The production of accounting opacity and its organisational effects
通过丹麦大学管理者的会计使用案例，研究会计如何产生不透明性，使管理者利用模糊性推进自身议程，并影响组织内的权力关系。
Accounting’s role in producing both organisational visibility and invisibility is well established in the critical accounting literature, but less attention has been paid to identifying different forms of visibility that accounting produces. In this paper, we investigate how accounting can produce forms of non-visibility within fields of visibility and the effects on organisational actors. Through a qualitative case study of Danish university managers’ use of accounting, and drawing on actor-network theory, we identify three socio-material practices that produce non-visibilities within visibility: obscurity, non-translatability, and profusion. Based on these practices, we propose the term accounting opacity to describe accounting representations that obfuscate rather than inform. We argue that accounting opacity enables managers to pursue new courses of action by exploiting others, limiting accountability, and capitalising on ambiguity to advance their own agendas. We show how accounting opacity governs in a more narrow, local, and fragile manner than visibility, thereby enabling various forms of resistance to asymmetric power relations among actors within an organisation. We contribute to the growing body of literature that goes beyond an exploration of accounting’s role in creating organisational visibility by showing how accounting practices can create forms of non-visibility, thereby enabling managers to act through ambiguity.