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Article
Publication date: 14 September 2012

Kalle Kraus

This paper aims to explore the effects of the increased influence of accounting on core values and practices within the services providing home care in Sweden – a public sector…

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the effects of the increased influence of accounting on core values and practices within the services providing home care in Sweden – a public sector setting involving inter‐organisational cooperation.

Design/methodology/approach

Case study data were obtained primarily through semi‐structured interviews with managers and front‐line staff involved in home care.

Findings

When accountingisation is extended to include inter‐organisational cooperation, a form of heterogeneous accountingisation occurred in the home care services: an internal domain (with a low level of accountingisation) could be differentiated from an inter‐organisational domain (with a high level of accountingisation). When the accounting‐induced disturbances intensified, there was a redefinition of core values. In the internal domain, core values of pensioner‐oriented focus and flexibility during service delivery persisted. In contrast, in the inter‐organisational domain, core values had the legal boundaries of the organisation as their central foundation, standardisation was emphasised, and inter‐organisational work practices were defined as the other organisation's responsibility. The findings also extend the research on absorption groups by indicating the rise of a new type of absorption process. Absorption was not undertaken by a few individuals, specialist work groups or satellite organisations, as described in the literature; instead, all front‐line welfare professionals were involved in absorbing the accounting‐induced disturbances when performing their tasks.

Research limitations/implications

This case study research is context‐specific and the meaning and consequences of accountingisation may differ within the public sector because of the status and strength of professional groups concerned.

Originality/value

To date, research on accountingisation has primarily employed an intra‐organisational perspective. This paper analyses accountingisation in an inter‐organisational setting.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 25 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 11 October 2021

Patrizia Di Tullio, Matteo La Torre, John Dumay and Michele Antonio Rea

The debate about whether corporate reports should focus on numbers or narrative is long-standing. The recent push for business model information to be included in corporate…

1658

Abstract

Purpose

The debate about whether corporate reports should focus on numbers or narrative is long-standing. The recent push for business model information to be included in corporate reports has revitalised the debate. Many scholars suggest this constitutes a move towards narrative-based reporting. This study aims to investigate the debate and draws a comparison with the juxtaposition of the narrative and rational paradigms. This study also investigates how accountingisation influences the way business model information is presented in corporate reports.

Design/methodology/approach

This study analyses data from the financial and non-financial reports from 86 globally listed companies. This study first uses content analysis to code the data. This study then uses a partial least squares-structural equation model to test how accountingisation influences how firms report their business model information.

Findings

This study finds that accountingisation and a rational paradigm shape how companies present information about their business model in their financial and non-financial reports. This suggests that the dominance of quantitative measures in accounting affects even the presentation of narrative-based information. Despite the much-touted shift towards qualitative reporting, this study argues that companies find it difficult to cast off the yoke of a traditional numbers-based mindset.

Research limitations/implications

This paper contributes to the debate on numbers- versus narrative-based corporate reporting and the workings of narrative and rational paradigms. In it, this study lays out theoretical and empirical findings of accountingisation. This study also makes a case for freeing corporate reports from the shackles of an accountingisation mindset.

Originality/value

This study provides new insights into how companies report information about their business models and the influence of narrative and rational paradigms on financial and non-financial reporting.

Details

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, vol. 18 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1832-5912

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 4 May 2020

Ann Martin-Sardesai, James Guthrie and Basil P. Tucker

This paper explores the impact of contemporary calculative practices, termed “accountingisation”, on Australian accounting academics' values. Also, it seeks to understand the…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores the impact of contemporary calculative practices, termed “accountingisation”, on Australian accounting academics' values. Also, it seeks to understand the rationale underlying the development of various university performance measurement systems (PMSs), and their implementation and evaluation.

Design/methodology/approach

A case study approach uses accounting academics' responses to an online survey and also semi-structured interviews with senior research-related leaders in a group of Australian universities. This is supplemented by document analysis. A narrative story-telling approach explores and presents the combined data observations, over the period 2010–2018, of two characters: a “typical” accounting academic and a “typical” vice-chancellor.

Findings

The study contributes to the literature on PMSs in understanding “accountingisation”, the rationale behind the development, implementation and evaluation of performance metrics by senior management and its impact on accounting academics. It juxtaposes and unpacks the complexities and nuances of PMSs and provides empirical evidence by highlighting the perceptions of both the Australian accounting academics and senior university management. The findings demonstrate a level of discontent among accounting academics in reconciling the expectations of increased “accountingisation” within university PMSs. These are juxtaposed against the views of senior university leaders who are influential in determining PMSs.

Originality/value

This paper is novel in considering the implications of “accountingisation” in a contemporary setting, focusing on accounting academics, values and individual PMSs within business schools.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 33 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 11 September 2007

Irvine Lapsley

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of accounting on clinical practices.

1021

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of accounting on clinical practices.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reviews existing studies of clinical budgeting; analyses publicly available data on cost‐effectiveness recommendations for the NHS; analyses publicly available data on the influence of accounting in medical dilemmas.

Findings

The paper finds that there is limited evidence of clinical budgeting dominating clinical decisions, but there is some evidence of central agency directions on appropriateness of treatments, but this is on a cost‐effectiveness basis. Numerous examples of adverse medical outcomes are cited in this paper – but with limited influence of accounting in these decisions.

Originality/value

The paper shows that the combination of accounting and medical data in a topical matter makes this an original and distinctive study.

Details

Journal of Health Organization and Management, vol. 21 no. 4/5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1477-7266

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 September 2020

Ann Martin-Sardesai, James Guthrie AM and Lee Parker

As accounting academics, the authors know that performance measurement is well-trodden ground in the literature. Yet rarely have they turned their gaze inwards to examine the…

Abstract

Purpose

As accounting academics, the authors know that performance measurement is well-trodden ground in the literature. Yet rarely have they turned their gaze inwards to examine the performance controls which they are subject to in the own everyday working life. Over the past 40 years, the rise of the New Public Management paradigm and neoliberalism has intensified changes in the way universities, disciplines and individual academics justify the quality of their work. This paper aims to explore the impact of accountingisation on the field and the Australian public sector higher education sector.

Design/methodology/approach

The perceptions of accounting academics in Australia’s 37 business faculties and schools were collected via an online survey. Additionally, a document analysis of annual reports, internal reports, strategy documents and other confidential material were also used.

Findings

The changes have included the use of corporate and individual research metrics aimed at increasing institutional status, brand reputation and revenue generation. These changes have transformed business schools and universities into commercial enterprises and commoditised education. What this analysis demonstrates is the apparent relationship between various government agendas, the commercialisation of universities and the distortion of the research activities by individual academics. For increased profits and efficiencies, individual scholars have paid the highest price.

Practical implications

If the accounting discipline is to be sustainable in the long term, business schools in Australia must reconfigure their performance measurement systems.

Originality/value

To date, research on “accountingisation” has previously been primarily conducted in the health and social services sectors. This research raises rarely heard voices to expose the actual social and human costs of accountingisation in Australia’s higher education sector.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 8 April 2022

Cemil Eren Fırtın

This study aims to explore the calculations and valuations that unfold in everyday practices within social care settings. Specifically, the paper concerns the role of accounting…

1251

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore the calculations and valuations that unfold in everyday practices within social care settings. Specifically, the paper concerns the role of accounting in dealing with multiple calculable and non-calculable spaces within the case management process. The study sheds light on the multiplicity produced in constructing the client as an object through the calculations and valuations embedded in the costing and caring practices in social work.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a qualitative case study in a Swedish social care organisation, with a specific focus on the calculations and valuations within the case management process. The data have been gathered from 20 interviews with social workers, team leaders, managers and a management accountant, along with more than 36 h of on-site observations and internal organisational documents, including policy documents, guidelines and procedural lists.

Findings

The case management process involves interconnected practices in constructing the client as an object. While monetary calculations and those associated with worth are embedded in costing and caring practices, they interact and proliferate in various ways. Three elements are found: transforming service units into centres of calculation, constructing the accounts of calculation and establishing the cost-value calculations. Calculations and valuations are actuated in these elements in describing the need, matching the case with the unit and caseworker and deciding on the measure. The objectification of the client entails the construction of accounts, for example, ongoing qualifications, categorisations and groupings of units, juridical frameworks, case types, needs and measures. As an object multiple, the client becomes different objects at different stages, challenging the establishment accounts, and thus producing a range of calculations and valuations. Such diversity in calculations concomitantly produces more calculations to represent the present and absent multiple facets of the client, resulting in a multiplicity of costing and caring.

Practical implications

The study might flag up for practitioners the possible risks and unintended consequences of depending too much on fixed guidelines and (performance) indicators since social work involves object multiples, which are always in diversity and changeable in situ. Considering the multiple dimensions within the specific contexts could thus be helpful to mitigate such risks in the evaluation of social care processes and the design of (performance) metrics.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the literature on accountingisation by extending the concept as a part of ongoing organisational practices, materialised within the calculations of money and worth in everyday social care. Besides demonstrating their reconsolidation, this study shows a multiplicity of costing and caring practices depending on the way the client is constructed, resulting in the proliferation of accounting(s) and ultimately accountingisation of social work.

Details

Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, vol. 20 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1176-6093

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 May 2019

Ebba Sjögren and Karin Fernler

The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a…

Abstract

Purpose

The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed.

Findings

Few visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings.

Research limitations/implications

Case study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved.

Practical implications

The study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned.

Originality/value

To date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 32 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 October 2021

Florian Gebreiter

This paper examines the historical background of accountingization, colonization and hybridization in the health services by exploring the relationship between hospital accounting…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines the historical background of accountingization, colonization and hybridization in the health services by exploring the relationship between hospital accounting and clinical medicine in Britain between the late 1960s and the early 2000s.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on an analysis of professional journals, government reports and other documentary sources relating to accounting and medical developments. It is informed by Abbott's sociology of professions and Eyal's sociology of expertise.

Findings

The paper shows that not only accountants but also elements within the medical profession sought to make the practice of medicine more visible, calculable and standardized, and that accounting and medical attempts to make medicine calculable interacted in a mutually reinforcing manner. Consequently, it argues that a movement towards clinical forms of quantification within the medical profession made it more open to economic calculation, which underpinned hospital accounting reforms and the accountingization, colonization or hybridization of health services.

Originality/value

The paper demonstrates that a fuller understanding of the relationship between accounting and public sector professions can be developed if we examine their mutual interactions rather than restricting ourselves to analyzing accounting's effects on public sector professions. The paper moreover illustrates instances of intraprofessional conflict and inter-professional cooperation, and draws on the sociology of expertise to suggests that while hospital accounting reforms have curbed the power of medical professionals, they have also enhanced the power of clinical expertise.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 35 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 18 May 2020

Cemil Eren Fırtın and Tom S. Karlsson

This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care…

Abstract

Purpose

This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care have been affected by accounting as a performative device. Special attention has been paid to how accounting brings about performative consequences in shaping the medical profession and its context.

Design/methodology/approach

The article employs qualitative research methods and draws its analysis on empirical data from in-depth interviews at an emergency health-care unit in Sweden.

Findings

It is demonstrated how accounting, in the form of calculations of treatment time and number of patients, enables performative consequences for medical professional work. It is also demonstrated how the use of accounting engages (re)descriptions of practices and roles, creates accounts of patients, and helps to sustain such (re)descriptions. Accounting terms (such as efficiency and control) have been reframed into medical terminology (such as health-care quality and security), ensuring and retaining (re)described medical professional work in terms of practices and emerging roles.

Originality/value

This article contributes to (1) the literature on accounting practices within health-care contexts by demonstrating a case where the accounting ideas and practices of medical professionals are coexistent and interwoven and (2) the increasing body of literature focusing on accountingization by showing how emerging calculative technologies carry performative power over medical professional work through formative (re)descriptions.

Details

Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management, vol. 32 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1096-3367

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 31 March 2023

Pei-Chi Kelly Hsiao, Mary Low and Tom Scott

This paper aims to examine the extent to which performance indicators (PIs) reported by New Zealand (NZ) higher education institutions (HEIs) correspond with accounting standards…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the extent to which performance indicators (PIs) reported by New Zealand (NZ) higher education institutions (HEIs) correspond with accounting standards and guidance and the effects issuance of principles-based authoritative guidance and early adoption of Public Benefit Entity Financial Reporting Standard 48 (PBE FRS 48) have on the PIs disclosed.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a content analysis index derived from accounting standards and guidance, we conduct a longitudinal assessment of the 2016 and 2019 statements of service performance published by 22 NZ HEIs.

Findings

The PIs reported extend beyond the service performance elements proposed by standard-setters. Despite few indicators on intermediate and broader outcomes, the measures disclosed by HEIs are reflective of their role in the NZ economy and the national Tertiary Education Strategy. The results show that principles-based authoritative guidance and early adoption of PBE FRS 48 influence the focus and type of measures disclosed, while there is no evidence of improvements in the reporting of impacts, outcomes and information useful for performance evaluation.

Practical implications

This paper provides timely insights for standard-setters and regulators on the influence principles-based accounting standards and guidance have on non-financial reporting practices.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the scant literature on HEIs’ service performance reporting. It presents a model for conceptualising HEIs’ PIs that can be used as a basis for future research on non-financial reporting. It also reflects on the tension between accountability and “accountingisation”, suggesting that, although the PIs reported support formal accountability, they do not communicate whether HEIs’ activities and outputs meet their social purpose.

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