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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2009

Shareholder accountability : the unknown ideal

Résumé

Peggy Kamuf suggests that 'The university must be said, must be found, in other words, must be made to occupy a space not just like that of a market, but one which simply is the market for a specific commodity, the post-secondary diploma. It must be: the force of this logic would be that of the market's own drive to saturate every domain of possible experience without remainder, to translate all difference into itself, as the universal value equivalent. In the US this translation is largely complete. Only pockets of resistance remain, here and there, notably in 'the' university. Now it is time to close these down. This is, as I read it, the aim and the purpose of the accountability movement.' (2007:255). But at a time when markets themselves seem to be utterly spooked, when investors' calculative indifference renders former citadels of capitalism but empty hulks, we ask how the accountability game has played itself out within the domain of high finance. Once, accountability was under attack from capitalist ideologues. Take the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's ruminations on the Sherman Act, a part of US antitrust legislation: It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge's verdict - after the fact. (1962: 63)Such risks are perhaps a practical evaluation of the consequences of what Hoskin comes to describe in his elegant essay on 'The awful idea of accountability': Accountability therefore subsumes much that goes under the label of responsibility, but goes further. … Not only new targets but new kinds of targets may at any moment get constructed out of the debris of past success and failure. The 'awful idea of accountability' as one of the first recorded usages of that term, around 1800, presciently names it, is therefore a system threatening continual potential failure, even for those who are consistently successful. Thus, Greenspan advocates freedom from such accountability, unsurprisingly through freedom of the markets: The ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market. So long as capital is free to flow, it will tend to seek those areas which offer the maximum rate of return… The churning of a nation's capital, in a fully free economy, would be continuously pushing capital into profitable areas - and this would effectively control the competitive price and production policies of business firms, making a coercive monopoly impossible to maintain. (1962: 68&70, emphasis in original.) Market punishment is discipline enough for agents of capital. And, moreover, as he later argued when in charge of the Federal Reserve, the flow of capital from investors to institutions under the free market system, despite occasional 'irrational exuberance' ensures a competitive, dynamic economy. Except when it doesn't, of course. Which led to the following unpleasant exchange: Congressman Henry Waxman "My question is simple. Were you wrong?" Greenspan "Partially ... I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms ... I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." (The Guardian 24/10/08) Not quite an apology - just an admission of a small mistake. Stuttering accountability, we might say, at best. And thus we are led to ask how, when the calculative engine tears down the market, does accountability, for Greenspan at least, suddenly seem so gentle? Is it the chance that he has to re-narrate the events that enables him to avoid responsibility? And what might we say about Kamuf's argument? However seducing and thought-provoking her proposal may be, there are several major problems within it regarding accountability. First, there is a question of who is forced to yield to the yoke of accountability. Employees, certainly, as part of the process of their subjectification (cf. Foucault, 1984; Roberts, 1991) and even if they could pause for breath in the whirl of accountability, they remain locked into the position from which they must give account. Few indeed are those, like Greenspan, that are given the possibility to think, act and narrate outside space and time governed by accountability. Secondly, within the organisation, accountability also means recognition (see Ricoeur, 1994) - only through accountability does the organisation pay attention to the individual. It allows the individual to ascribe action and performance to him or herself, and for it to be accepted and counted. Accountability can be Hell, sure, but it also provides part of the narrative the individual calls upon to make sense of and to get a feeling for their identity (Ricoeur's narrative identity; see Ricoeur, 1990). Any stammering in accountability is also the stuttering in recognition and identity. Thirdly, even with pauses, flaws and hesitations, accounterability still revolves around a demand for accounts - be it through numbers, narratives or testimonies. In his powerful short novel, Blanchot (1973) parallels the demand for narrative to that of an interrogation. Accountability requires grounds, rationality and to tie all actions into a single narrative. No accountability device will ever be able to account for the multiplicity of the trials, becomings and hesitations of life. But perhaps most dangerous of all, and tying us back to the big beasts of the market, insofar as accountability stands as a proxy for responsibility, holes in accountability may also become alleys through which responsibility escapes. Accountability is a complex, multifaceted technology that operates within and without organisations. Causing accountability to stutter appeals enormously as we career through our academic lives, but the remedy is also a poison. Subtle plays will be invented through accounterability that shed responsibility and, as we see in our interrogation of Greenspan, our remaining tools appear to have little purchase

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hal-00441464 , version 1 (16-12-2009)

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Geoffrey Lightfoot, Jean-Luc Moriceau. Shareholder accountability : the unknown ideal. CMS '09 : 6th International Critical Management Studies Conference, Jul 2009, Warwick, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-00441464⟩
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