Governing Social Orders, Unfolding Rationality, and Jesuit Accounting Practices

Abstract

This paper questions a key assumption in the organizations literature that the dynamism of institutional logics and practice variations is the result of rivalry among logics and actors, of tensions and institutional shifts, and of the agency of institutional entrepreneurs. This study examines in rich historical detail the development of accounting in the Jesuit Order, illustrating how Jesuit accounting started from a rationality that did not presuppose an external ordering principle; instead, Jesuit rationality was unfolding—founded in continuous interrogations informed by common, purposeful procedural logics stemming from rhetorical practices used to classify, recall, and invent knowledge. I examine this concept of unfolding rationality in two areas of Jesuit practices: spiritual self-accountability and administrative accounting and recordkeeping. In this Jesuit rationality, the relationships between means and ends, and how and why behaviors take place, were not anchored permanently in a substantive logic. Instead, procedural logics left individual Jesuits and the community to imagine modes of action in the specific social and organizational contexts in which their missions operated. Jesuit rationality was thus unfolding, a persistent and recursive mode of governing social behavior and searching for organizational order that generated large-scale administrative routines and institutional dynamism while never fully achieving that order. The analysis brings into question our understanding of the historical and institutional genealogies of modern rationality and its taken-for-granted link with Protestant ethics.