François-Régis PUYOU

"Using examples from Rome, the Renaissance, and modernity, this chapter takes an historical view on how accounts allow organizations to coalesce. This phenomenon is described as a process of composition where the visual and material spaces of accounts prompt their users to perform ordered classifications of arguments that make organizations tangible. Organizing is thus conceived as the regular encounter between people and artefacts. Such encounters support the coexistence of different interconnected organizings, resulting from multiple engagements with the signs and words in account books, as illustrated by the outcomes of budgetary discussions between engineers and traders in a hydroelectric company."

"This chapter explores some of the impacts of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) visual interfaces on organizational learning processes. Inspired by the work of the phenomenologist Michel Henry, it suggests that the visual design of ERP outputs (graphs, figures, and images) are abstract representations constitutive of an ideology that make users privilege virtual management over subjective experience to guide their actions and gain knowledge from situations. A video, available online between 200 and 2007 on the SAP website, illustrates how the clarity, simplicity, aesthetic, and formal coherence of ERPs screens make the long known managerial myth of “being in control at a distance” look closer at hand than ever. The video exemplifies ideal notations of learning, managing, and organizing “with a click,” urging users to follow instructions of the instrument and rely on indirect communications channels to go on with the work at hand to the detriment of learning and innovation. However, empirical evidence from a case study illustrate that not all managers are not permanently lured by ERP’s prescriptions. Efforts to confront and combine lived experience with abstract representations contribute, for example, to unexpected and innovational operational developments and new knowledge."