Research Interests
People normally think that accounting is all about numbers and economic rationality. Prof. Quattrone’s research and teaching seeks to change this taken for granted and conventional view. He studies accounting and management techniques for their visual power and ability to engage the user rather than simply for their aid to rational decision making. In his view accounting always fails to provide accurate information but it is important for the effects that it produces on organizational actors, and for the roles it plays other than producing information for decision making.
Successful techniques such as the Balanced Scorecard, Strategic Maps, 6-Sigma and information technologies such as Enterprise Resource Planning systems all rely on various forms of visualization and rhetorical techniques which help managers to imagine new business, how to align strategy and performance and the like. These techniques and technologies rather than simply representing financial transactions and performances help organizational actors to innovate and invent new business, processes, and solutions. ‘Numbers are figures’ an Early Modern accounting scholar said. Prof. Quattrone takes this statement seriously as indeed management is made by, and produces, all sorts of graphs, images, and strategic visions which inform managers’ behaviours and produce effects. From this perspective accounting and management has to do more with semiotics, visual studies and the sociology of knowledge, science and technology than with economics.
Professor Quattrone is currently working on the analysis of the visual and rhetorical techniques which allow the spread and success of management, governance and accountability practices. He is mainly interested in large multinational corporations, universities, and religious organisations and seeks to bring this wide range of interests and case material into his teaching in the areas of management accounting and control systems. He is the Principal Investigator of a project sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Management Accounting (CIMA) to innovate the design of reporting systems in order for these to generate innovation, wise governance and leadership.
His research interests cut across various disciplines including history and history of science and technology, semiotics, sociology and he is particularly interested in the interface between business and the humanities.