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This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

Goffman’s (1961) work on total institutions has been relatively neglected in the fields of organizational research. This paper compares the conceptions of obedience to authority in two different types of voluntary total institutions and how such conceptions affect interaction contrary to the aims of the organizations. Consequently, by addressing how conceptions of authority and constructions of the obedient self shape conditions for underlife, the analysis provides knowledge about the variety of ways in which total institutional authority works and contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of organizational underlife.

New digital technologies are reshaping the business landscape and accounting work. This paper aims to investigate how incorporating more data and new data analytics (DA) tools impacts the role and use of judgment in financial due diligence (FDD).

The paper reports findings from a field study at a Big Four accounting firm in Sweden (“DealCo”). The primary data includes semi-structured interviews, observations and other meetings. Theoretically, it draws on Dewey’s The Logic of Judgments of Practise and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry and distinguishes between theoretical (what is probably true) and practical judgment (what to do).

In DealCo’s FDD practice, using more data and new DA tools meant that the realm of possibility had expanded significantly. To manage the newfound abundance and to use DA effectively, DealCo’s advisors invoked practical and theoretical judgments in different stages and areas of the data-driven FDD. The paper identifies four critical uses of judgment: Setting priorities and exercising restraint (practical judgment) and forming hypotheses and doing sense checks (theoretical judgment). In these capacities, practical judgment and theoretical judgment were essential in transforming raw data into actionable insights and, in effect, an indeterminate situation into a determinate one.

The study foregrounds the practical dimension of knowledge production for decision-making and contributes to a better understanding of the role, use and importance of accounting professionals’ judgment in a data-driven world.