Research seminar by François-Régis Puyou from emlyon business school
Authors: Edwige Nortier (emlyon business school); Pauline Boisselier (Paris Assas), François-Régis Puyou (emlyon business school)
Drawing on documents produced by the French government and city councils over the 2014-2022 period, we explore how the combination of maps and accounting is used to identify and act on poverty. We use the French Urban Policy as a case study of a fight against poverty. The 2014 Lamy law in France changed how the government allocated its financial aid for priority urban neighborhoods (PUNs), introducing a process presented as objective and transparent, promoting administrative simplification and resource concentration but without much consideration for local contexts and populations. The article shows how gridded maps of the national territory and statistical data of the residents’ income levels are mobilized together to discharge the expression of national solidarity. It also argues that the boundaries of PUNs are often drawn involving elected representatives promoting the notion of lived neighborhoods in an attempt to adapt the mapping of urban poverty to local contingencies. This article thus bears witness to a centralized statistical approach to the fight against poverty, but one that is at times tinged with more contextualized elements. It provides a critical illustration of how the combination of mapping and accounting data may accompany negotiations of the perimeter of public action to combat poverty.
François-Régis Puyou is a professor of management accounting at emlyon business school. After working as a management accountant, he completed his Doctoral studies in sociology at Sciences-Po Paris. He subsequently held teaching and research positions at Audencia Business School and at the University of St Andrews’ school of management. His works relate primarily with critical approaches to management accounting practices. In particular he has written, often in collaboration, on the social and organizational impacts of accounting tools and practices, on the phenomenology of management control systems and on the power of the visualization in management and society.