Responding to expanding accountability regimes by re-presenting organizational context

Accounting information systems (AIS) provide information needed to manage, control, and evaluate organizational activities. As the corporate accountability regimes expand into such areas as social and environmental responsibility, these information systems must also expand in order to meet the requisite information needs. Adequately addressing the emerging information needs requires that the focus move beyond the customary preoccupation with the technical aspects of AIS design, implementation, and use in order to incorporate a broader conceptualization of organizational context. An initial step in designing more salient AIS is to recognize the social forces and related conflicts present within work organizations that relate to issues within the purview of the expanded accountability regimes. I propose that organizations be viewed through the lens of social theory as a way to expand what has traditionally been a narrow, exclusive, and instrumental perspective. Re-presenting organizational context using alternative social theory-based perspectives opens the conventional, taken-for-granted scope and functions of AIS to examination and critique, providing space for change. I demonstrate how alternative perspectives can provide a basis for revealing the assumptions, conflicts, and ideologies that underlie conventional systems applications, facilitating more inclusive designs that incorporate a greater range of values, interests, and objectives. I use three disparate social theories to illustrate possibilities following from alternative organizational representations. From labor process theory, we gain an understanding of forces underlying representations of work by organizations operating within the context of market capitalism. Latour's accumulation cycle provides a description of the embedded processes whereby information is collected, processed, and applied to maintain organizational control. A variant of postmodern thinking reveals hegemonic contextual assumptions and constraints that underlie prevailing organizational representations. A more comprehensive understanding of organizational context increases the likelihood that AIS will provide the information necessary to support the more inclusive accountability regimes arising from an expanding notion of acting in the public interest.