Keith joined Birmingham Business School in September 2015 as a Professor of Accounting. He was previously a Professor at Warwick Business School and the Manchester School of Management, UMIST (now the Alliance Business School, University of Manchester).
His major research and publication interests are in the historical and conceptual study of accounting, management, strategy and modes of valuing. The focus in the first instance is on (i) developing better conceptualisations of accounting as naming-and-counting ‘statement’ across its 10,000 year history, and (ii) its constitutive status as first form of writing and initiator of the ‘non-glottographic’ naming-and-counting statement form (today manifest in not only in accounts but in charts, tables, graphs, equations, forms of money, etc). In the second instance Keith focuses on the genesis of modern management, strategy and governmentality via accounting, approached as a way of doubly disciplinary thinking and acting developed via learning under written, graded examination and manifested first in business management in the USA.
Prior work in these areas is continuing via papers and articles, with book publication in view. Both projects extend Foucault’s ‘critical history of thought’ in engaging in forms of ‘bottom-up’ theorizing of human thinking and acting, but making explicit the constitutive roles of accounting and pedagogy in shifting our modes of thinking and acting and modes of veridiction.