Research Article |
Corresponding author: Koos Wagensveld ( j.wagensveld@fm.ru.nl ) Academic editor: Chris Knoops
© 2018 Koos Wagensveld, Jasper Jolink.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Wagensveld K, Jolink J (2018) Performative research: A Baradian framework. Maandblad Voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie 92(1/2): 27-35. https://doi.org/10.5117/mab.92.23787
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This paper stresses the importance of materiality in accounting and organization studies. Accounting and organization studies have overlooked the ways in which accounting and organizing is bound up with the material forms and spaces through which humans act and interact. To incorporate the materiality concept in accounting and organization research, an agential realism research approach is proposed in this paper (
It is not only humans that practice accounting measurement, albeit in a manner mediated, enabled or constrained by non-humans; rather, it is matter in and of itself that has been shown to engage in and affect measurement practice.
This paper emphasizes the importance of materiality in accounting and organization studies. Accounting and organization studies have generated important and valuable insights, but have overlooked the ways in which accounting and organizing is bound up with the material forms and spaces through which humans act and interact (
The paper is organized as follows. After an introduction to the performative research approach (section 2) and the notion of performativity (section 3), section 4 describes the ontology of Barad’s agential realism. To clarify the different concepts mentioned in this paper, section 5 discusses some examples from prior accounting and organization research. The final section provides a conclusion and discussion, including suggestions for further research.
Although mainstream positivistic (ostensive) research has been very useful, it has limited the range and type of problems that have been studied and the research methods that have been used (
Moreover, whereas ostensive research assumes that power (or agency) is located in individuals, performative research acknowledges that the power to act also resides in non-human actors as they are related to other actors; non-human actors have the power to interactively transform social life and human action (
The paradigmatic shift from ostensive research to performative research has brought the concept of performativity to the fore. According to
The notion of performativity
“Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (
Barad questions why language and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while matter did not. Butler’s theorizing of materiality is not broad enough (
Agential realism is a performative perspective which aims to understand the complex processes constituted by a number of human and nonhuman forces and is a radical version of ‘new materialism’ (
Agential realism theorists study the research subject in its dynamic and multiple sociomaterial (re)configurations and focus on achieving a comprehensive understanding of practices. The entanglement between human and nonhuman actors and the practices they constitute involves intensive research on situated activities. So, because users and context influence how the artefacts enact, artefacts enact differently in different practices. The artefact’s ‘existence’ is therefore dependent on the time and space of observing (
According to Barad, the moment of analysis determines the outcomes of the research. The ‘being’ of the phenomena (figure 1 (
Agential realism takes into account the discursive and material nature of social practices. As is said, Barad reconfigures time and space as active parts. More precisely: subject, object, body, time and space are not independent entities but components for and of each other (
To make a clear distinction between former ways of thinking and the Baradian way of thinking,
The former two paradigms observe the clay figure as ‘dead matter’. The third, ‘being-of-the-world’ paradigm (also mentioned by
Barad furthermore develops the notion of apparatus to refer to the specific material-discursive practices that help to constitute phenomena through producing knowledge about them (De
The apparatus is part of the process of constructing meaning. Examples of apparatuses are photographs, documentation or video films. The observer or the researcher chooses how to take a photograph or how to ‘describe’ something in documentation. The moment of taking the actual picture is important, the quality of the photograph, the angle of taking the photograph, which way the camera is turned to or which part of a process is documented or not. All these factors determine what kind of documentation or photographs are produced and which conclusion can be drawn from these. The observer can be constrained by the quality of the photograph if it is enlarged on the computer or cannot observe something that did not ‘fit’ in the picture. Consequently, the apparatus becomes an active agent in the production of knowledge. It “offers constraints on or limitations to what is produced as knowledge, and even produces exclusions of ways of knowing, depending on what we are able to conceptualize and understand in terms of meaning-making” (
Contrasting with Cartesian (or Newtonian) thinking
In order to study phenomena, one still has to make a difference between ‘social’ and ‘material’. This distinction has to be made because it is impossible to study the entanglement effects of two phenomena without making a distinction between them. Agential realists claim that these differences made are a result of an ‘agential cut’ (
The measurement of emissions by engineers is found not to precede the recognition, measurement and subsequent valuation of an emissions liability by accounting. Emissions do not exist, as a separate entity prior to accounting. Emissions do not cause the liability. Rather, the emissions liability and the emissions emerge as determinate entities, through their intra-action in configurations of measurement practice. Emissions/emissions liabilities are not a fixed essence but rather an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity (
Choices are made as to the types of matter that will constitute an emission/emission liability, as well as the types of value or meaning that will be privileged, and the one affects the other. Measuring is a meeting of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’. It is a locally situated practice from which ‘matter’ awards ‘meaning’ in the form of the emissions/emissions liability enacted; and from which meaning determines matter (
“Sometimes postponing a decision, especially with animals, can bust all the results or compromise the animal. If you wait two or three days the animal dies or else” (
“It is only through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular articulations become meaningful.” (
Agential realism can at least make three contributions to the literature. We illustrate this by the work of
Agential realism thus offers an interesting and promising avenue for further research on materiality and performativity in accounting and organization studies (
Central to
As a short summary to recap agential realism and to conclude this paper, a quote regarding Barad’s theoretical framework:
“Agential for the conceptualization that everything does something, that everything is performative and has agency – nothing is delimited, everything is always in intra-activity with something else, and Realism as the concept for the fact that the agentiality has real effects” (
Dr. Koos Wagensveld RA is lector Financial Control aan de Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen.
Jasper Jolink MSc behaalde zijn master Accounting & Control aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen en is werkzaam in de auditpraktijk bij Deloitte Nederland.
The notion of performativity assumes a phenomenon is created by the world where it exists. It often refers to the capacity of words or language to act an action or to create and construct a phenomenon.
Discursive practices refer to the original word ‘discourse’. “It refers to stretches of language above the level of the sentence in conversations or written texts” (
“Idea about distinct and inherent borders between the ‘object’ that is observed and the ‘observer’: the observer has agency and is active, and the observed has no agency and is passive” (