Accounting For Public Space

Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414 www.elsevier.
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Accounting for public space

Dean Neu
*
Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4
Abstract How is accounting implicated in the ordering of public space? Starting from the assumption that public space is that portion of an institutional eld where, in part because of the participation of the media, there is relatively more openness in the ow of information and in the ability of eld participants to engage in public discussion and debate, the study examines the relationship between accounting and public space in the context of educational reforms in Alberta, Canada. Using a variety of archival, conversational, interview and focus group data as well as the theoretical insights of Bourdieu and Foucault, the analysis highlights how the nancial and accountability mechanisms used by the provincial government as part of its reform initiatives facilitated changes in the types and amounts of capital of certain eld participants, encouraged the partitioning of generic social groupings such as parents and academic labour into more nely distinguished social groupings, and introduced new ways of saying and doing into the eld. While these accounting and accountability changes were constraining on certain eld participants they were also productive in that the new ows of accounting information created new opportunities within the eld for certain eld participants. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting for public space Although not frequently analyzed, the importance of accountings constitutive role should not be under-emphasized (Hopwood, 1987, p. 229). How is accounting implicated in the constitution of social spaces? In particular, how does accounting inuence where the boundary is drawn between public spaces and more private spaces,
*
Tel.: +1 403 220 4836; fax: +1 403 282 0095. E-mail address: dean.neu@haskayne.ucalgary.ca
such as organizations? And what role does accounting play in organizing and ordering public spaces? These are some of the questions that motivate the current study. Since Hopwoods comment (1987, p. 229) that accounting is constitutive of social spaces in that it can play a signicant role in the creation of possibilities for other organizational phenomena to become what they are not, a variety of research studies have examined the role and functioning of accounting within public and organizational spaces. Studies examining the role of budgeting and standard costing in the construction of governable people (Miller & OLeary,
0361-3682/$ - see front matter 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.aos.2005.03.001
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D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414
1987), the ways in which budgets are fabricated (Preston et al., 1992), the positioning of accounting within the spatial reordering of manufacturing (Miller & OLeary, 1993), the role of activity based costing in the reordering of actor networks (Briers & Chua, 2001) and the pedagogy of business planning within museums (Oakes et al., 1998) allude to and indirectly illustrate the constitutive nature of accounting practice within organizations. Likewise, studies on topics such as the introduction of DRG costing in the United States (Preston et al., 1997), the interrelations between accounting and the state (Miller, 1990) and the positioning of accounting numbers within democratic processes (Rose, 1991, 1999) illustrate how accounting numbers are deployed within public spaces and how these numbers have the potential to change public space. This research has increased our understanding of the role and functioning of accounting by highlighting the various ways and the various domains in which accounting constitutes public spaces and demarcates them from organizational spaces. At the same time, some questions remain. For example, through what mechanisms does accounting re-constitute social space, what are the phenomena that are re-constituted and what is the interrelationship between dierent spacesthat is between public and organizational spaces? The current study seeks to answer these questions through the analysis of the case of educational reform in Alberta, Canada. Beginning in January 1994, the provincial government introduced a series of accounting and accountability changes that centralized educational funding at the provincial level and removed the ability of individual school districts to raise monies through taxation. These changes were accompanied by new accountability practices including the publication of school district nancial statements and student achievement test results on the internet. Through the analysis of archival documents, interviews and conversations as well as focus group data, the current study examines how these accounting and accountability changes encouraged the reconstitution of this particular domain. One of the building blocks for the current study is the institutional sociology perspective of Bour-
dieu, in particular his focus on institutional elds (cf. Bourdieu, 1985). The institutional eld of public education in Alberta, Canada is assumed to be a social space characterized by interactions and ows of information/resources amongst the elds participants. Public space is that portion of the eld where, in part because of the participation of the media, there is relatively more openness in the ow of information and in the ability of eld participants to engage in public discussion and debate. These ideas regarding institutional elds along with the work of Foucault and colleagues on governmentality provide the necessary analytical tools to consider how the introduction of nancial, accounting and accountability reforms encouraged the re-ordering of public and organizational spaces. Specically the analysis illustrates how the introduced reforms facilitated changes in the types and amounts of capital of certain eld participants, encouraged the partitioning of generic social groupings such as parents and academic labour into more nely distinguished social groupings, and introduced new ways of saying and doing into the eld. While these accounting and accountability changes were constraining on certain eld participants they were also productive in that the new ows of accounting information created new opportunities within the eld for certain eld participants. Although the analysis is eld specic, the insights will be of wider interest. The analysis extends our understanding of the constitutive role of accounting by identifying and analyzing the processes through which accounting facilitates the re-ordering of both the public and organizational portions of social space. It also illustrates that within institutional elds such as education, the boundaries between organizational spaces (i.e., schools) and the broader eld are uid and permeable, the result being that information as well as ways of saying and doing ow through the network with relatively few constraints. Finally, the analysis highlights how the ability of accounting to change social groupings may mean that accounting is not only constitutive of public spaces but of notions such as the public interest itself.
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Constituting public space In the early 1980s, Hopwood and colleagues in a series of research articles initially proposed the idea that accounting is constitutive of social space. For example, Burchell et al. (1980) in their now classic article on the role of accounting in organizations and society proposed that accounting is intimately intertwined with organizational and societal processes. Hopwood (1983, p. 288) picks up on this earlier idea, stating that accounting can shape, mold and even play a role in constructing the setting of which it forms a part. These ideas were further elaborated in Hopwoods 1987 article that explicitly refers to the salience of accountings constitutive role, noting that the importance of accountings constitutive roles should not be under-emphasized (p. 229). The article suggests that accounting plays a signicant role in the creation of possibilities and is implicated in organizational transformations (p. 207). Furthermore, it is through the intertwining of accounting discourse and practice that organizational agents and organizational arrangements can be re-constituted (p. 229). In this later article, Hopwood also speculated about the relationship between organizational and social spaces noting that this intersection has been less well studied: The domains of the organizational and the social also have tended to remain independent ones. Few attempts have been made to delineate the both overlapping and interdependent spheres of the two, to appreciate how accounting might enable the concerns of the social to pass through and thereby transform the organization and, in turn, to create organizational practices which can be inuential in the construction of the world of the social as we know it (p. 214). In this study I distinguish between organizational (a semi-private space) and public spaces, assuming that both of these spaces are social spaces. In the remainder of this section, I outline some theoretical concepts and tools that are useful in helping us to analyze the positioning of accounting within organizational and public spaces.
Like many of the studies mentioned in the introduction, my starting point for understanding and theorizing the constitutive nature of accounting is the literature on governmentality. Government, according to Foucault (1991, p. 102), refers to the general and specic ensemble of institutions, calculations and tactics deployed to arrange things in such a way that certain ends are achieved. Instead of concentrating on a single mode of control exercised by and through the state, this notion of government draws attention to the diversity of forces and groups that have, in heterogeneous ways, sought to regulate the lives of individuals (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 3). Miller and Rose also introduce the term technologies of governance to: Suggest a particular approach to the analysis of the activity of ruling, one which pays great attention to the actual mechanisms through which authorities of various sorts have sought to shape, normalize and instrumentalize the conduct, thought, decisions and aspirations of others in order to achieve the objectives they consider desirable (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 8). Technologies refer to apparently humble and mundane mechanisms (p. 8) such as techniques of notation, computation and calculation (p. 8) as well as the vocabularies implicit within the practices of accounting, administrative science and law. The notion that accounting technique be viewed as a technology of governance provides us with a way of thinking about the positioning of accounting within organizational and public spaces. Accounting and other numerical techniques are central to the act of governing in that they allow knowledge of distant sites to be mobilized and brought home to centres of calculation (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 9; Said, 1979). Budgets, cost allocation mechanisms and other accounting inscriptions facilitate the coordination of action in distant locales (Miller & OLeary, 1993; Robson, 1992). They also regulate these distant locales through the introduction of new practices/vocabularies (Hopwood, 1987, p. 228; Oakes et al., 1998) and by encouraging self-disciplining activities on the part of the elds participants (Hoskin & Macve, 1986, p. 129; Hoskin & Macve, 1988, p. 41). Thus
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accounting techniques not only convey information between dierent sites but also serve to standardize practices across the sitesstandardization that involves both the standardization of nancial practices as well as the standardization of common vocabularies and common behaviours (Preston et al., 1997). Whereas the literature on governmentality explains why accounting practices are productive technologies of governance and enumerates the potential consequences associated with these techniques, the work of Bourdieu and colleagues provides us with a vocabulary for understanding the organization and dynamics of institutional elds in which governance is attempted. In particular, the notions of eld, capital and habitus are useful in understanding the static and dynamic aspects of institutional elds. Institutional elds refer to networks of social relations, structured systems of social positions within which struggles or maneuvers take place over resources, stakes and access (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). As Bourdieu and Wacquant comment: Each eld prescribes its particular values and possesses its own regulative principles. These principles delimit a socially structured space in which agents struggle, depending on the position they occupy in that space, either to change or to preserve its boundaries and form (p. 17). Fields are always relational, dynamic social microcosms (Everett, 2002, p. 60) with enduring yet changeable patterns of social relations being one of the dening characteristics of such elds. Social relations and patterns of interaction within institutional elds are a cause and consequence of the eld specic conguration and hierarchy of capitalsin particular the distribution of economic, cultural and symbolic capitals. Economic capital in this context refers to monetary and material wealth, commodities and physical resources (Everett, 2002, p. 62); cultural capital refers to intangibles like knowledge, information, skill, taste, and lifestyle as well as tangibles like cultural objects (i.e., books, paintings etc.) and credentials (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119); nally symbolic capital is a composite form of
capital that occurs when the other forms of capital are deemed legitimate within a particular eld symbolic capital is any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents . . . which cause them to know it and to recognize it, to give it value (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 8). The organization of capitals within a eld inuences not only the patterns of interaction but also the ows of information. From this vantage point, information such as accounting information is simultaneously a resource and a ow. Accounting information can be viewed as a type of cultural capital in that it is both a material resource and a way of inuencing ways of thinking and ways of doing (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 7). Actors struggle to establish a monopoly over valid types of capitalincluding accounting capitalsand, hence, the mechanisms of reproduction within the eld (Everett, 2002; Oakes et al., 1998). At the same time as the subsequent case illustrates, information ows through the social network creating new visibilities and new modes of control as well as new possibilities for changing and disrupting the order of things. Habitus is the nal concept that I wish to introduce. Habitus refers to the durably inculcated system of structured, structuring dispositions (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 52) that are inculcated in the body and exist in the form of mental and corporeal schemata which mediate perception, appreciation and action (Everett, 2002, p. 65). Habitus includes the language that we use to describe and make sense of activities. It is also the implicit values and beliefs that are taken-for-granted yet guide our daily activities (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 61). Thus habitus represents the idiosyncratic but takenfor-granted meanings, vocabularies and practices of a particular institutional eld that both rationalize and reproduce the hierarchy of capitals within the eld (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 5758). Taken together, the literatures on governmentality and institutional elds provide us with a way of understanding both how accounting facilitates the re-constitution of space as well as the intersections between organizational and public spaces. More specically, I propose that the introduction of accounting practices may facilitate
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changed capitals, visibilities, vocabularies and practices. Accounting practices and the generated accounting information are both a type of capital and something that circulates. While it is the economic capital that often provides the conditions of possibility for the initial introduction of a set of accounting techniques in that powerful actors often have the ability to impose new practices (Edwards et al., 1997; Preston et al., 1997), once these practices have been introduced the results are less predictable (Hopwood, 1987, p. 229). Field participants that have the ability to use the new information that is owing through the network of social relations can combine this information with their previous capitals to generate new capitals often economic capital. These new entrepreneurs could be individuals such as accountants who have the ability to prepare the required reports or interpret the results of the new information for their organizations. Alternatively they could be individuals who create new information products which are then sold in the market to interested parties. As the subsequent case illustrates, the introduction of changed accounting practices created new opportunities for such entrepreneurs. The introduction of accounting practices can also create new visibilities for both self and other. As Hopwood comments, accounting practice creates a very particular visibility and pattern of organizational signicance (Hopwood, 1987, p. 209). This visibility can provide the basis for the sorting, sifting and classifying activities to which Foucault (1984, p. 195) refers. Such information can be used by other network participants to name and partition the social population however it can also be used by individuals and groups for self-judging and self-forming activities. While such classication exercises can be constraining, it is also important to note that they can be productive (Foucault, 1984, p. 119). As the subsequent case illustrates, new accounting visibilities encouraged the formation of social groupings by individuals who were proximate in social space. Changed accounting practices can also reconstitute social space by introducing new ways of thinking about and talking about the social
world. As Oakes et al. (1998) illustrate in their study of museums, the language of business planning, accounting and accountability changed how participants thought about, talked about and (en)acted organizational activities. As a consequence, accounting vocabularies can encourage shifts in ways of thinking, speaking and doing (cf. Hopwood, 1987, p. 229). Likewise the introduction of accounting practices such as budgeting, planning, variance analysis and reporting change the habitus of the eld by changing both what is done and what is valued within the eld (cf. Everett, 2001; Oakes et al., 1998). In addition to providing a way of understanding accountings role in the re-constitution of social space, the aforementioned literatures help us to think about the intersection between organizational and public spaces. In particular, an institutional eld perspective concentrates on the organization of social relations within an institutional eld rather than on the notion of an organization per se. From this vantage point, what I call an organization is really a network of social relations embedded in a larger network of social relations. The type and frequency of interactions may dier for certain sub-groups because of their proximity in social space, but the boundaries between sub-groups (i.e. an organization) and the broader eld are always permeable and in a state of ux. This relational view has implications for our understanding of the organizational and the public as well as the role of accounting. For example, a relational view suggests that a binary opposition between the organizational and the public is not that useful because it obscures both the arbitrary nature of organizational boundaries and the connectedness of organizations to the broader eld (Drummond, 1998; Everett & Jamal, 2004). Indeed it is the ow of things such as accounting information that circulates through the network and acts as a form of glue that binds together network participants. This is not to say that the distinction between the public and the private is superuous. Rather it is to acknowledge that within institutional elds there are diering degrees of participation and interaction amongst participants. At one extreme are those situations where the interactions do not extend beyond and are not transmitted
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beyond a small group of participants. At the other extreme are those interactions that involve many of the eld participants and where the interactions are publicized and re-produced via the media. As the case study illustrates, public dialogues (a form of interaction) are not necessarily public in that, because of the distribution of capitals within the eld, not all participants are willing/able to participate. The idea that the public portion of an institutional eld refers to that subset of the institutional eld where information circulates more or less freely and where a portion of eld participants can participate in some manner in the conversation owes much to Bourdieus (1985, 1994) conception of institutional elds and public spaces. However given that Habermas (1991) also talks about the public sphere, it is useful to briey alert the reader to the similarities and dierences between these two conceptions. Like Habermas, the provided conception emphasizes the discursive character of public spaces, a concern to identify not only who is assumed to be part of the public (p. 39) but also who actually participates in public conversations (p. 34) as well as the role of the media (p. 22). However instead of adopting the normative ideal that the public sphere is a subset of civil society (p. 49) that compels public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion (p. 25), the current study adopts an empirically grounded eld specic approach and does not dene a priori what portions of an institutional eld will be public nor which actors will participate in the resulting conversations. Instead the intent is to use the notion of public space to orient the analysis of the dynamics of a concrete empirical setting that is to explore how the types and amounts of capital of eld participants inuence and are inuenced by the dynamics of interaction and conversation within an institutional eld as well as the boundaries between the public and organizational portions of the eld.
Method My objective in the case study that follows is to understand the positioning and functioning of
accounting within the eld of educational reform in Alberta, Canada. The educational reforms that I investigate began in January 1994 when the Education Minister introduced sweeping changes to the public education system including the centralization of funding, a new block funding mechanism, new planning and reporting mechanisms along with a 12.4% reduction in education funding over a four year period (Peters, 1999). Although the majority of reforms occurred between 1994 and 1998, government reform initiatives are on-going. The data-collection strategies and mode of analysis follow a social praxeology approach (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 104105; Everett, 2002). Given my interest in the positioning of accounting within this particular social space, my starting point was to attempt to map the social eld in both the pre- and post-reform periods in terms of nancial, accountability and interactional ows among eld participants. Multiple data sources were used to initially develop the social maps and then to subsequently analyze eld processes (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 29; Oakes et al., 1998). The sources used include: archival policy and other documents, archival nancial records, interviews and conversations, and focus groups. The following briey summarizes these sources of information. Archival policy documents consisted of Alberta Learning Business Plans for the 19942003 period, Alberta Learning Annual Reports (Alberta Learning, 1996) the Review of the Calgary Board of Education (Alberta Learning, 1998) and Jurisdiction proles for the 19952003 period. Archival nancial documents consisted of individual school district nancial reports for the population of 60 school districts for the 19952002 period as well as Government of Alberta and Statistics Canada documents containing overall education spending numbers for the 19812003 period. Archival newspaper documents for one of Albertas two major newspapers were reviewed for the 19941998 period. An electronic data search using a variety of keywords generated a list of 450 articles. These documents were supplemented by newspaper documents obtained from an education parent-group listserv that circulated relevant articles and other documents.
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Interviews and conversations occurred with the following groups of individuals: government representatives, representatives of the teachers union, representatives of the support sta union, representatives of the school boards association, school district trustees, school district administrators, school principals and vice principals, teachers and support sta. In some cases, these were formal in the sense that they followed a semi-structured interview process, the interviews were taped and transcripts prepared.1 In other cases they were less formal in the sense that they were unstructured and were not tape-recorded. In these cases, the researchers maintained notes that were subsequently used as research traces. I refer to these as conversations in that they provide a way of accessing various stories and narratives through which people describe their worlds (Silverman, 2000, p. 823). The advantage of conversations is that they permit a form of interaction that is less constrained by the bounds of formal interview procedures and therefore which allows for the exploration of viewpoints unconstrained by the presence of a tape recorder cf. (Oakes et al., 1998, p. 264; Madriz, 2000, p. 835). The disadvantage, of course, is that these conversations do not provide us with the same level of detail that an audio record would (Silverman, 2000, p. 829). Given my reliance on multiple data sources, I decided to use a combination of interviews and conversations. Focus groups were used to complement the aforementioned interview/conversational data and to provide both a collective form of testimony (Beverley, 2000) and multi-vocal testimony (Madriz, 2000, p. 836) regarding the eects of changed nancial mechanisms. In November 2002, a series of focus groups involving approximately 50 school board trustees and school board administrators were undertaken as part of the Alberta Public School Boards Annual Conference. Participants
were provided with a historical overview of the nancial reforms and were then asked in groups of 58 participants to reect on their experiences of the nancial changes. These experiences were then shared with the larger group and provided the starting point for a more general discussion of the consequences of the nancial reforms. The focus groups maintained written notes of their discussions and the larger group discussion was taped and transcribed. After the social maps and initial analysis were completed, I circulated this information to selected participants from the aforementioned groups to solicit their comments regarding the appropriateness of the maps and the analysis.2 Written comments were received from six readersthese comments were incorporated into the analysis where appropriate.3 Given that the ability to undertake this research was clearly related to my position within this social eld, it is important to acknowledge this social positioning (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 33). In Alberta, Canada the eld of public policy, and particularly educational/nancial policy, is a relatively conned public space in that there is but a small group of nancial experts/academics working and researching in this area. As a consequence, these academics not only have access to the participants but also are called upon to oer advice, give presentations, write reports and teach courses in the area of public nance. For example, Oakes et al. (1998, p. 264) comment how their positioning within this type of public policy eld provided them with access to a variety of government bureaucrats and sites that might otherwise have been dicult to access. In the current study, I acted as advisor to the teachers union and support sta union, presented at the public school
2 Originally I generated three maps for both the pre-reform and post-reform periodsone for each of the funding, accountability and interactional ows. For expositional purposes, these maps have been condensed to one each for the pre- and postreform periods. 3 In total, my colleagues and I conducted 10 formal interviews, over 40 informal conversations, a focus group with 50 participants and received six written responses to our social maps and analysis resulting in approximately 110 respondents/ participants.
1 The semi-structured interviews started with general questions regarding the persons position, how long they had been in the position etc and then moved on to more specic questions regarding how the changes impacted on day-to-day practices with an emphasis on the accounting and accountability changes.
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boards association annual conference, taught senior level bureaucrats, school administrators and teachers in executive and graduate programs and provided information resources to parent groups. As mentioned previously, this access provided a way of testing the social maps and interpretations with a variety of participants.
Re-inventing government In January 1994, the Education Minister introduced changes to the public education system that drastically altered the funding and accountability ows within the province. Beginning in the 1995 scal year, school districts were stripped of their ability to raise monies through taxation with all tax monies pertaining to education owing directly to the provincial government. Additionally, the new funding framework that was introduced at this time provided funds designated for specic activities organized around three primary funding blocksinstructional activities, support activities (i.e. administration), and capital activities (i.e. infrastructure). The instruction block provides for the cost of principals, teachers, instructional support sta, and learning resources. Funds are allocated on a per student basis with dierential rates for students with special needs and ESL students. Geographically-challenged districts are also compensated through the provision of distance and sparsity grants. The support block funds support services such as board governance and administration, operations and maintenance of facilities and student transportation. Again the distribution of these funds is based upon preestablished formulae. Finally, the capital block funds current payments for school buildings and for capital loan repayments on previously built facilities. The new funding framework was the suggestion of an implementation team that had been charged with the task of developing a new framework (Taylor, 2001). Three members of the legislature (politicians) worked with an advisory committee to develop the recommendations (there were not public hearings). The result was a new funding mechanism that consisted of the aforementioned
funding blocks as well as specic limits on whether funds could be transferred between dierent funding envelopes (Alberta-Education, 1995). These restrictions stated that: the funding provided by the province for the instructional block cannot be transferred to board governance and system administration; the transfer of funds from the instruction block to operations and maintenance and student transportation will not exceed 2% of the instruction block to operations; no transfer is permitted from the capital block for school building projects (Alberta Learning, 1998, p. 41). Besides centralizing funding and replacing a loosely-coupled funding system with a directed funding system, the changes also served to ration and redistribute the amount of educational funds available. As Fig. 1 highlights, the aggregate per student constant dollar funding available within the system decreased signicantly in subsequent years. The funding mechanism also had the eect of redistributing funds within the province depending on the demographic prole of the individual school district (Neu & Taylor, 2000). These changes resulted in both the loss of autonomy and a situation of nancial scarcity for many school districts. The ideological shift that occurred in the United Kingdom with Thatcherism, and in the United States with Reaganism, arrived in Alberta in 1993 with the election of Ralph Klein as provincial premier. Drawing upon the experiences of other jurisdictions such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the intellectual guidance of books such as Re-inventing Government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), Alberta sought to both downsize and remake government (Laxer & Harrison, 1995; Lisac, 1995, p. 43). Expenditure reduction, privatization, contracting out, and deregulation were some of the methods adopted to achieve this vision (Bruce et al., 1997). Central to the governments restructuring eorts was a plan to cut government expenditures by 20% or approximately $3B per year. In April 1993, Premier Klein released a paper, Seizing Opportunity, which outlined the new economic strategy. One of that strategys key features was to balance the budget. The Provincial budget statement of that year included a four year scal plan to balance the budget,

Alberta Per Student Constant $ Funding (grades 1-12)
$5,500 $5,300
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Constant $ (1986-1987)
$5,100 $4,900 $4,700 $4,500 $4,300 $4,100 $3,900 $3,700 $3,500 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
year ending
Fig. 1. Historical funding patterns. Source: Statistics Canada and Alberta Learning documents.
through spending cuts rather than an increase in taxation. The plan was embedded in the Decit Elimination Act of 1993. Starting in September 1993, the government began the process of re-organization by privatizing registry services and liquor sales, announcing a voluntary 5% public sector wage cut and striking a tax reform commission (Bruce et al., 1997, pp. 89). These changes foreshadowed the changes to education and healthcare that were announced in January 1994.
The pre-reform period In the pre-reform institutional eld, school board Trustees occupied a central position. Trustees are elected during municipal elections for a term of 3 years. During this time period, school board trustees were responsible not only for setting educational policy but also for deciding on a local education tax mil rate for both individual property owners (what are referred to as Parents and Other Taxpayers in the gures) and also for businesses operating in the region (Business). These funds accounted on average for 36% of the total funds received by the school district (Neu et al., 2002). Approximately 60% of the funds received by the school districts came in the form of grants from Alberta Learning. In turn, provincial Politicians decided the level of funding available to Alberta Learning. Thus for an urban school dis-
trict like Calgary with approximately 95,000 students and a total budget of $489M, municipal taxes (the portion under the control of the trustees) provided approximately $176M whereas the portion provided by government was $293M.4 Fig. 2 illustrates that trustees acted as a funding hub deciding on both how much monies would be raised through taxation and how the monies received from taxation would be spent. Because of their ability to determine resource inows as well as the exibility they possessed regarding spending priorities (i.e. in terms of the type of programs to be oered by the school district), trustees occupied a central position within the pre-reform institutional eld. While trustees occupied a central position, this is not to say that their inuence was unconstrained. Rather it is to suggest that they possessed relatively more inuence and autonomy within the social network in this pre-reform period than in the post reform period. At the same time, there were constraints on their ability to act unilaterally. For example, some government regulations existed regarding both the use of the monies and the types of nancial reports that individual school districts
These numbers are calculated at the average contribution rates of 36% and 60% using enrollment and budget data for the 1992 school year.
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Fig. 2. Financial and accountability ows (pre-reform). Note: the arrows show the direction of the nancial ows (the accountability ows go in the opposite direction). The distance between participants denotes social distance in terms of inuence and accountability. In pre-reform social space, parents and Alberta Learning had more inuence than did business and other taxpayers.
were required to provide. The School Grants Manual indicated that districts would receive funding through a school program fund and a school jurisdiction fund for 22 dierent activities including instruction (on a per student basis), for building quality restoration (on the basis of specic projects), and for debt retirement (Alberta-Education, 1990). Likewise, the trustees were also responsible to the electorate. The annual budgeting process was public in that the trustees in conjunction with Board Administrators prepared a preliminary budget that contained the recommended taxation mil rates and a detailed plan on how the nancial resources would be used. These preliminary budgets were public documents that were then subject to scrutiny and public debate before being approved. One participant stated that within Alberta taxation mil rates have always been a contentious issue and thus accountability was often enforced through the electoral process in that one cannot run for a trustee on increasing taxes for education or anything else and get elected. Despite these constraints, the centrality of trustees in the pre-reform social space provided them with economic and symbolic capital. Trustees did not necessarily possess the education-specic expertise and cultural capital in the form of educational qualications of administrators, principals and teachers. Rather it was the symbolic capital associated with the electoral process as well as
their control over the sources and uses of fundingespecially the use of funds generated by municipal taxationthat provided the trustees with signicant inuence. At the same time, given the distribution of symbolic, economic and informational capitals within the eld, one could also envision dierent congurations of space. As Bourdieu comments, the state is the culmination of a process of concentration of dierent species of capital . . . which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of meta-capital (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 4). This meta-capital provides provincial politicians with the ability to augment or liquidate the symbolic, economic and informational capitals of other eld participants. In both pre- and post-reform periods, Alberta Learning was a signicant social actor. Alberta Learning is responsible for both kindergarten to grade 12 education and post-secondary education in the province. Employing around 1000 professional sta, many with graduate degrees in education and related disciplines, it possesses signicant cultural capital. Alberta Learning is run by a Deputy Minister that is directly responsible to the Minister of Learning: the Minister of Learning being a cabinet minister in the provincial government. While Alberta Learning has some autonomy from the provincial governmentpartly because of its educational expertisethere is a close linkage between the two. The retirement of the long-
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standing Deputy Minister in the post-reform period along with the desire of politicians to exert greater control over the activities of Alberta Learning, increased the tightness of this coupling (Taylor, 2001). In the analysis that follows, I use the term Alberta Learning as a short-form descriptor for this complex of politicians and bureaucrats. In the pre-reform period, Alberta Learning possessed signicant unused economic and informational capital that could have been deployed to facilitate governance at a distance. For example, Alberta Learning provided 60% percent of the funding received by school districts. Likewise, Alberta Learning also possessed unused informational capital. Alberta Learning did function as a centre of calculation, receiving and aggregating knowledge of distant locales (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 9). District level annual reports acted as carriers of information, linking together distant sites and inscribing these sites in certain relations of power. However Alberta Learning did not use this information in a systematic, public way to inuence the activities of individual school districts. As Rose (1991) notes, it is often the deployment of these statistics in the public sphere that facilitates government from a distance in that the statistics come to construct a discursive space which both denes and constrains the conditions of possibility within the eld. As we will observe in the post-reform period, these informational technologies were used to both organize public space and to encourage a panoptic form of discipline (Foucault, 1984) amongst eld participants. The preceding has hinted at the ways in which nancial ows and accountability ows help to organize public space, especially with respect to the positioning of trustees. However the construction and social positioning of groups such as parents, students and school sta was also mediated by these ows. More specically, the analysis suggests that the presence of local autonomy along with the absence of the nancial scarcity that occurred in the post-reform period (see Fig. 1) encouraged the construction of generic categories such as students, parents and school sta. These discursive place markers were possible because the individuals that were subsumed under these categories perceived themselves to be occupying
similar social spaces within the social network (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 113).5 In interviews with principals, teachers and support sta, participants often referred to the notion of an educational team where dierent team members performed dierent tasks (and had dierent levels of status) but where team members had a common goal. For example, one interview participant refers to the collegial and team atmosphere that existed in this pre-reform period: In the old days the principal would be able to say to sta Lets go. In other words, lets do it together and now the principals just say go. In other words, you do it. Its not as collegial a relationship and thats very noticeable. And thats with all sta support sta and professional sta. Because of the nancial organization of the eld, salary and stang decisions for each of these groups was only partially coupled to the other groups. Thus it was possible to eace the dierences across groups. Likewise discourses concerning the student did not distinguish between disabled students, English as a second language students (ESL) and other students. For example, an electronic database search of Alberta newspapers contained in the Canadian Business Corporate Aairs database for the 19822000 period indicated that the rst article specically referring to ESL students appeared in 1992. While the interviews indicated that perceived hierarchies and stratication did exist within the school system, the absence of nancial scarcity along with the funding autonomy available to trustees allowed system participants to universalize both the student and the parent. As the discussion of the post-reform system highlights, funding mechanism and accounting mechanism changes shattered these convenient social groupings of school sta, parents and students.
5 As we will observe in the post-reform period, the introduction of nancial scarcity encouraged individuals who previously perceived themselves to be occupying a similar social space to more nely partition themselves into distinct social groupings.
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Changed accounting and accountability Accompanying the new funding mechanisms, were a series of new accounting and accountability requirements. As the Alberta Learning website states: The provincial government has developed a comprehensive concept of accountability which expanded the focus from accounting for dollars spent to include accounting for results achieved. Accountability for performance involves developing plans to make best use of resources available, assessing results to determine if expectations are being met, identifying where improvement is needed, and reporting the results to the public. This expanded concept of accountability, applying to government departments and funded agencies and organizations, was established in legislation in 1995. The Government Accountability Act (GAA) requires government departments and school boards as well as other public agencies to prepare plans and report on results (Alberta Learning, 2001). The Government Accountability Act along with its sister document, Accountability in Education Policy Framework, June 1995, states that individ-
ual schools will plan and implement threeyear education plans aligned with school board direction, monitor progress, report annually to stakeholders and use results to plan improvements(Alberta Learning, 2001). School districts will follow a similar process of planning, implementing, monitoring and reporting. Included in the Alberta Learning website is a diagram (re-produced in Fig. 3) that illustrates Alberta Learnings view of the accountability and reporting relationship. This diagram ties together the funding, planning and reporting processes. For example, Alberta Learnings three-year plan for education contains both provincial directions for planning and reporting along with funding announcements to envision a tightly-coupled planning, monitoring and reporting system. The accountability loop envisioned in the diagram represented a drastic change from accountability relations in the prereform system. The reforms changed the type, quantity and ow of information within the eld. The requirement that individual schools, districts and Alberta Learning itself prepare business plans increased the amount of activity devoted to the gathering, construction and reporting of such information. The changes also inuenced the circulation of
Fig. 3. Accountability cycle for continuous improvement. Source: Alberta Learning (2001).
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information within the eld. For example, the volume of information owing to the centre (Alberta Learning) increased in the post-reform period. Business plans, audited nancial reports and standardized test results for individual schools and districts all owed to Alberta Learning. This information formed the basis for the sorting, sifting and classifying activities that are inherent in the act of governing. As Miller and Rose (1990, p. 9) comment, this type of informational capital facilitates the exercise of domination and involves the exercise of a form of intellectual mastery made possible by those at a centre having information about persons and events distant from them. These ows of information, in turn, created the conditions of possibility for a normalizing gaze (Foucault, 1984, p. 193) whereby government representatives and Alberta Learning bureaucrats could dierentiate between school districts on the basis of nancial responsibility. However, the information did not stop at Alberta Learning as it had in previous periods. Information was now re-circulated and publicized in a manner that dened the domain of government within the eld of education and re-inscribed eld participants in certain relations of power. Central to this re-circulation of information was the decision of Alberta Learning to publish the nancial results and provincial education test results on the Alberta Learning website. The annual report, consisting of statements of nancial position, nancial performance, cash ows, notes to the nancial statements and detailed nancial schedules pertaining to dierent expense categories, are provided for all school districts. Provincial test results are provided for each subject tested on both a school district and individual school level. As the website pertaining to provincial testing states, this information about achievement is provided to schools and school authorities, parents, and the public, so that they may know how well students in their schools are meeting local targets and provincial expectations (Alberta Learning, 2003). As I suggest in later sections, these changes were productive in that the information created new visibilities that, in turn, created new opportunities for eld participants.
Circuits of inuence The aforementioned funding, accounting and accountability changes re-constituted the eld by changing the capitals within the eld. The redirection of taxation powers to the provincial government liquidated the economic capital and signicantly reduced the symbolic capital of the trustees. In contrast to the previous period, the provincial government was now the funding hub, receiving monies from businesses, parents and other taxpayers. Politicians decided on aggregate funding levels; these monies were then directed to Alberta Learning; Alberta Learning then divided these monies amongst the various school jurisdictions based on the aforementioned funding formula. Thus while the funds technically still owed through the trustees, the discretion that they previously possessed in terms of funding levels and funding uses was mostly circumscribed (see Fig. 4). Changes in the distribution of economic and symbolic capital were not lost on eld participants. A school district superintendent comments that the province has taken a huge controlling interest (in education). They have become the controller the expression I like is the Golden Rulehe who has the gold rules. In the conversations, I often heard a comment that, with the funding and accountability changes, the role of trustees had been signicantly downsized. During the focus groups with trustees, trustees themselves mused whether the province would sometime in the future abolish trustees since the funding changes etcetera had shifted control to the provincial government. These comments highlight that the symbolic capital of trustees in the pre-reform period was partially predicated on the economic capital that they possessedas Bourdieu (1994) notes economic capital is often generative of symbolic capital. Thus the liquidation of the trustees economic capital along with the decision to circumscribe trustee discretion via changed funding, accounting and accountability mechanisms decreased their symbolic capital. Administrators and parents felt frustrated by the changing circuits of inuence. Whereas these groups had ready access to trustees in the
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Fig. 4. Financial and accountability ows (post-reform). Note: the arrows show the direction of the nancial ows (the accountability ows go in the opposite direction). The Basic, ESL and Disabled circles refer to groupings of parents/students that emerged in the postreform period (in contrast to the previous generic parent grouping).
pre-reform period, they did not have the same access to government politicians. Administrators commented that the government treated them as a special interest group and largely ignored their concerns: The options are very limited. You can send in your pretty little letters. You can go to meetings with the minister. But . . . the board also realizes that they dont have a lot of power. Interestingly, this participant suggested that parents had more inuence with the government in that school districts know that their strongest means of getting change is through a group of parents . . . School boards are writing letters left, right and centre and they were getting nothing. However parents disagreed. They also felt that while the government was theoretically accountable to parents, the distance between government representatives and parents was such that parents were unheard. For example, one reader commented the greater centralized control exerted by Alberta Learning since 1994 has not been accompanied by any replacement of the feedback link parents had to their trustees concerning funding. Now they need to take these concerns to the Minister of Learning and he apparently does not reply to their letters. Thus both administrators and parents felt disadvantaged by the new circuits of inuence.
Because of the close ties between business leaders and the provincial government (Lisac, 1995), the changed circuits of inuence beneted business. In the pre-reform period, the concerns of business often got lost because education was a local issue and it was individuals that elected trustees. In the post-reform public space, provincial politicians were both more receptive and accountable to business. Indeed one interview participant comments that it was the concerns of business that encouraged the centralization of education funding. The concern was that municipal education taxes were based upon the value of machinery and equipment that resulted in a signicant tax burden for certain types of industries: The government removed the power from the local municipalities to tax. . . The machinery and equipment tax in this area was phenomenal because of places like P&G and the gas plants, right, because you could tax a business on the machinery and equipment that they had on the land. Well, places where theres more farming, there wasnt that much machine equipment . . . not compared to a gas plant, right. So, a number of the gas plants and places like Weyerhaeuser, they lobbied hard for that, and as part of this transfer, I think the transfer of educational taxes had more to do with getting rid of that tax because once it went over to the province . . . they canceled the Machinery and Equipment tax.
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This observation is consistent with conclusions of other commentators who noted that business concerns and business spokespeople occupied a signicant place within the policy-making arena in Alberta during this juncture (cf. Laxer & Harrison, 1995; Lisac, 1995; Taylor, 2001, p. 77). The proceeding comments highlight how the changed funding, accounting and accountability mechanisms changed the circuits of inuence. Inuence was centred less around the trustees and those individuals proximate to the trustees such as school board administrators and more around the provincial government and its traditional allies such as business. Thus by re-organizing economic and symbolic capitals via the aforementioned changes, the government was able to re-constitute public space. The comments also highlight that eld participants themselves have a tacit understanding of the sources of capital within the eld and how changes to such capital re-organizes social hierarchies (Bourdieu, 1990).
One of the interview participants succinctly captures the sense of unease that pervaded this period stating that: one of the popular sayings in Africa is when its a drought, at the water hole the animals start looking at each other a little dierently. Thus one of the consequences of the funding mechanism changes was to re-construct and re-position social network participants into discrete interest groups such as ESL students, special needs students, gifted students and francophone students. These events encouraged the formation of parent groups dened by these emergent social positions. For example, the web site for the Coalition for Equal Access to Education states: In February 1992, community groups and individuals vigorously protested Calgary Board of Education cutbacks which targeted English as a Second Language services. Shortly thereafter, the Coalition for Equal Access to Education was formed. Since then, many individuals, community groups and organizations have contributed their expertise and support, and the Coalition has established itself as a strong, unied community voice (Coalition for Equal Access to Education, 2004). Similar groups focussing on special needs students (i.e. the Parent Support Association) and French immersion students (i.e. the Alberta chapters of the Canadian Parents for French) emerged or became more active during this period. If the proposals to balance the books encouraged the formation of parent groups dened by particular subject positions, these subject positions were subsequently re-produced in public discourse. Newspaper articles at this juncture continually positioned the dierent parent/student groupings ` vis-a-vis each other, often through the use of quotes from the representatives of the dierent groups. For example, the spokesperson for the Coalition of Equal Access to Education is quoted in response to a proposal by one of the school districts to re-invest in ESL education after cutting positions in previous years: The three-year proposal called for the hiring of 10 new ESL teachers at a cost of $600,000, an ESL psychologist for $60,000, and $90,000 to be spent
Re-organizing social groupings The announced educational reforms facilitated the re-organization of social groupings. Embedded within the funding mechanism itself was a partitioning of students in that dierent funding amounts were attached to dierent categories of studentsbasic students were funded at a dierent rate than ESL and severely disabled students. The funding received by individual school districts was based on these calculations; in turn the trustees had discretion over how the monies would be allocated within the school district. These funding calculations along with the announcement of decreased funding created the appearance of a zero-sum game in terms of programming decisions at the school district and school levels. Following the announced changes, proposals to balance the books were forthcoming from a variety of sources and were promoted and debated within the mediathe solutions included laying o teachers aides, decreasing support for English as a Second Language (ESL) students and severely disabled students, contracting out custodial services, increasing class sizes and laying o teachers.
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on sta development. Two Calgary citizens groups agreed with trustees that the plan is sketchy and doesnt take fully into account the cultural needs of ESL students. Pearl Yip, co-ordinator of the Coalition for Equal Access to Education, said the plan cannot resolve the crisis situation at hand and amounts to little more than window dressing. She added the hiring of 10 teachers is inadequate to address the ESL needs (Dawson, 1997, p. B2). While the aforementioned quote does not refer to other groups of parents/students, the comments of other participants often positioned particular ` parent/student groups vis-a-vis each other, comments that re-enforced the notion of a zero-sum game amongst the dierent groups of students: Some class sizes are bound to increase under a Calgary Board of Education proposal to pool up to 600 teachers and re-deploy them to needy schools, says a local education ocial. The board intends to pump more of its 5500 teachers into high-needs schools for things such as English as a second language (ESL) and gifted instruction, but it would denitely be at the expense of class size in other schools, Lynn Nishimura, president of the Alberta Teachers Association public local, said Monday. The head of a local parents group said such a move would be unacceptable under any circumstances. Parents are already frustrated by the number of classes topping 30 students, and theyre not going to tolerate classes getting even bigger, said Sharon Hester, president of the Calgary Council of Home and School Associations (Dawson, 1997, p. B1). In these quotations and others, I observe how the changes encouraged the re-positioning of parent/students into discrete groups. Not surprisingly, these types of changes were not limited to parents/ students. Similar changes occurred amongst academic labour. Whereas in the previous period the discourses around schooling often referred to the academic team, in this period resource scarcity as well as the ways in which school administrators chose to deal with this scarcity encouraged the partitioning of academic labour into a series of distinct groupings. These groupings included
teachers, aides, custodial sta and professional support sta. Again in many of the school districts the notion of protecting the educational core encouraged administrators to initially focus their cost-cutting activities on peripheral groups such as aides (via lay-os), custodial sta (via contracting out) and professional support sta (via lay-os or re-deployment): Slashing the number of school psychologists ignores students needs and will provoke violence in schools, says the president of the Alberta Association of School Psychologists. Currently, there are only eight full-time school psychologists working for the Calgary Board of Education, down from the 25 on sta over a year ago. To save money the school board redeployed 17 psychologists who now work in a variety of capacities in assigned schools, president Kathy Baehr said in an interview (Collins, 1993, p. B7). Although leaders of the various associations and unions as well as the members tried to maintain solidarity across the groups, the interviews and conversations suggested that the changes and the solutions introduced by school districts to deal with the changes had the eect of dividing academic labour into discrete groups and positioning ` them vis-a-vis the other groups. For example one participant comments the principal says, okay, Ive only got this much money, so Ill get rid of counselors because we want teachers in front of students so thats who we get rid of so we can make our budget balance. The preceding hints at how the introduction of nancial scarcity in conjunction with the other educational reforms encouraged the emergence of particular social identities via labelling processes. As the water hole quote illustrated, the changes encouraged participants to engage in other and self labelling activities as a way of justifying how nancial resources should be distributed. For example, the changes encouraged parent/students who were proximate in social space to self-label and self-organize themselves as a group in order to protect perceived common interests (cf. Bourdieu, 1990, p. 50). And whereas academic labour was already organized into unions based upon occupational activities, the reforms motivated a
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change away from the notion of an educational team to an emphasis on these occupation divisions. Bourdieu (1998, pp. 510) comments that it is often such external events that encourage individuals who are proximate to explicitly name what, until that moment in time, had only been loosely recognized and articulated similarities. In this case, the labelling activities had the eect of more nely partitioning public space into a series of distinct and partially competing social groups. Thus instead of having generic groupings of students and school personnel, the result was groups of specic types of students and specic types of school personnel.6
rhetorical space for similar conversations within the domain of education. Like the case of debt and decit, newspaper articles on education focussed on the topics of nance and funding. Of the 450 newspaper articles on education that I examined, the majority contained some reference to the nancial aspects of the reforms. On one level, newspaper articles concentrated on the nancial consequences associated with programming choices: The board has come under re from immigrant groups since announcing its proposed 19931994 budget to cut $5.4 million in programs earlier this month (Lunman, 1993, p. B1). Much like the debt and decit articles, these articles re-produced nancial numbers that had been calculated in other sites (i.e. by the school districts or by the government) to either demonstrate the magnitude of the changes or to provide a particular interpretation of events: The administration of the Calgary Board of Education is lean compared with other school jurisdictions of similar size in Canada, claim public trustees. The Calgary boardthe largest in the country with 96,000 studentsranks 110 of 141 operating boards in Alberta in total per pupil spending at $5,494, based on 199394 budget details. The average spent per pupil for all Alberta boards is $6,364. The Calgary public board ranks 129 of 141 in administration costs per pupil at $220 with the average cost at $439 for all other Alberta boards (Collins, 1994, p. B4). Thus the reporting of nancial numbers in the media served to both re-circulate previously calculated information and to provide a particular shape and form to democratic deliberation regarding the changes (Rose, 1991). On another level, the articles sometimes went beyond the numbers to talk about the accounting assumptions and calculations implicit within the numbers: It leads us to wonder if the parents of French immersion students are being used as a source of extra revenue. As Martin pointed out, the board has already admitted that their calculation of the
Ways of saying and doing In Alberta as in most jurisdictions, education has always been a subject of public discourse. The reforms, however, reconstituted public space by encouraging particular ways of saying and doing. These patterns of saying consisted of very public dialogues involving some eld participants via the media. The reforms also facilitated changed patterns of saying and doing within the schools themselves. The period immediately preceding the election of Premier Klein and the announcement of reforms (19901993) witnessed the emergence of the nancial within public discourse (Lisac, 1995). Originally, this discourse centred on debt and decit (Neu et al., 2001). We have a spending problem not a revenue problem, interest on the debt is bankrupting us and spending on social services is out-of-control were some of the more popular themes contained in the media. Over the 19901993 period, the number of articles pertaining to debt and decit contained in the two major Alberta newspapers (Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal) increased by over 300% (from 50 to over 150 articles). Arguably this insertion of the nancial into general public discourse created the
Similar partitioning and identication processes occurred in other arenas such as healthcare between doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and other support sta (cf. Laxer & Harrison, 1995).
6
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extra costs associated with the French immersion program includes basic costs such as building and maintenance costs that would still exist if the students were in the English program (Gage, 1993, p. A6). In these ways, nancial re-presentations and accounting technique came to be part of the vocabulary of education during the post-reform period. Financial re-presentations and accounting technique were constitutive of public space in that they mediated the recognition of problems and options available for their resolution and infused the eld with particular patterns of language (Hopwood, 1987, p. 228). While a vigorous public discussion regarding the changes occurred, it is important to note that not all eld participants participated. Certainly parent groups such as the aforementioned Coalition for Equal Access to Education and the Home and Schools Association participated. Likewise the government itself became a very public participant. One interviewee comments that: I guess what I believe to be true about the media is that the person who takes the rst shot gets to tell his story rst in the media, gets read, has some credibility. And anything that comes after is sour grapes . . . The province, they make the big announcements for funding. Theyll do it in a way, I mean theyre good at what they do when it comes to spinning a news release. They set the expectations and we get the ne print and it isnt all that one would have believed to be true by reading the press release. This comment is consistent with the observations of Lisac (1995) who states that beginning in this period all government communications owed through the public relations department to ensure that the right message was being communicated to the public. However the centralization of economic capital in the hands of the provincial government encouraged trustees and administrators to eschew this public dialogue. Stated dierently, trustees and administrators who understood the rules of the game realized that public criticism of government policy usually resulted in punitive actions:
Boards around the province have had a couple of dierent approaches of getting messages to government. One is the cooperative method where you befriend government, you work with them, you work towards incremental changes and you stay out of trouble. The other way has been to publicly confront the government using newspaper headlines and protests and all kinds of things that end up making the government embarrassed or upset, in which case they react badly. And: I would say every board by and large is compliant . . . In the sense that you try to stay inside the dollars. The only one that didnt was Calgary and they got thumped . . . But, its been made very clear: agree with us or else. This particular minister is also very happy to involve himself directly in the aairs of the boards. In the preceding quote, the participant is referring to the fact that public disagreements between the Minister of Education and the trustees for the Calgary Board motivated the Minister in 1999 to dissolve the Board of Trustees and to call for a new election of trustees. The emergence of the nancial and the active participation of the government and the less active participation of school districts within public discourse resonates with Roses (1991) observation that democratic power is calculated power, and that numbers are intrinsic to the forms of justication that give legitimacy to political power in democracies. Accounting and other nancial numbers were intrinsic to the forms of justication used by government spokespeople to justify their actions. As a consequence, nancial numeracy emerged as a form of cultural capital within the eld. However the ability of school districts to utilize such capital was foreclosed by their economic dependency on the government. Thus in this case, the calculated power to which Rose refers was unequally distributed within the eld. Within the schools themselves, changes in ways of saying were intertwined with changes in the ways of doing. Participants talked about the emergence of a business focus within schools:
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And so the priorities change away from student focus into more of a business management focus. And the business management component is very important or you cant have the successful student process taking place. But it has to be near at hand and Im nding that its pulling the principals away from where their priorities should be. We spend a lot of time talking at principals meetings about facilities, expenses, cutting teachers, dissolving programs. We talk about photocopiers and whether we can aord them. Faxespeople are talking about those things because theyre a nancial concern now. These new ways of saying were simultaneously a way of doing in that these discussions became part of the day-to-day activities of school sta. In turn, they facilitated a re-visioning of social relations within the school. Instead of the notion of an educational team to which I referred in the pre-reform analysis, participants spoke of a hierarchical relation between administrators and sta: I think that before the changes, principals were leaders more and I think now they are bosses . . . And it develops a rift or a barrier between school administration and sta because youre talking about their jobs now, youre not a colleague so much as you are a boss. And that changes the game a little bit. Interestingly, this participant specically uses the metaphor of the game in referring to the eect of the changes. Changed practices also involved new types of reporting activities. Participants stated that planning and reporting had come to occupy a central position within educational practice. At the district level, planning and reporting requirements had increased signicantly in the post-reform period: Were required to put together three year education plans which six or seven years ago was not part of government requirements. Jurisdictions had their own plans . . . Theres now a requirement to submit an annual education results report to the government.
In turn these requirements trickled down to the school level with the requirement being that individual schools prepare plans and reports that can then be aggregated upward: Well theres that but theres also other things too because what are the other priorities that we have, how are we reporting on them, what kind of targets did we set, these are all requirements that have been laid out that we have to address. So not only we have to plan for that, but we have to report. Which means that we have implemented a whole dierent reporting process inside our division, which means that in order to report, you have to assemble the data. So we require a lot of information in one fashion or another out of our schools. The preceding highlights how the reforms facilitated changed ways of saying and doing within the eld, in particular that the reforms encouraged the insertion of the nancial into public discourse. Likewise within the schools, participants talked about education dierently, focusing on the nancial aspects. They organized their time dierently, again spending more time on accounting/reporting activities and more time discussing the nancial aspects of schooling. They also viewed internal social relations dierently, choosing to emphasize the hierarchical aspects of such relations. The provided evidence hints at the linkages between the organizational and external portions of the eld. For example, the empirical material suggests that the boundaries between organizational and external ways of saying were permeable in that discussions of the nancial were taken up in both locations, the only dierence being that school district administrators and trustees generally did not participate in the public discussions because of the punitive capacities of the government. The analysis also illustrates how the information generated within schools and school districts (i.e. annual report information) became public information. The next section hints at how the circulation of this information throughout the eld created new opportunities for certain eld participants.
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New opportunities Clearly the nancial, accounting and accountability changes re-constituted the eld of education, shifting economic and symbolic capitals, re-organizing social groupings, changing ways of saying and doing and constraining the autonomy of many of the elds participants. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that these changes were also productive in that they provided new opportunities. As Foucault comments: What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesnt only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance of repression (Foucault, 1984, p. 119). In the current case, the production and public circulation of nancial and student performance information on individual school districts spawned a new industry with companies such as SchoolWorks! using the new information to rank school performanceperformance rankings that were then sold to interested parents and other parties.7 Financial information on individual school districts and the population of school districts was sometimes picked up and used in the media to both question school district spending priorities as well as government policy (cf. Jacobs, 2002). These observations echo Roses (1991) suggestion that such information be viewed as poly-vocal resources in that, once the information is produced and begins to circulate within a particular public space, it can be adopted, modied and used by a variety of participants in a variety of ways. This being said, the nancial information arguably facilitated a panoptic form of discipline whereby
everyone is watched, according to his position within the system, by all or by certain of the others (Foucault, 1996, p. 235). Within the schools themselves, previous sections have highlighted how nancial discourses became more prevalent amongst school sta. Similarly, principals found ways to modify and utilize the newly-introduced accounting practices to accomplish their administrative goals. For example, one principal stated that funding envelopes and decentralized budgets could be modied to organize activities within individual schools. This individual gave each teacher an envelope of supplies at the beginning of the year as well as a line of credit with which to buy photocopying: I instituted classroom budgets for teachers so instead of us having arts supplies, oce supplies, you know all these dierent things where people just helped themselves to everything, scissors, wed give them a little treasure box with their stapler and their scissors and their whatever, one of each of these things . . . hole punch, whatever. And then, give them say $1200 or $1500 as their line of credit. That was for xeroxing, that kind of thing. His rationale was that these nancial practices would economize on resource usage if each person was accountable and responsible for their usage. This example highlights how the practices mandated by the provincial government not only functioned as a form of constraint on principals in that they were required to produce school budgets and annual reports but also provided principals with news ways of organizing and administering the organizational space within schools. These examples of adoption and re-deployment hint at how the new information, nancial practices and nancial discourses are productive in that they come to circulate and traverse the social network. This is not to say that the introduced changes did not have negative consequences for certain groups but rather that the changes simultaneously functioned as a source of constraint and a source of new opportunity for participants within this particular domain.
7 Although there appears to be a continued interest in such ranking exercises as evidenced by the continued publication and discussion of test results in the Alberta newspapers, SchoolWorks! itself disappeared from public view around 2002.
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Discussion This study examined the case of educational reform in Alberta, Canada with a focus on how changes in funding, accounting and accountability practices encouraged the re-organization and reordering of this particular eld. The starting assumption for the analysis was that an institutional eld is a social space that consists of both public and less public spaces, with the public portion being characterized by relatively more openness in the ow of information and in the ability of eld participants to engage in public discussion and debate. Beginning from a series of interviews, conversations and focus groups as well as an analysis of archival documents, the case study highlighted the positioning of accounting and accountability within the processes leading to the reconstitution of public and organizational spaces. Specically the analysis illustrated how the changes facilitated a re-distribution of the types and amounts of capital amongst eld participants with the provincial government and their business allies gaining in inuence and the trustees, administrators, academic labour and parents losing in inuence. The changes also encouraged a fragmentation of general social groupings such as parents and academic labour and their replacement with more nely distinguished and sometimes competing social groupings. Finally the analysis highlighted both how the reforms encouraged changed ways of saying and doingin particular an increasing emphasis on accounting discourses and practicesand how the associated new ows of accounting information were productive in that they were picked up and used by certain eld participants. The analysis is illustrative of Hopwoods (1987, p. 229) suggestion that through its intertwining with the discursive notions of accountability and responsibility, accounting can play a role in the reconstitution of organizational agents. However the analysis also contributes to our understanding of the positioning of accounting within democratic deliberation and how accounting is constitutive of the public interest. For example, a sub theme throughout the analysis was the centrality of accounting numbers to democratic deliberation.
In this regard I alluded to the prior work of Rose (1991), particularly his notion that democratic power is both a calculated and calculating power (p. 675). The analysis highlighted that accounting practices not only facilitated the re-forming of this particular space but also encouraged the insertion of accounting discourses into political discussions. As Rose comments, in a democratic society with an elaborated sphere of civil society and a plurality of interest groups, numbers produce a public rhetoric of disinterest in situations of contestation (p. 678). It was through nancial numbers and by nancial numbers that a subset of participants articulated, justied and defended their interests within the public discourse regarding educational reforms. The caveat that only a subset of participants participated in the public discussion and utilized accounting justications is important. The increased circulation of nancial information and the incorporation of this information into democratic deliberation increased the value of nancial/accounting literacy as a form of cultural capital within the eld. At the same time for school districts, such cultural capital was subservient to the economic and other capitals of the provincial government in that school districts realized that the government usually reacts badly to public criticism. As a consequence, the introduction of new funding, accounting and accountability mechanisms simultaneously produced more nancial/ accounting information that could be used within democratic deliberations and restricted the groups that could participate in such discussions. While nancial literacy increased in value within the eld, I did not observe that accounting became implicated in the creation of a domain where technical expertise (narrowly dened) came to dominate political debate (Hopwood quoted in, Rose, 1991, p. 678). Accounting numbers did facilitate the creation of a space where numbers became central to public discourse in the postreform period but the majority of participants were not accountants and tended to use these numbers in non-technical ways. In this sense, the accounting numbers and accounting discourses were polyvocal resources (Rose, 1991, p. 684) that were mixed, matched and deployed with little
412
concern for the sources and appropriateness of the numbers. Thus while some degree of nancial literacy was necessary to participate in the discussions and to use the nancial numbers, the debate was not limited to accountants and other technical experts. In addition to encouraging us to think about the positioning of accounting numbers within democratic deliberation, the current study pushes us to re-consider the notion of the public interest. Previous public interest research has tended to concentrate on the consequences associated with accounting and auditing practices. Frequently consequences have been dened as distributional consequences in terms of wealth, jobs and prices. For example, auditing research has emphasized the publics that are disadvantaged nancially by current-day auditing practices (Brilo, 1990, 2001; Martens & McEnroe, 1992; Mitchell & Sikka, 1993; Sikka et al., 1998); research on accounting standards/practices has illustrated the nancial and other job-related consequences for employees of certain accounting standards (Baker & Hayes, 1995; Reiter & Omer, 1992; Tinker & Ghicas, 1993); public sector research has highlighted the employment consequences for employees (Arnold & Cooper, 1999; Cooper & Hopper, 1988) and the price consequences for consumers (Shaoul, 1997). Clearly, as this study has demonstrated, accounting does have distributional consequences within institutional elds. Yet of equal importance are the ways in which accounting is constitutive of the public interest itself. Social groupings, as Bourdieu (1990, p. 113) reminds us, are not pre-existing but rather are formed and re-formed by the peculiarities of the eld. In the current study, the analysis highlighted how the changes in conjunction with the other reform initiatives encouraged both the emergence and utilization of nancial discourses within the public sphere as well as self and other labellinglabelling that partitioned generic categories such as parents/students and academic labour into more discrete categories thereby fragmenting the public interest. In these ways, accounting not only encouraged such fragmentation but also provided the vocabularies and numbers with which to discuss the dierential
eects across groups. Thus while accounting may contribute to democratic deliberation it may also forestall the construction of an inclusive public interest by shattering the public into a series of isolated and competing interest groups. In such situations, the demise of the public interest as a conceptual category may be an un-intended consequence of a politics of the numbers.
Acknowledgements The funding provided by the Canadian Academic Accounting Association as well as the comments provided by Je Everett, Cameron Graham, Duncan Green, Monica Heincke, Elizabeth Ocampo and two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.
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Accounting for public space

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

D. Neu / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 391414

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