The contronymity of project accounting for performing the relevance of project outcomes
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 22 August 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to advance recent literature on the performativity of accounting by examining how project accounting affects a project organization’s ability to deliver a relevant project outcome, such as a product or a building, for a receiving client organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on a longitudinal case study of a 41.4-billion-kroner (5.5-billion-euro) Danish project of constructing 16 new public hospitals. Its objective was to reduce the average unit costs and improve the quality of patient care. Each hospital construction was managed by a separate project organization and handed over to a separate receiving hospital organization. The project organizations applied a common approach to project accounting. The paper relies on Michel Callon’s concepts of performativity and sociotechnical agencement – approaching project accounting as an arrangement of devices.
Findings
The paper shows that the project-accounting agencement simultaneously supported and undermined the project organizations’ ability to deliver hospitals relevant to the receiving hospital organizations. The agencement performed hospital designs, disciplined project actors and guided decision-making, thus supporting the overall work of the project organizations. It also, however, compelled the project organizations to compromise on hospital designs when unexpected events occurred. These compromises led to the delivery of hospitals, which largely prevented the receiving hospital organizations from achieving the project’s objective.
Originality/value
This paper advances our limited understanding of the dynamic and complex relationship between project accounting and the relevance of project outcomes. It introduces the concept of a “contronymity device” to capture the way project accounting simultaneously produces two opposing consequences, both supporting and undermining the enactment of a particular reality. The paper lastly enriches our understanding of how project-accounting devices impact hospital organizations’ operating cost structures and challenge patient care capabilities.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This article has been in the works for over 10 years, evolving and expanding in scope throughout that time. We would like to thank Editor Lee Parker for a positive and constructive review process and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, which have significantly improved this paper. We are also incredibly grateful to colleagues and fellow academics who have offered feedback along the way; your help has been invaluable. Lastly, we thank our interviewees for their time and insights, our contact persons in the project organizations for setting aside time and facilitating our observation studies and everyone we met at the practitioner conferences and seminars that we attended.
Citation
Themsen, T.N., Jacobsen, P.H. and Tryggestad, K. (2024), "The contronymity of project accounting for performing the relevance of project outcomes", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-10-2022-6103
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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