The spatial downgrading of accounting clerks: the case of Pont-à-Mousson

Abstract

Research into accountancy has concentrated largely on professional accountants and has tended to ignore accounting clerks. Based on a micro-historical approach and the case of a French company as a starting point, this study explores the evolution of workspace and demonstrates how the space allocated to accountants changed during the inter-war period. We adopt Bourdieu's notion of social space to bring together spatial practices and overhead cost calculations, and Foucault's analysis of space to define office space mobility. This work sheds light on the influence of Taylorism on the accounting world, how it affected accounting clerks and, finally, the social downgrading that resulted from the reconfiguration of workspaces. This research contributes to the history of the workspace and to the history of the separation between accounting clerks and chartered accountants.

The Construction of the Efficient Office: Scientific Management, Accountability, and the Neo‐Liberal State

“…As Cooper () has argued, such supervision of the individual objectifies a human being as a tool, the purpose of which is to pursue and produce efficiency and profit, thereby producing a financial return on themselves; so that the individual is transmogrified from person to performance metric. From this perspective, office clerks were viewed by scientific management as minimizable overhead cost items to be managed as part of the agenda for organizing and controlling office processes (Labardin ). Thus supervisors were construed as essential tools of authority‐based control over individual office clerks (Parker ).…”

Accounting and work in historical perspective

“…Other topics on accounting and work deserve future study, like for instance the history of workspaces as revelatory forms of status, or of accountability, building on Labardin (2014), Parker and Jeacle (2019), but also studies on the ways in which work is organised and accounted for (for example, telecommuting, remote work).…”

Spatiality and accounting: The case of female segregation in audit firms

“…Beyond the issue of gendering workspaces, research at the intersection of accounting and spatiality has been limited, albeit with some appreciation of spatial arrangements in the study of professionalisation projects and management accounting. For instance, Labardin (2014) studies workspaces of French accounting clerks during the first half of the twentieth century and explains how a re-arrangement of their workspace reinforced their social inferiority. Other authors reach similar conclusions by investigating how architecture is symbolically linked to power at head offices (Leslie, 2011), in the banking sector (Frandsen et al, 2012) and also in accounting institutions (McKinstry, 1997;Edwards & Walker, 2010).…”

“…Overall, the literature recognises the implications of spatial arrangements in accounting (e.g. Carmona et al, 2002;Labardin, 2014) and the gendering of professional interactions and career opportunities in audit or accountancy firms (e.g. Anderson-Gough et al, 2005;Kamla, 2012;Kamla, 2014;Haynes, 2013).…”