Search results

The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature on accounting’s performativity by developing a ventriloquial perspective that directs the attention to the reciprocity between the accounting signs and the accountants: they both do things by making each other speak. This oscillation explains where accounting number’s authority, materiality and resistance come from.

In order to show the relevance of this approach, the authors examine various ways numbers manage to speak or do things in the context of video-recorded conversations taken from fieldwork completed with Médecins sans frontières (also known as Doctors without Borders) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The analyses show how this ventriloquial perspective can inform the way the authors interpret what happens: when numbers do not say the same thing; when numbers are competing with other figures; and when numbers backfire on their own promoters.

Even if some of the numbers studied are sometimes far from accounting per se, it shows how the absence or presence of accounting can make a difference.

The authors then discuss the implications of this research for accounting social innovation through accounting inscriptions.

This perspective helps to understand that numbers can give great power, but that everything cannot be told with numbers. This is why making numbers speak is a great talent.

This refreshing perspective on accounting could be extended to other fields such as auditing and auditing.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature and comparability of budget balance (surplus/deficit) numbers headlined by the Australian Commonwealth Government and the governments of the six Australian States and the two Australian Territories. It does this in the context of the transition to Australian accounting standard AASB 1049 Whole of Government and General Government Sector Financial Reporting.

A case study research method is adopted, based on a content/documentary analysis of the headline budget balance numbers in the general government sector budget statements of each of the nine governments for the eight financial years from 2004-2005 to 2011-2012.

Findings indicate some variation in the measurement bases adopted and a number of departures from the measurement bases prescribed in the reporting frameworks, including AASB 1049. Findings also reveal that none of the nine governments have headlined a full accrual based budget balance number since the implementation of AASB 1049 in 2008.

While the study focuses on the Australian general government sector environment, it has significant implications in highlighting the ambiguity in the government budget balance numbers presented and the monitoring and information asymmetry problems that can arise. Research findings have wider relevance internationally in highlighting issues arising with the public sector adoption of accrual accounting.

The paper highlights the manner in which governments have been selective in the manner in which they present important budget aggregates. This has important practical and social implications, as the budget balance number is one of the most important measures used to evaluate a government’s fiscal management and responsibility.

The paper represents the first detailed examination of aspects of the effect of the transition to AASB 1049.

This paper aims to examine the mobilization of management accounting (MA) numbers and metrics in social interactions. The purpose is to develop a model of how and why managers perceive and mobilize (new) MA numbers/metrics in a changing way over time in situated face-to-face interactions.

An observation-based qualitative field study of a change project in a large manufacturing company is used as the basis for our analysis.

The empirical study shows that MA numbers and metrics are essential when semi-distant managers strive to solve problems and achieve radical improvement targets, but that the ways in which existing and new metrics are perceived and mobilized during face-to-face interactions change over time. The study provides both a detailed account of the emergent nature of the transformation process and a number of mechanisms as to why managers (inter-)act the way they do to produce such change.

The paper problematizes the generally held view that MA numbers and metrics primarily work as a structuring device in face-to-face interactions, and also, how the processes are constituted through which MA is transformed into such a structuring device. The paper also adds new insights to our understandings of why managers (inter-)act the way they do to produce MA change.

Using the example of capital charging in UK hospitals, this paper shows how new public policy initiatives are justified through forms of persuasion without numbers and can be challenged with empirics. A reading of official and academic texts shows how the official problem definition focuses on poor asset utilisation. Hospital accounts are then reworked to show that, although poor asset utilisation was never a major problem, the introduction of capital charges could disrupt service provision. The conclusion is that the operation of NHS hospitals should be understood in terms of distributive conflict, rather than inefficiency. Through practical demonstration, the authors of this article aim to encourage accounting researchers to use numbers to challenge public policy definitions.

The American Accounting Association (AAA) Committee on Accounting and Auditing Measurement (1991) had recommended that value added be considered for mandatory disclosure in the US in addition to the income and cash flow statements. This study examines empirically the relative merits of derived performance indicator numbers from value added reporting, accrual accounting and cash flow accounting. The results show that the derived performance indicator numbers based on net value added had lower variability and higher persistency than corresponding numbers based on either earnings or cash flows of 673 US firms for the 1981–1990 period. These results and other related considerations argue strongly in favor of the recommendation of the AAA Committee.

The purpose of this research is to examine the role of accounting numbers in one organisation's attempts to enact and calculate customer intimacy, given renewed interest in organisation‐customer relationships.

The paper utilises actor‐network theory in conducting an ethnography at a wholesale financial services firm pursuing a strategy of customer intimacy. The main empirical site was the sales and marketing department, where actors were attempting to further their knowledge of customer needs in the present and anticipate them into the future.

The paper finds heterogeneous enactments of “customer intimacy” through a “numeric calculation network” and a “sales calculation network”. The former sought to use accounting numbers to calculate how customer intimacy was enacted and impose upon a sales‐force periphery a regime of performance measurement. The latter eventually destabilised the proposed performance measures by promoting their own basis for calculating customers. These were more diverse and “implicit”, comprising talk and communication through co‐location and proximity with customers.

The paper provides a number of insights into the role of accounting as a calculative practice. The observed emergence of novel means of producing accounting numbers outside the domain of the accounting function and within the sales and marketing department has important implications for the practice and study of accounting. In addition, potential limits to the use of accounting in enabling “action at a distance” are identified through the observed contest between “hard” accounting' numbers and softer modes of calculation.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how teaching broader accounting concepts through real life non-financial case study information (such as COVID-19 case reporting) can assist students understanding accounting’s technical, social and moral perspectives. Accounting education and practice has traditionally focussed on the technical aspects of accounting and has situated accounting within a financial context.

This exploratory study uses content analysis of COVID-19 case and death numbers reported by several international health reporting agencies. This study does not set out to provide a detailed technical or comparative jurisdictional analysis of the decision-usefulness of COVID-19 information. Rather, this study looks at the “decision-usefulness” of the COVID-19 case and death number information, and provides examples that educators can draw upon for inspiration when showing how the qualitative characteristics of decision-useful information can be applied to non-financial information. This study also highlights, by use of a “novel data set”, the technical, social and moral aspects of accounting.

This study finds that the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for accounting education by positioning the qualitative characteristics of decision-useful information beyond a financial context. The exploration of accounting within this setting effectively demonstrates that accounting has “technical”, “social” and “moral” dimensions.

This paper fulfils an identified need to include teaching of decision-usefulness of non-financial information in the accounting curriculum to ensure that future professional accountants possess technical and professional competency skills.

This paper aims to examine an early stage of the institutionalization of accounting practices in devolved UK governments, concentrating on: the construction by devolved bodies of a “rational” set of planning and budgeting documents; the extent of homogeneity/heterogeneity in organizational response to seemingly similar institutional pressures; and politicians' cognition of accounting numbers.

The paper uses neo‐institutional theory to examine the planning and budgeting documents of the devolved bodies and material gathered from semi‐structured interviews.

The findings point to a process of nested translations, from mission through aims and objectives to targets, with accounting numbers present only in the last stage whereby time‐bounded targets are formulated and used to assess achievements. Because of the negotiations around the diverging interests of actors, the translation process is neither linear nor stable.

The paper contributes to the literature by: examining the emergence and use of new accounting and budgeting systems in political organizations; understanding the experience of institutionalization of accounting practices; and exploring the impact of accounting reform on political deliberation and joined‐up government.

This paper aims to analyze the process of producing a reported profit number to understand how different actors overcome the tensions arising from the often conflicting value frames that apply in different situations during this process and how the actors can benefit from the ensuing friction.

The tensions found in the profit production process are theorized in terms of dissonance (Stark, 2009), emphasizing how multiple voices, drawing on different value frames, contribute to the search for a profit number. The authors study this by means of a case study of a large listed company in the construction industry, where, because of how judgment pervades the profit production process, the search for profit is particularly exposed.

The authors find three important value frames – caution, control and compliance – which managers, accountants and auditors draw on in the profit production process, depending on the situation they find themselves in. With this finding, the authors contribute to the previous research on financial reporting and management work and the production of profits by demonstrating how the relationships between the involved actors – primarily the auditor–client relationship – can be characterized by principled and constructive rivalry in which competing value frames can coexist alongside each other and how the dissonance created in these situations can produce generative and productive friction.

Previous research has mostly focused on profit measurement, taking the existence of a “true” profit number for granted. The auditor–client negotiation literature typically suggests that actors endeavor to solve situations in a zero-sum game where different value frames are present. This paper, drawing on an incipient theoretical approach to accounting research which emphasizes multivocality and perspective, contributes to the nascent research on financial accounting and management work in general and the profit production process in particular. With empirical illustrations of the dissonance found in this process, this paper suggests that tensions resulting from dissonance (Stark, 2009) may be a resource in situations like the profit production process.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to illustrate the way in which carbon emissions are given calculative agency. The authors contribute to sociology of quantification with a specific focus on the performativity of the carbon number as it was introduced to the organization’s capital investment accounts. In following an intangible gas to a physical amount and then to a dollar value, the authors used categories from the sociology of quantification (Espeland and Stevens, 2008) to explore the persuasive attributes of the newly created number and the way it changed the work of actors, including the way they reacted and viewed authority.

An empirical case study in a large Australian water utility drawing on insights from the sociology of calculation.

The authors present empirics on the calculative appeal of the carbon emissions number, how it came into being and its performative (or reactive) effects. The number disciplined behaviour and acted like a boundary object, while at the same time, enroled allies through its aesthetic appeal in management accounting system designs. In framing the empirics, the authors were able to highlight how the carbon number became a visible actor in the newly emergent and evolving carbon market.

This paper provides an empirical framing that continues the project of writing the sociology of calculation into accounting.

This study contributes to the sociology of quantification in accounting with an empirical framing device to reveal the representational work of a number and how it expands as it becomes implicated in broader networks of calculation.