The aim of this paper is to rework contemporary notions of power by acknowledging discretion and membership as the `other' side of an increasingly familiar story of organizational domination through calculation and surveillance. The paper first identifies neglected aspects of power, particularly associated with a discretionary ability to defer affirmations of membership. Such power effects might seem ephemeral and temporary, but when considered alongside translation effects generated by the technologies of managing, particularly accounting numbers, it becomes clearer that discretion can be both redistributed and accumulated in organizations. The ensuing power effects become extended across space and time. It is argued therefore that any full reworking of power needs to consider how `centres of discretion' are created simultaneously alongside `centres of calculation'.

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts 'pass muster' and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co-presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like 'action at a distance'.Taking numbers to act as 'bearers of culture', the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to 'occasions' in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets.The article begins by exploring how 'calls to account' are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such 'gaps' affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of 'co-presence'.The violence of forgetting, (Derrida, 1976: 37) ,, a procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy, and anamorphosis that elaborates an 'initial forgetting,' (Lyotard, 1993: 80) You will fmd in the complex of ordinary, mundane accounts that there are practices for locating monsters but that there are also practices for burying them. There are practices for refusing the existence of exceptions. (Garfmkel, 1968)

This paper explores self as a site of consumption. Arguing that most views of self are caught in a production metaphor, the paper goes on to suggest that the limitations to Mary Douglas's theory of consumption lies in its lack of theorizing in terms of consumption of self. The paper then examines the notions of extension and exchange as they have been elaborated by Marilyn Strathern. Pointing out that there can be no 'return' from extension to a core self, merely exchange to another configuration, the paper illustrates how appropriation of artefacts makes possible performance on a scale.

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Ideas about control are enriched by attending to cultural performances taking place in everyday organizational life. While much literature conflates culture with control, purists try to exclude control devices altogether, as if these artefacts cannot be expressive of real forms of culture. This view overlooks how managers make an `exhibition' of such artefacts on a daily basis in order to cut a figure of being `in' control. By closely examining which material is made visible and available, and when, the paper also challenges assumptions about the `performed order' being hegemonic. The paper illustrates how everyday `exhibitions' of membership over-lap into `displays' of self as the successful, or charismatic manager. In that cultural performances set a performer apart (as different) at the same time as figuring them as members (as the same), the paper argues that the performed order is always motile to the precise artefacts being made visible and available.