From paper democracy to square bureaucracy: accounting’s geometric ecology and its disciplinary effects in a utopian space

Internal Seminar for Researchers 

Research Area: Accounting

Abstract: This paper builds on the accounting visualization literature by examining how visual features are implicated in the way accounting assembles and is itself assembled. We argue that not only are accounting visual features important, but that a particular geometric form, in our case, the square and its analogues, the box, the cell, has material implications for how numbers and network builders connect inscriptions and through them disparate world views and aspirations. We examine this through an in-depth analysis of how the Logical Framework was adapted by German development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s. We show that the square has certain affordances that not only help explain the adoption of the Logical Framework, but also how this geometric grammar – inherent in both abstract symbols and physical counterparts – mediates and conditions the alignment of initially conflicting utopian worlds by at the same time transforming them.