Controlling innovation, innovating control : accounting for innovation in the field of university-industry interrelations in the UK
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The thesis examines the role of accounting in configuring innovation as the driver of \neconomic progress in modern Britain. Set against a context of changing \ngovernmental rationalities and greater attention of economic theory upon issues of \nR&D productivity, University-Industry interrelations have come to represent, since \nthe 1980s, a laboratory where British government has experimented with \nprogrammes for both promoting and decentralising innovation, while maintaining at \na distance control through mandated calculations and calculative devices.The thesis \nbrings accounting into the discussion of how private and public agencies of \ngovernance steer innovation by exploring the paradoxical phrase: “controlling \ninnovation, innovating control”. The phrase questions the extent to which accounting \ndiscipline and practices have changed in order to keep pace with the progressive \neconomic and social agenda of innovation. \nBy means of an in-depth study of accounting practices, corroborated by forty \nsemi-structured interviews, the thesis explores the action of controlling innovation \nacross three main sites where university-industry interrelations are enacted, namely \ntechnology transfer, technology incubation, and corporate R&D. Drawing on the \nconcept of socio-technical agencement (Callon 2005) the thesis seeks to identify and \nanalyse the economic agencies that configure and assemble innovation as an actor \ncapable of influencing government policies, corporate strategies, and universities’ \nmission. The thesis shows that controlling innovation involves calculative action that \nis mainly distributed across accounting devices (e.g. Discounted Cash Flow, R&D \nbudget, and input-output performance indicators), non-accounting devices, and \nhuman entities. Drawing on, and expanding, the work of Beunza & Garud (2007) on \ncalculative frames, the thesis finds patterns of regularity occurring in the \nmechanisms through which economic action within innovation is organized and \ndistributed. The thesis also accounts for the tensions arising in the negotiation of \ndifferent versions of the value of innovation. Finally, while controlling innovation is \nperformed through a variety of accounting devices, the thesis shows that such \ndevices are not new to the accounting discipline and practice, but rather are \ntraditional accounting tools that adapted to the innovation rationale in virtue of their \nfluid and combinable properties.
Author: Veronica Casarin
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2508301193