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Much has been made of economizing. Yet, social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economizing of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economizing and marketizing of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. The authors consider a specific case of the economizing of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a “failure regime” for NHS Foundation Trusts modeled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favor of a regime based initially on the notion of “de-authorization.” The notion of de-authorization was then itself abandoned, in favor of the notion of “unsustainable provider,” most recently also called the Trust Special Administrators regime. The authors suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of health care, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that “exit” models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economizing and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, transparency became a rhetorical token used to provide a solution to financial problems. This study examines how transparency materialized in the context of the European securitization industry, which was largely blamed for the credit crunch. The authors show that although transparency was broadly associated with a political call for financial system reform, in the European securitization industry it provided the basis on which to repurpose its market infrastructure. The authors introduce the concept of transparency work to show that transparency is a market achievement organized as a standardization network of heterogeneous actors aiming at establishing a new calculative infrastructure for managing credit risk. Combining insights from information infrastructure research and Economic Sociology, the authors contribute to a distributed and networked understanding of information infrastructure development.

Most carbon accounting consists of valuing what has not happened; such absent entities and their materialisation through simulated calculations can enact political participation, however. By using Marres’s (2012) notion of an “experimental site of material politics”, this paper aims to investigate the mediating role of simulated calculations of prevented carbon emissions in deploying environmental politics’ discourses. Here, such calculations become seductive forces for public engagement and help performing engaging spaces for supporting the diffusion of innovation technologies.

The empirical analysis concerns a simulated calculative device developed by Autostrade, a motorway management firm, in its work to translate questions about capacity utilisation, through the fluidity of traffic, into reductions in CO₂ emissions. These reductions took the form of a simulation that required an apparatus to be performed and involved alternative scenarios focussing on hypothetical rather than absolute CO₂ reductions.

The Autostrade case highlights how simulated calculations of absent CO₂ emissions participate in the construction of a collective experience by interfacing concerns that encompass the rationalities of the domestication of technological innovation and make motorway mobility a responsible and ac-countable action.

The paper shows how simulated and experimental calculations on absent carbon emissions act as mediators between public engagement and the deployment of environmental politics discourses. They both extend political participation and propagate and reproduce the trials, which, from time to time, challenge the enticement and forcefulness of a technological innovation.

The paper suggests a different dimension of politics that relies on material politics. Rather than considering human centric discursive acts, it looks at the power of technical objects and their augmented calculative devices in engaging the public in environmental politics. This is where absence, which is made visible and materialised through simulations, deploys affordances that reframe power relationships.

This is the first case study that addresses the issue of the role of accounting calculation on absent carbon emissions in enabling innovation and engaging publics in environmental politics.

This research seeks to explain how a national government becomes capable of constructing an account of its biodiversity performance that is aimed at enabling formulation of policy in pursuit of SDG 15: Life on Land.

The research examines a case study of the construction of the UK government's annual biodiversity report. The case is analysed to explain the process of framing a space in which the SDG-15 challenge of halting biodiversity loss is rendered calculable, such that the government can see and understand its own performance in relation to this challenge.

The construction of UK government's annual biodiversity report relies upon data collected through non-governmental conservation efforts, statistical expertise of a small project group within the government and a governmental structure that drives ongoing evolution of the indicators as actors strive to make these useful for policy formulation.

The analysis problematises the SDG approach to accounting for sustainable development, whereby performance indicators have been centrally agreed and universally imposed upon all signatory governments. The analysis suggests that capacity-building efforts for national governments may need to be broader than that envisaged by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the role of the performativity theory for understanding how the calculative instruments of accounting provoke innovation and participate in the generation of values by activating processes that pervade everything rather than being limited to categorical spaces.

The paper draws on Judith Butler’s work and her notion of excitability to explain how multiple values may arise when accounting interacts with innovation. Through this lens, accounting, as a language based on signs, can be theorised as an ex-citable force involved in provoking and transforming innovation and its associated values, notably beyond innovators’ initial intentions. Thus, innovation is not a stable object but a pervasive movement diffusing multiple values.

By introducing the notion of pervasiveness, the paper argues that even if values can be imagined ab origine, they may not be contractible to a plan. The calculative instruments of accounting provoke innovation and participate in the generation of value(s) by activating processes that pervade everything rather than being limited to categorical spaces. In the course of this pervasive process, innovations, which are born to develop private interests, can possibly generate public goods.

The notion of pervasiveness the paper advances is used to challenge the division between business and social innovation. It well expresses the effects that ex-citable calculative practices put in place when interacting with innovation. It suggests that it is only possible to create productions – to assemble things – in ongoing processes, and the value(s) produced in such movements are always evolving and multiple. However, in this sense, they are social.

This paper aims to explore how two dimensions of trust, calculative trust and benevolent trust, affect supplier opportunism, and further investigates how information technology (IT) infrastructure capability moderates the relationship between calculative trust, benevolent trust and local supplier opportunism.

This study uses ordinary least square regression to test the hypotheses, using survey data from 164 buyer–supplier relationships.

The findings suggest that both rational and emotional dimensions of trust, calculative trust and benevolent trust, have negative effect on the opportunistic behavior of suppliers. Furthermore, IT infrastructure capability amplifies the inhibitory effect of calculative trust on supplier’s opportunism, while diminishing the effect of benevolent trust on suppressing supplier’s opportunism.

This study investigates the impacts of both rational and emotional dimensions of trust on opportunistic behavior, thereby enhancing the comprehension of the multifaceted nature of trust in interfirm relationships and contributing valuable insights into interorganizational relationship governance. Moreover, this study reveals the double-edged moderating roles of IT infrastructure capability in supply chain relationships, presenting innovative perspectives within the research on exploring the role of IT capability in business-to-business marketing relationships.

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 study aims to answer the research question of how a calculative regime for public universities is implemented, how and under which conditions its symbolic use emerges and what kind of unintended consequences occur over time.

The empirical material presented in the paper derives methodically from a longitudinal qualitative research approach analyzing higher education systems (HES)-reforms in Austria. To better understand the consequences of the organizational changes in line with the new legal framework, 2 series of qualitative interviews in 2011/2012 and 2016/2017 on the field level and the organizational level were conducted.

Identifying two enabling consequences from the tactical behaviors of resistance and symbolic use, i.e. new processes of communication and horizontal network building, allows for theory-building with a focus on the dynamics how accounting begins, then next becomes an established infrastructure, is then destabilized and re-elaborated before it becomes, again, an infrastructure which is different from before.

Although the findings are based on a national empirical context, they are linked to the international discourse on HES in transition and the role of calculative regimes including performance measurement and management attitudes and instruments. They are relevant for an international research community open-minded toward differentiated case studies in a longitudinal perspective on HES-reforms.

When reflecting on their own specific settings governing bodies and practitioners managing the transition of HES may find insights from longitudinal case studies inspiring. The dynamics initiated by new calculative regimes installed need a sensitive framework to handle dissent, resistance, tactical behaviors and changes in power relations between the field level and the organizational level.

This is a unique longitudinal case study of the Austrian HES and its public universities in transition.

This study aims to articulate the conceptual foundations of the role of accounting infrastructure (calculative practice and the communicative dimension of accounting) in extractive industries (EIs) towards a sustainable orientation from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective.

This study is a literature-based analysis of the calculative property and communicative dimension of accounting in EIs, using the concepts of calculability, assemblage and other related concepts from ANT to identify potentialities and limits of the roles of accounting in this sector.

While accounting infrastructure can influence social and environmental outcomes, it has not, as yet, led to ecologically and socially sustainable practices in EIs. Calculative properties and the communicative dimension of accounting infrastructure have capabilities to foster the phenomenon of “sustainability” in EIs by valuing, disclosing (reporting) and governing EIs towards a sustainable orientation. Conceptualizing sustainable EIs as a promissory economy, accounting infrastructure serves as a tool not only to represent past performance but also to enact the future: it helps to shape a sustainable future for the industry by informing and triggering behavioural decisions of EIs firms towards sustainable practices.

This conceptual paper is anticipated to stimulate future sustainability accounting research. The research agenda discussed in this paper can be used to enrich our understanding of the role of accounting in sustainability.

This paper charts a direction for future research by interpreting the role of sustainability accounting within networks of sociotechnical relations, using ANT concepts which attach importance to the dualism of nature and society. Conceptualizing sustainability accounting and reporting as an infrastructure, which draws more attention to the relationality characteristic of accounting, the study goes beyond the traditional interpretation of accounting as a mediation device and draws on a contemporary view of accounting by invoking the dynamic relation between accounting and society, in the context of EIs.

This chapter addresses research on worker skill, technology, and control over the labor process by focusing on routine immaterial labor or knowledge work. Based on participant observation conducted among analytics workers at a digital publishing network, I find that analytics workers appear paradoxically autonomous and empowered by management while being bound by ever-evolving, calculative cloud-based information and communication technologies (ICTs). Workers appear free to “be creative,” while ever-evolving ICTs exert unpredictable control over work. Based on this finding, I argue that sociology’s tendency to take organizational boundaries and technological stability for granted hampers analyses of contemporary forms of work. Thus, sociologists of work must extend outward – beyond communities of practice, labor markets, and the state – to include the ever-evolving, infrastructural, socio-technical networks in which work and organizations are embedded. Additionally, research on the experience of immaterial labor suggests that ICTs afford pleasurably immersive experiences that bind workers to organizations and their fields. Complicating this emerging body of research, I find workers acutely frustrated by these unpredictable, ever-evolving, cloud-based ICTs.