Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22 (2011) 200–211 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Critical Perspectives on Accounting journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa Beyond disciplinary enclosures: Management control in the society of control Daniel E. Martinez School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2R6 article info Article history: Received 13 July 2009 Received in revised form 2 January 2010 Accepted 22 June 2010 Keywords: Deleuze Society of control Foucault Discipline Macintosh Management control systems abstract This article aims to build on Norman Macintosh’s use of eighteen and nineteen century disciplinary practices to analyze contemporary management control systems. The paper proposes, drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “society of control” (1992, 1995), that institutions are no longer crucial sites of normalization; rather, control is pervasive in the open environment through overlapping digital information systems characterized by speed, ubiquity and heightened accuracy. The article suggests that Macintosh’s disci- plinary studies of management control systems exclude from the analysis what lies beyond the boundaries that circumscribe the panoptic gaze. The society of control is an attempt to contemporize Foucault’s discipline and its inclusion in accounting research may offer another set of conceptual tools to theorize management control systems, normalization and forms of resistance that the disciplinary approach has so far not adequately account for. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. A disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 3) 1. Introduction Norman Macintosh has had an ongoing fascination with technology and the important role it plays in management processes. In Macintosh’s (1985) earlier work, technologies are proposed as an important feature of management control systems, since an organization’s management accounting and control is contingent on the types of technology implemented by the firm. Technologies are defined as the means of production: as the means by which raw materials are transformed into a final product. By 1993, Macintosh continued his interest in technologies but in a radically different way, as the term included the study of technologies or techniques of discipline such as hierarchical surveillance, normalizing sanction, and examination (Hopper and Macintosh, 1993). That is, taking inspiration from Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, Macintosh has sought to understand management control as a disciplinary technology. In this paper, I explore and question this theorization of management accounting in contemporary firms (Hopper and Macintosh, 1993, 1998; Macintosh, 1994, 2002). 1 E-mail address: daniel3@ualberta.ca. 1 Hopper and Macintosh (1993), Macintosh (1994, chapter 13) and Hopper and Macintosh (1998, chapter 8) discuss Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment and illustrate its features by providing a case history of Harold Geneen “the super accountant” who was CEO of ITT for close to 20 years. In his later book, Macintosh (2002, chapter 5) gives a general introduction to Foucault, emphasizing the general principles of disciplinary control and develops a genealogy of the disciplinary capacity of accounting, starting with the medieval merchant and ending with the decentralized management controls systems practices of Johnson & Johnson. 1045-2354/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2010.06.016