Accounting assemblages, desire, and the body without organs

Purpose This paper uses the ideas and concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and aims to to examine how accounting works in the context of international development. Design/methodology/approach A case study approach within El Salvador is used. Data sources include archival documents, 35 semi‐structured interviews with field participants, and participant observations. The focus is on the activities of the Inter‐American Development Bank (IDB) and the United Nations Development Agency (UNDP) in the country of El Salvador, showing how complex assemblages of people, technologies such as accounting, and discourses such as accountability come to claim or “territorialize” particular physical and discursive spaces. Findings The analysis highlights how accounting and its associated actors further the development aspirations of loan beneficiaries; yet at the same time contribute to the “over‐organization” of these actors' social space. Originality/value The paper illustrates that the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari – assemblage, desire, Bodies without Organs, and lines of flight to name a few – open up for consideration and analysis a series of field‐specific processes that have previously been largely un‐explored within the accounting literature.