Dancing the Dow: How accounting produces capital market trading and analysis as dance Advanced Management Accounting Ann-Christine Frandsen, (University of Birmingham) (Elton McGoun (Bucknell University, US) , Kelly Knox (Bucknell University, US) and Keith Hoskin, (University of Birmingham) University of Bergamo 27 Nov, 2019 7 7
Dancing the Dow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB6CFEkQo1k
Embodiment and Dance not new insights concerning knowing and acting • as a ‘financial genius’ view • "[ … ] as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance’ • (Citigroup CEO Charles (Chuck) Prince, July, 2007) • OR • (9 th , July 2007, Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/80e2987a-2e50-11dc-821c-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz38mCZisPd) • I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body. The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call ‘spirit’, is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence. You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this – although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’’ . • (Nietzsche, 1961 [1883], pp. 61 – 2)
This is about seeing the dominant ‘statement forms’ of both Finance and Accounting producing knowledge statements which NEED or HAVE to be danced because they never TELL you what WILL happen. Instead they always articulate a version (more or less ‘True’) of what HAS happened and offer only SUGGESTIONS to what MAY happen. This is because these dominant statement forms are non-narrative – charts, tables, graphs, models, equations, etc. They have no verbs. They mix scriptorial and pictorial elements. They are ‘unspeakable’. They demand, so to speak, a ‘dance to the music of time’. So these knowledge statements open a space for market trading as a constant dancing from past to future , and seeing a chart of past market trades as a crystallising of dance past, and an invitation to future dancing. Dance is the mode of knowing and acting. And that is what we read, we suggest, from what Chuck Prince is saying.
Becoming analysts of practices (Foucault/Florence, Entry on ‘Foucault’ in Gutting, Michel Foucault, 1 st edn, 1994: 318) ‘Michel Foucault’s approach…. first studies the practices – ways of doing things – that are more or less regulated ( réglées), more or less conscious (réfléchis), more or less goal-oriented ( finalisées ), through which one can grasp the lineaments both of what was constituted as real for those who were attempting to conceptualize and govern it, and of the way in which those same people constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analyzing and ultimately modifying the real. These “practices”, understood simultaneously as modes of acting and of thinking , are what provide the key to understanding a correlative constitution of the subject and the object’
What about the dance knowledge field? • if we if we also consider Dance as making statements, particularly in modern and postmodern (western?) forms, what do we find? Dance makes statements that have no verbs. it is non speakable and so is again some major and fundamental ways distinct from and incommensurable with what is said in speech and narrative writing statement forms. • That is the level which we are seeing dance market trading and the forms of articulating, as fundamental the same or homologous. These two knowledge fields, fields of expertise makes the same truth claims in precisely the same way.
Dance not as decoration for the ‘true’ truth claims • Dance your PhD (science) • ‘ Any style of dance is welcome as long as you, the Ph.D. researcher, are part of the dance. The final product should be not only fun to watch, but helpful for others to gain an understanding of your scientific research. If you can pull that off, you can win a portion of the $2500 cash prize.’ • http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/and-winner-year-s- dance-your-phd-contest
The Dissemination of Dance in / as ‘Knowledge’ (even ‘Proper Knowledge’) • Bakery Dance • http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/39828783 • Dance your PhD (2016) • http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/announcing-2017-dance- your-phd-contest • Dance astrophysics • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDDw1xRt5E • Dance statistics • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr1DynUzjq0
From first thoughts to our current thinking • Beyond thinking accounting as ‘disembodied’ and ‘number - crunching’ • The ‘view from nowhere’ is always from ‘somewhere’ (Hoskin, 1995) • Accounting always must first ‘ name ’ objects which it then counts • Recognised in the Greek term ‘ logos ’ and the Latin ‘ ratio ’ • Both originally terms for ‘account’ before translation to ‘REASON’ • So accounting as embodied, just like dance, and not just ‘number - crunching’ – • Not just a form of ‘ visualism ’ or ‘visual inscription’ • It is a first writing and knowledge statement form transforming consciousness (Ong, 1982) • It is constitutive (always says something) and therefore also performative • More generally from philology to forms of statements (Foucault, 2002) and historical epistemology (Damerow, 1999)
Our history / trajectory • Listening to Accounting, Bettner M, Frandsen AC and McGoun E (2009) Critical Perspectives on Accounting • Dancing the Dow (2019) …. Frandsen AC, Knox, K, McGoun, E, Hoskin, K. Under submission. • Ideas forming in us / despite us
Where it started…..
Monthly Dow-Jones Industrial Average October, 1929 - December, 1941 317.51 267.14 169.34 76.55 60.90 107.22 101.69 149.49 184.74 121.87 143.76 145.33 124.13 317.41 271.11 190.34 81.44 51.39 103.46 102.38 152.53 187.17 129.64 147.30 146.54 121.97 308.85 286.10 172.36 73.28 55.40 100.31 100.78 156.34 186.41 98.95 131.84 147.54 122.72 319.29 279.23 151.19 55.93 73.10 100.49 109.45 145.67 174.27 111.66 128.38 148.43 115.54 297.41 275.07 128.46 44.74 88.11 94.00 110.64 152.64 174.71 107.74 138.18 116.22 116.23 331.65 226.34 150.18 42.84 98.14 95.75 118.36 157.69 169.32 133.88 130.63 122.06 123.14 347.70 233.99 135.39 53.89 90.77 88.05 126.23 164.86 184.01 141.20 143.26 126.14 128.79 380.33 240.42 139.41 73.16 102.41 92.86 127.35 166.29 177.41 139.27 134.41 128.88 127.43 343.45 204.90 96.61 71.56 94.24 92.49 131.92 167.82 154.57 141.45 150.16 132.64 126.82 252.16 273.51 183.35 103.97 61.90 88.16 93.36 139.74 177.15 138.48 151.73 151.88 134.61 117.82 293.38 238.95 180.91 93.87 56.35 98.14 102.94 142.34 183.22 123.48 149.82 145.69 130.03 114.66 300.00 248.48 164.58 77.90 60.26 98.67 104.04 144.13 179.90 120.85 154.36 149.99 131.13 110.96
Monthly Dow-Jones Industrial Average October, 1928 - December, 1941 400.00 350.00 300.00 250.00 200.00 150.00 100.00 50.00 0.00
Translating #’s into Dance • Numbers into normalized pitches/notes • 971 became 140 points: the music • 7 dancers with 20 points/sequences (high & low) each, but • Too difficult for the body to do • 140 points squeezed into 88 piano keys: 1-88, • 1 made laying on the floor • 88 made jump high as possible bu t • One sequence had a 0: stand still and say zero!
Translating #’s into Dance (cont.) • From left to right: as ‘time’ • Position on stage: representing high/low on the graph • Timing of movements: • a) move faster for each time across the stage • b) Complete the sequence in the duration of 140 notes played
Finance as compulsory movements’ Randy Martin Dance Research Journal : ‘He changed how we looked at our discipline parameters In this examination of the dance, we were able to answer questions about the process of moving through poor financial circumstances that lead ruin to some form of creative achievement. Professor Martin urged us to understand that by looking to dance we can find “sources of value that can lead us to greater collective appreciation” of the things that surround us. It is from this point of view that we can see dust yet also imagine the phoenix that rises from it .’ • https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/dance- research-journal/article/editors-note-presence-of- randy- martin/94420754A32854C06E763BCCCDFC9F03/core -reader
Where can we find finance and accounting and compulsory movements? Traders’ Music and Dance
Where can we find finance and accounting and compulsory movements? Here? Here? Here? Here?
Rethinking the Accounting Statement Form as particular Form of Statement / Dancing • From clay tokens till today, accounting always names and counts • But accounting does so today in multiple different forms • Financial statements / Annual Reports • A cost focus as in management and cost accounts (only since 19 th century) • Accountability statements to shape future action on the basis of ‘improving on the past’ • Targets as in Goodhart’s Law • ‘Every measure that becomes a target becomes a bad measure’ • Performance and Competence as unilinear Merit/Demerit ‘scores’ • The Tesco shopping experience
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