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This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

This paper seeks to understand kaizen in practice as it travels through time and space in the organisational setting.

A qualitative case study was carried out at a multinational company using mainly interviews for the data collection that were analysed from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective.

This paper finds that the company deals with a series of paradoxes while managing the kaizen process. Efficiency and quality paradoxes are the basis for starting kaizen projects. Furthermore, intrinsic, and extrinsic motivation, emerge in these processes, and paradoxes relate to how spontaneous ideas emerge in a deliberated context of cost-saving objectives. The supply chain finance team coordinates kaizen projects with the collaboration of plant managers, promoting the paradox of autonomy and control. In addition, as kaizen mobilises and enrols the actors, some trials of strength emerge, showing actors who oppose the kaizen network and create competing networks that mutually exist in the firm.

This study presents valuable insights for professionals to successfully implement kaizen methodologies that take advantage of developing a network for problem-solving in organizations.

This study highlights the supply chain finance team's role in enrolling the actors within a network built by practitioners engaged in kaizen projects. Usually, engineers, quality, or manufacturing teams lead kaizen projects, and only occasionally, accounting and financial teams participate, including multidisciplinary teams.

This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.

This chapter examines organisational change processes that occur when accountability demands from powerful external stakeholders change. It investigates, firstly, whether these external accountability demands impact on the performance management systems of two different types of organisations. Secondly, it considers whether the goals for improved performance contained within the external accountability demands are realised. The chapter derives its primary insights from analysing in-depth interviews with managers working in a private sector company and in public sector organisations. The analyses reveal complex organisational responses. In the public sector case study, the organisations tended to reorient their performance management systems towards the external accountability demands; whilst in the private sector organisation, pressures from falling share prices forced managers to focus their decision making on the preferred performance measures contained in shareholders’ accountability demands. However, whilst there is some evidence of performance management system changes, the desires for improved performance subsumed by the external accountability demands are not necessarily realised through the performance management system changes.

This paper compares balanced scorecard and intellectual capital and finds important differences between their theoretical underpinnings, which suggest that the breath of indicators will work differently in organisations.

Analysing texts about balanced scorecard and intellectual capital, the paper discusses not the obvious similarities – that they are both integrated performance management systems – but four more aspects: strategy, organisation, management, and indicators. Comparing these four dimensions the paper discusses the differences arising from the very different theories of strategy that they presuppose: competitive advantage versus competency strategy.

The paper suggests that the very different notions of strategy that underpin the balanced scorecard and the intellectual capital approach make such comprehensive performance management systems behave in very different ways – the difference between a tightly coupled and a loosely coupled system accounts for this.

The main limitation is that the paper is primarily a literature study and therefore it is not certain that in practical situations companies will necessarily adopt the theoretical perspectives mobilised behind balance scorecard and intellectual capital.

The usefulness of that paper is that practitioners may understand the breath of implications of a shift in strategic focus and realise the various organisational conditions that can help mobilise the use of indicators in different ways.

The paper's analysis shows how the two models assume how indicators work in an organisational systems and concludes that the differences are significant and that therefore there are considerable differences in how a system of indicators may work in the context of balanced scorecard compared with the context of intellectual capital.

Skandia’s intellectual capital supplements are pioneering forms of communication that inform internal as well as external readers of the attempts to manage and create value from intellectual resources. These supplements to the financial accounting statement communicate not only in numbers but also in stories and illustrations about the challenges facing the firm. They help develop a narrative for the path ahead for Skandia as a “capable” firm that thrives through intellectual resources found in humans, structures and relations. In this paper we discuss how this is possible and we suggest that intellectual capital statements are not only new types of communication; they also anticipate new “contracts” between labour and management where employees are persuaded to help managers craft the strategies to be pursued in the marketplace of the future.

On the basis of empirical illustrations from five Danish firms this paper discusses how the objects of intellectual capital statements were constructed. These objects were the activities that defined knowledge management, and the intellectual capital statements monitored these through depicting a particular narrativised strategy for managing knowledge – called a knowledge narrative – and through a monitoring system that reflected the activities set in motion to mobilise the strategy for managing knowledge. Particularly, the paper discusses the idea of knowledge as a narrative. It is suggested that for knowledge to count, it has to be able to produce something. This something is found the value‐to‐the‐user of the products and services.

This article will consider the various ways in which accounting can be conceptualized within Boltanski and Thévenot’s economies of worth theoretic. Drawing on two case illustrations, a not-for-profit welfare agency and a government-owned water utility, we follow the unfolding of disputes and the variety of outcomes in which accounting is implicated. We illustrate the role of accounting in justificatory actions and the ways in which it “holds things together” in compromise arrangements. We also illustrate the situations which challenge the “test” of worth and the innovative accounting responses that either facilitate coordination and agreement or become controversial and be the object of organizational and institutional dispute.

This paper introduces a framework for analysing intellectual capital statements. It is suggested that the three‐way model of intellectual capital (human, organisations and structural) can be developed in its descriptive and its prescriptive qualities. Another model is offered which relate intellectual capital indicators to the firm’s knowledge strategy. This IC accounting system describes the transactions that allow the firm’s knowledge strategy to be implemented and it prescribes an agenda from which it is possible to monitor the effects around intellectual resources, to qualify and upgrade them and to survey the portfolio of intellectual resources. An example of Systematic Software Engineering’s two intellectual capital statements from 1999 and 2000 is used to illustrate how intellectual capital statements may be read from this perspective.