Accounting and Science: Natural Inquiry and Commercial Reason

by Michael Power

Overview

This volume is concerned with the intellectual intersections between the history and sociology of science and the history and sociology of accounting. The various chapters describe a broad shift from concerns for the scientific credentials of accounting to a recognition of the constitutive role that accounting plays for science. They explore the links between the ideals of scientific objectivity and different administrative and political values, look at laboratory practice in social context, and evaluate the emerging interest in the economics of science. The volume as a whole considers the implications of accounting for science, particularly given recent initiatives in the industrialized world to make science more accountable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521556996
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/28/1996
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Management , #26
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.79(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword: The flat-earthers of social theory Bruno Latour; 1. From the science of accounts to the financial accountability of science Michael Power; 2. Making things quantitative Theodore M. Porter; 3. Natural and artificial budgets: accounting for Goethe's economy of nature Myles W. Jackson; 4. A calculating profession: Victorian actuaries among the statisticians Timothy L. Alborn; 5. The factory as laboratory Peter Miller and Ted O'Leary; 6. Connecting science to the economic: accounting calculation and the visibility of research and development Keith Robson; 7. Governing science: patents and public sector science Brad Sherman; 8. On customers and costs: a story from public sector science John Law and Madeleine Akrich; 9. A visible hand in the marketplace of ideas: precision measurement as arbitrage Philip Mirowski; 10. Towards a philosophy of science accounting: a critical rendering of instrumental rationality Steve Fuller; Index.