healthcare system between 2004 and 2017. It does so with reference to two different forms of Foucauldian subject formation (disciplinary and aesthetic) and their relationship to accounting. This leads to two principal contributions. Firstly, we show that (and how) accounting operates as a practice not only for managers to know about and discipline themselves and others, but also to read and write about and develop an ethics or aesthetics of living with their constructed selves. This duality illuminates that, far from being cold and calculating agents of the state, financial managers are hybrid professionals, personally committed to determine how best to care and cure. Secondly, we show how the accounting practices enacted through different reforms reconfigure the relations between discipline and freedom. This has implications for our normative understanding of contemporary efforts to equip financial and other managers as ethical agents.

Authors

• Dane Pflueger, HEC Paris

• Margit Malmmose, Aarhus University