ACCOUNTING
Accounting is rationalizations that people provide for
their actions: justifications and excuses. Accounting is the process by which people offer
accounts in order to make sense of the world.
In ethnomethodology
the term accounting is used to refer to the practices of observation and reporting which
make objects and events observable and objective.
If a teacher claims that a student is above average,
there are a set of things the teacher routinely does (setting tests and assignments,
grading participation) to give this claim foundation and demonstrate the competence of the
student in an objective and rational way. The student is therefore connected to these
accounting practices.
Accounting is the process of describing or explaining
social situations or how members make sense of their everyday world. Ethnomethodologists
are interested in both the account and the method by which the account is made meaningful
to the recipient of the account, and tend to emphasize the latter. The interest is not in
determining if the account is accurate or otherwise judging the account but rather in
exploring how the account is conveyed.
Explanation given by a husband for arriving home late at
night is an account. Ethnomethodologist is interested in both the account and the methods
used to convey that account to the recipient, the wife. Whether the account is factual or
not is of no interest to the ethnomethodologist.
BRINGING CALCULATION BACK IN: SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES IN
ACCOUNTING - By Andrea Mennicken - London School of Economics and Political Science
Introduction - Accounting systems have come to play a key role in the organisation of
modern economies and societies. Today, in the economic sector as well as in the public
sector, organisational activities are structured around cost-benefit analyses, balanced
score cards, profit centres, discounted cash flow analyses, standard costing procedures,
value added accounting, financial risk calculations and many other numerical forms of
organisational representation and economic measurement. Against the background of these
developments, it is surprising how little attention accounting techniques have received in
contemporary sociological thinking.
Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology: Accounting for
Hybridity in Talk-in-Interaction
Shirley Anne Tate
Theorising hybridity within Postcolonial Studies is often done at a level which seems to
exclude the everyday with the exception of its relevance for the cultural productions of
migrants and dominant culture's "eating the other". This article uses the
exploration of hybridity as an everyday interactional achievement within Black "mixed
race" British women's conversations on identity to look at the production of an
analytic method as process based on the task of the analyst as translator. This method as
process thinks the links between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN in the emergence of an
ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis (eda) which is called on to make sense
of a hybridity of the everyday where Black women reflexively translate discourses on
identity positions in order to construct their own identifications in conversations.
FOUCAULT's discourses and BAKHTIN's heteroglossia and addressivity allow us to theorise
this movement in the talk which ethnomethodological transcription and theory enables us to
first pinpoint occurring. The article begins by looking at first, how hybridity as
identification emerges in talk-in-interaction through both speaker and analyst
translations. Having established this, it then goes on to look at the theoretical
convergences and divergences between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN on the subject, identity and
discourses in the eda enterprise. Looking at data through the lens of eda means that we
must be aware of the subject positions which speakers identify as having the effect of
constraining or facilitating particular actions and experiences and there is always the
possibility for challenge to subjectification
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