From the Science of Accounts to the Financial Accountability of Science

The ArgumentThis introductory essay describes some intellectual intersections between the history and sociology of science and the history and sociology of accounting. These intersections suggest a potential field of inquiry that concerns itself explicitly with science and economic calculation, a potential that is partly realized in the essays that follow. It is possible to describe a broad shift from concerns for the scientific credentials of accounting to a recognition of the constitutive role that accounting plays for science. In other words the so-called cultural hegemony of the scientist is giving way to that of the accountant. This shift has a number of loosely related but complementary elements. The first is to be found in some recent historical work that links ideals of scientific objectivity to administrative and political values. A second element is a body of work that is critical of theorydominant approaches to experiment and concerns itself with laboratory practice in social context. A third element is an emerging interest in the economics of science. I argue that such a program is weak where it abstracts from processes of economic calculation, and this suggests the fourth element: a contextual approach to economic calculation to be found in sociologically informed accounting research. In the light of these four elements, the essay concludes by considering directly the implications of accounting for science, particularly given recent initiatives to make science more accountable

Accountability · Economics · Epistemology · Hegemony · History of science · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Accounting and Organizational Management · Accounting Education and Careers · Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance · Chemistry · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Accounting

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• Science as Practice and Culture

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• More Heat than Light

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• The Taming of Chance

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• The System of Professions

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• The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis

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• Organizational environments

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• Economy and Society

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• The Social construction of technological systems

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• The Social shaping of technology

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• The sociology of money

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• Scientific Community.

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• The principles of scientific management

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• The Calculating Forester

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• Stealing into Print

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• The politics of brand accounting in the United Kingdom

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• Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science

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• Accounting for Research

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• The history of measurement and the engineers of space

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• Political power beyond the State

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• Mediating Machines

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• Accounting for Innovation

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• History, Philosophy, and the Central Metaphor

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• Practice, Reason, Context

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• The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century

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• Changing Order

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• Engineers and Economists

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• The Electrification of America

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• A History of Financial Accounting

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• The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason

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• Scientific Practice in the Courtroom

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• Accounting for Rationality

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