Page 353 - Cultures and Organizations

318 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

accounting principles, the GAAP Guide. Being “generally accepted” within
a certain population is precisely what makes a ritual a ritual. It does not

need any other justification. Once you have agreed on the ritual, a lot of
problems become technical again, such as how to perform the ritual most
effectively. To a naive observer, accounting practice has a lot in common
with religious practice (which also serves to avoid uncertainty). British
journalist Graham Cleverley called accountants the “priests” of business. 26
Sometimes we fi nd explicit links between religious and accounting rules,
such as in Islam in the Koranic ban on calculating interest.
Geert’s doctoral research in the 1960s dealt with the behavioral con-
sequences of budgeting, and it unwittingly supported the ritual nature
of budget accounting. This is remarkable, because the budget process is
probably one of the most action-oriented parts of the accounting system.
In those days Geert worked as a production manager in a Dutch textile
mill, and he had been struck by a number of behavioral paradoxes when a
budget system was introduced: observable behavior that was the opposite
of what the system intended.
The main conclusion of the research was captured in the title of the
27
dissertation: The Game of Budget Control. It was based on a fi eld study in

five Dutch business companies. It did not refer to rituals or culture, but it
found that for budget control to have a positive impact on results, it should
be played as a game. Games in all human societies are a very specifi c
form of ritual: they are activities carried out for their own sake. Basically
the research showed that the proper ritual use of the system was a prime
condition for its impact on results. The technical aspects of the system
used—the things the professional literature worried and still worries most
about—did not affect the results very much. The way the game was played
gave the system its meaning in the minds of the actors, and this determined
the impact. This was a cultural interpretation avant la lettre.

If accounting systems are rituals rooted in avoiding uncertainty, one
can expect that a society’s score on uncertainty avoidance will strongly
affect its accounting practices: societies that are more strongly uncertainty
avoiding will have more precise rules on how to handle different cases; in
societies that are less strongly uncertainty avoiding, more will be left to
the discretion of the organization or even of the accountant.
Behind the symbols, heroes, and rituals in accounting there are val-
ues. The less an activity is determined by technical necessity, the more it

is ruled by values and thus influenced by cultural differences. Accounting