Their method of excluding our knowledge and analysis is a part of the historical narrative that forces the idea of “inevitability of biopolitics” --- this keeps us unable to make radical change

In its investigations the current study adopts the genealogical method based on the writings of Foucault and shows how present-day phenomena, including accounting practices and the expertise that underlies these practices, can be understood as contingent. It also attempts to create a “history of the present” by “cultivat(ing) the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault, 1977, p. 144). Genealogies present the unfolding of a non-linear diverse series of events that shaped some present-day phenomena:

We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference (Foucault, 1977, p.155).

Genealogies draw our attention to how knowledge and techniques emerge within discourses that form as a result of relations of power. They show how discourses make certain things visible by suggesting that particular sites of interest are worthy of investigation and intervention. It is through this process of making sites visible that otherwise indeterminate spaces become open to being governed. In the current study, we investigate the employment relationship as one which opened up as a calculable space (Townley, 1993, p. 525), becoming the site for new visibilities concerning workers' behaviours, tendencies, and abilities and in making them calculable through actuarial technique. Opening this visibility offered the means for accounting to later intervene, deeming it of interest to report certain features of this employment relationship. A genealogy presumes a meticulous study of the formation of objects, the transformation of practices, and the intersection of chance events as conditions for the production of discourse. In the present study, for instance, we found at the intersection of lines of thought emerging from social reformers, the efficiency movement and medical research, that the older worker would emerge as an object “with all the conceptual clarity of a moral concern dressed in scientific respectability,” (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008, p. 97).

Such objects are, as demonstrated herein, historically contingent. The genealogical approach reveals that where we are today was not inevitable, necessary nor self-evident; rather its aim is to “… emphasize the historical contingency of contemporary practices, and to debunk the apparent permanence of the present,” (Miller & Napier, 1993, p. 633). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault highlighted the use of genealogy to unearth items connected to present-day concerns, which inescapably form our focus as we look back in time. “That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present,” (Foucault, 1977, p. 30). The strength of the genealogical approach is to give clarity and sharpness to a contemporary problem, in part by its ability to place contemporary tendencies in relief against their historical formations (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008).1 It thus opens the opportunity for the researcher to offer critique of present-day practices (Macintosh, 2009), since it views these as, in part, a “construction of past human choices that may be altered in the future” (Young & Mouck, 1996, p. 127).

This critique takes effect partly through the dislodging of “desubjugated knowledges” that have been released from “unitary, formal and scientific theoretical discourse,” (Foucault, 2003, p. 10). Actuarial knowledge fits so “unobtrusively” into various areas of life, including into the discussions around modern day pension and pension accounting issues, as to be taken for granted, (Simon, 1988). It is this taken-for-granted-ness that a genealogical history tries to dislodge. For instance, in remaining bound to our present-day notion that pensions are costly and that actuarial method has been the singular way to demonstrate this cost, we foreclose the possibility of proposing “radical solutions” (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008, p. 96). We find that actuarial knowledge was more - or less - “correct” depending on how it fit with accounting's then-dominant ideals (such as comparability). Arguments that are made today about correctness, and for and against actuarial theory, need to be understood as part of this same historical contingency. This is especially important given that this so-called “more correct” or “truer” cost is the motivation for wide scale change (i.e. reduction) in pension benefits. By locating disqualified knowledge, we open possibilities to offer alternative ideas, or at least bring discomfort to strictly held views that may block alternate paths. In that sense, the method is ideally suited for the current analysis.