ACCOUNTING AS A TOOL TO EXERCISE BIOPOWER AND BIOSECURITY: THE COVID-19 EXPERIENCE IN ITALY AND ENGLAND

The recent Covid-19 outbreak posed under the spotlight several aspects of the management of a disastrous event as a pandemic. During the earliest stages of the pandemic, governments from all over the world issued extraordinary measures aiming to both protect public health fighting the pandemic and protect their economies. The management of the pandemic was not just a sanitary or economical fact, but it embraced the whole society under several aspect, including the ethical and bioethical ones. Thus, Covid-19 pandemics and the management of it can be analysed under the philosophical lenses of biopower and biopolitics, deeply studied by philosophers Foucault and Agamben. Referring to scientific literature which considers accounting not only a technical tool but a social practice, the discipline can be used as a tool to influence people’s behaviour and was used to help governments to manage the pandemic and also as a tool to monitor sick people and healthcare facilities. This research analyses and compares how Italy and England managed the pandemic and which role accounting played helping the governments in this effort. To absolve this task, extraordinary measures adopted in both countries will be analysed aiming to determine how they effectively helped in fighting the pandemics. This work studies the management of the pandemic under the biopolitical lenses, trying to identify what kind of biopower was utilised by both countries. In fact, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of biopower: Foucault’s one, oriented toward the multiplication of life, a form of power, exercised by the government, which aims to protect, favour and improve life and its quality; and Agamben’s biopower, that evolves in biosecurity and can be reassumed as the biological life used as an instrument to oppress and control the population.