Actuarialism as biopolitical and disciplinary technique

Reporting the costs of pension plans has “challenged the accountant's imagination” (Matthews, 1960) for decades. Recent financial reporting has been under pressure to reveal the more “true” costs of pension plans, even if that means revealing their failing health. As part of this call, the actuarial methodology upon which pension accounting is based has been criticized as being wholly incorrect and responsible for concealing that health. A much understudied profession, actuaries have been implicated in pension accounting from its very beginnings. This study goes back in time to actuarial intervention in industrial pensions in the United States. Drawing upon archival materials from the beginning of the 20th century and ending with the development of Accounting Opinion No. 8: Accounting for the cost of pension plans, published by the Accounting Principles Board in 1966, we develop a genealogy of that profession's connection to pension accounting. We find that the worker was rendered visible and enunciated via actuarial knowledge, and we trace the effects of that enunciation on the relations between the employer and the worker. We also examine the relations between the accounting and actuarial professions, and demonstrate how accounting intervened into actuarial expertise. We find that as a biopolitical technique actuarialism has, in order to predict costs, fit older workers into a system that traces employees' life patterns. In so doing, it only partly “destroyed” the individual subject, while still working as a mechanism that enabled old, and new, forms of individual discipline to exist.