Technology actors located in relationships within the participating networks shaped, through their agencies, the activities of other actors within those relationships to achieve the three truths of the networks, the privileging of the client, the office and productivity. Nevertheless, this ordering was according to Law (2001) in a “continuing process of movement” (p. 293), as networks reordered themselves through negotiated changes to the relationships of actors within, affecting both their internal and external environments. These were negotiated changes that in chartered accountancy firms were primarily initiated by the agencies of the technologies. The introduction of the desktop computers, spreadsheet, productivity and cloud-based accounting software, virtual personal networks and remote access have all resulted in negotiated changes within the networks of the participating firms because they maintained the network truths.
After computers, the email and telephone were the most common technology actors the networks enrolled into their relationships since these assisted in client retention while minimising network costs. However, these older cost-effective communication technologies caused tensions with the younger actor accountants and younger business client actors, because these younger actors in client networks were located with and shaped by the newer technologies, the mobile phones with their ability to text, Skype and access Facebook. Therefore, to continue to privilege these clients,
teleworkers and other in-office accountants stepped back into their home networks to use their mobile phones to communicate with actors in client networks, blurring the boundaries between the two networks.
Actors within the networks of all the participating firms were also shaped by the agency of the office actor that required them to pass through its obligatory passage point (Callon, 1986), a mode of ordering informed by the accurate completion of timesheets by actor accountants, including teleworkers, verified by observation and linked to productivity software. However, teleworking actors who were located in their home networks could not be observed with the consequence that their timesheets could not be verified. Thus, the technological panopticon was incomplete, as there was no software-generated or observationally verified data from the home networks of the teleworker. To the network of the firm, the linkages within the productivity network were incomplete; thus, the
calculations of translation were equally incomplete, which the actors in the network constructed as risk. That said, verification data was available through, for example, the productivity software and video conferencing, but the agencies of these actors were either not located within the networks of the firms or those of the home, or not attributed to specific actor’s agencies.
Consequently, the location of technologies within the participating firms both promoted the potential for actors to be enrolled in teleworking and discouraged this enrolment. The ordering of the digital technologies assisted accounting actors in negotiating enrolment into telework by providing, through their agencies, access to the network’s servers and accounting software. Translation of client financial materials could now be completed from within the home network. Nevertheless, ‘gaps’ between the agencies of certain technologies constituted risk to the network truth of productivity, a risk which the networks minimised by grounding accounting actors in the physical office.
Younger business people wanting immediate access to information via the digital technologies to make real-time decisions were no longer content to wait until month, or years-end for financial information. As a result, these actors negotiated and enrolled the new cloud-based accounting programmes into their network relationships to achieve translation of their accounting materials into compliant accounts that they could interrogate anywhere there was an internet connection.
Consequently, basic accounting processes were no longer the exclusive domain of the professional accountant.
To take advantage of this change, several of the participating firms identified with their clients that the changed ordering of their networks was incomplete in two areas. First, some actors in these business networks did not have the knowledge the agencies of their locations required to translate the
accounting information into compliance. Secondly, actors within these client networks had limited knowledge to make the resulting translation, the accounting reports, meaningful, thus inhibiting the networks ability to add value.
As a result, these firms adopted one of two strategies. The first was to introduce their client actors using cloud-based accounting software to the best accounting and business practices through regular seminars. This strategy was used to promote these firm-led services to complement and increase their traditional ordering for compliance as the major revenue source. The second strategy, was to support client actors to complete their own compliance accounts and to sell to these client actors financial and business practices to add value to their networks. Both strategies required negotiated changes to the ordering of the networks of the firms, negotiations that varied from firm to firm. C, for example, enrolled actor accountants into a new network ordered to translate, through training, the incomplete knowledge client actors had of how the cloud programme generated final accounts could be used to add value to the client network. A, on the other hand, increased the agencies of specific accounting actors within the accounting network to offer to their clients training in good business practices. With two exceptions, these changes did not include teleworkers. They remained within the relationships of the accounting network translating client materials into compliance, possibly because the majority of these teleworkers were in-office trained and to retrain them would be costly in terms of time and lost
productivity. Two directors, however, would disagree, since they had met the expectations of their younger clients by equipping their teleworkers with the new communication technologies, the mobile phones. These new technology actors located in the networks, changed the ordering of these networks and therefore the mechanics of power, to achieve the changed translations of financial training and client mentoring for client networks. These changes also affected the calculations of translation, because the traditionally used calculations based on budgeted hours no longer applied. New
calculations based on actual hours charged or on budgeted hours aligned with contractual agreements were being developed. However, these continued the reliance on the nontechnology materials, timesheets and observation.
This chapter, the last of the analytical chapters, has unpacked the technological dimension of the networks of the participating firms just as the previous three chapters have analysed and unpacked these networks using the cultural symbolic, the political and the economic dimensions. An analysis that has focused on how and why these teleworking actors were located in relation to other actors, for example, the technology actors, within the networks of these firms, because it is from how these relationships are cultural symbolically, politically, economically and technologically ordered that the directors constructed their meanings of telework and communicated these to the actors within these networks and to the social.
The next chapter brings together these four unpacked dimensions and reflects on them to understand how actors within the networks have negotiated to enrol others to be located in the home network for the purpose of translating client financial materials.