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The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual reflection based on the author’s personal research experience, reading of the literature and contact with the academic education of emerging scholars.

In this reflection on the paper “Accounting for tacit coordination: The passing of accounts and the broader case for accounting theory” (Vollmer, 2019), the author argues that the silences of the qualitative empirical management accounting research process may preclude research from understanding the silences of accounting practitioners and shape the trajectory of the discipline as a whole.

The author presents a slightly exaggerated depiction of the qualitative empirical management accounting research process. From this, the author infers what impedes empirically studying unorthodox phenomena such as the silences of accounting practitioners.

The author offers a critical perspective on the author’s own research process, using accounting silences as way of reflecting on the potential and limitations of empirical research. Finally, the author makes tentative suggestions for opening up the standard research process.

This paper aims to review the literature on the use of the notion of performativity and its related concepts in accounting research. The literature uses the term performativity in almost diametrically different ways, yet most papers assume that the meaning of the term is self-evident. We build on recent reviews of the notion of performativity and explicate the implicit tensions in the accounting literature, discovering a need to clarify how the accounting literature has explored the processes – how accounting becomes performative – and effects – what is performed – of accounting performativity. The paper develops suggestions for future theoretical and empirical research.

The authors have searched in six leading accounting journals (Accounting, Organizations and Society, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Management Accounting Research, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management) for the terms “performativity” and/or “performative” and/or “performable”. This yielded 289 results from which we distilled a core sample of 92 papers which substantially draw on the concept and explicate their use of the term.

The authors find that the accounting literature has paid almost equal attention to the conforming and amplifying effects of performativity but has mostly explored how conditions of performativity are built. Less attention has been paid to how accounting generates multiple worlds and how differences in these worlds are coordinated by accounting. Building institutions and searching for accounting incompleteness have been developed as the two main processes where accounting is made performative.

The paper develops avenues for future research, highlighting the potential for a deeper understanding of how the notion of performativity can be used. We do not advocate homogenizing the literature, instead exploring its fruitful tensions to discover a renewed interest in how accounting is constitutive of existing and/or new worlds. We illustrate this potential by reflecting on the debates about accounting incompleteness and the boundaries of accounting. The authors also suggest the potentials for concepts of performativity in studying emerging phenomena such as big data and sustainability and revisiting the ethics of using accounting as a social and organizational practice.

The literature review explicates differences in the use of the term performativity, which usually remain implicit in the literature. The study develops a framework that attends to both the processes – problematizing the conditions for performativity or not – and effects – conforming and amplifying – of performativity accounting studies have drawn upon, which clarifies how the accounting literature has mobilized the notion of performativity and the contributions the accounting literature has added. Further, the authors extend Vosselman’s (2022) review both in scope and nuance.

The purpose of this study is to provide insight into the roles of accounting in the management of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in five German hospitals.

The authors conducted three rounds of interviews, ethnographic observations of meetings and document analyses in five German hospitals between February and August 2020.

The authors found that actors repeatedly used a central set of indicators (the number of beds for COVID-19 patients) when adapting a healthcare infrastructure to the pandemic. Accounting figures allowed actors to problematize prior configurations, organize processes to make uncertainty plannable and virtualize changes to resume treating non-COVID-19 patients.

The authors offer suggestions about scenario planning and interorganizational learning which have implications for healthcare practitioners.

The authors contribute to the accounting in crisis literature by adding an organization-focused study. Adding nuance to key themes in the literature, they show how the organizations and the field level interact and how organizing locally preceded economizing. They also offer a nonbinary answer to the question of whether or not changes revert back to “normal” after a crisis event.

A total of 25 years of research on the audit society has provided rich and engaging accounts of the ways in which rituals of verification have conditioned organizations and individuals to think and act. In contrast, this paper aims to explore the possibility of conditions through which things and spaces are enacted to be non-auditable.

Using the concept of proliferation and rarefaction (Callon and Law, 2005), the paper adopts a case-comparison design to explore two empirical sites. The first investigates a vast excess of audit structures against the case of the biggest corporate fraud in German accounting history, the Wirecard scandal. The second discusses the configuration of Tinder, the most popular provider of mobile dating and the absence of visible verification mechanisms.

The paper argues that things can become non-auditable through two mechanisms. Based on the two empirical sites, non-auditability can happen through an overload of auditable resources or, through the withdrawal of required resources. The paper discusses the consequences of this finding and suggests avenues for future research on non-auditability.

While accounting scholars have extensively addressed the audit explosion and traced how audit practices have journeyed into ever more novel terrains, this paper discusses forms of escape from the value-subverting and reductive accounts incorporated in the audit society. It thereby points to conditions under which accounting ends.

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.

The discipline's most common uses for literature reviews—identifying gaps, developing research agendas, and categorizing the literature—too often fail to challenge, change or advance theoretical perspectives. The authors offer guidance to theorization through literature reviews. The key to theory advancement is consistency between the state of theory and the chosen review type.

A conceptual approach is taken. The authors identify shortcomings in literature reviews of logistics and supply chain management (L&SCM) research and develop a framework to aid theorization from literature.

Literature review types are categorized as inductive theory building, contextualized explanations, theory testing and interpretive sensemaking. The authors argue that the effectiveness of a review type depends on the prior state of theory, which ranges from nascent, to intermediate, to mature. The authors propose the interpretive sensemaking review as a novel review type rooted in the interpretive paradigm.

This study should be of immediate interest and value to logistics and supply chain management scholars—as well as scholars in other fields—because it offers a pathway to theory development through literature reviews. Appropriate applications of the proposed review types will result in more comprehensive theories.

This article lays down arguments for the need to change the way L&SCM scholars use literature reviews. It extends earlier work from the authors (Durach et al., 2017; A New Paradigm for Systematic Literature Reviews in Supply Chain Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management) by outlining four review types, and offering further insights to theorization, as is typically the goal in the synthesis step of literature reviews.

This paper aims to offer a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography in particular.

The author builds on Stefan Hirschauer’s methodological reflections on ethnography and the “silence of the social” to briefly re-articulate some of the ideas the author had associated, in an earlier piece, with the investigation of tacit coordination in accounting.

Ethnography is an intrinsically theoretical practice and also a particular form of accounting. As such, it presents a paradigm case for how accounting theory builds on, and emerges from, social research in joint efforts of breaking the silence of the social. Ethnographic research, like the practice of accounting and social research more generally, is associated with a stewardship of silence and an “ethics of mattering” (Karen Barad), and accounting theory is an invitation to reflect on the underlying practices of (dis-)articulation.

The paper invites readers to engage with accounting practice as a topic of systematic theoretical interest in exploring how we put the world on the record, understand the choices we make in the process and the silences we let lie.

This paper introduces the second part of a AAAJ special issue on accounting, accountability and management during the COVID-19 emergency. The authors analyse the themes that emerge from the second part of the special issue, which allows us to identify the diverse accounting and accountability practices across different geographical and organisational contexts. The authors also provide an overall picture of the contributions of the special issue, with insights into avenues of future research.

Building on the first part of the AAAJ special issue, the paper draws together and identifies additional emerging themes related to research into the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacts accounting, accountability and management practices. The authors reflect on the contributions of the special issue to the interdisciplinary accounting research project.

The authors identify two macro-themes and outline their contributions to the accounting literature. The first deals with the changes and dangers of accounting and accountability practices during the pandemic. The second considers accountability practices in a broader sense, including reporting, disclosure and rhetorical practices in the management of COVID-19.

The paper shows the pervasive role of accounting and accountability in the unprecedented and indiscriminate health crisis of COVID-19. It highlights the important role of special issues in producing timely research that responds to unfolding events.

This paper contributes to current debates on the roles of accounting and accountability during COVID-19 by drawing together the themes of the special issue and identifying future interdisciplinary accounting research on the pandemic's aftermath.