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This study aims to understand master’s students’ experiences of service-learning, following their participation in a workshop with local social innovators whose activities had contributed to combating poverty in East Africa and to determine how this participation affected work on the students’ theses. The authors also explored possible gender differences in this context.

The study was based on pretest–posttest mixed methods research design. Data were collected from master’s students within the social sciences and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, respectively, in Kenya and Uganda, via surveys and interviews before the workshop, immediately afterwards and six months later.

Students’ immediate experience was that the workshop contributed to increased critical awareness, adoption of transdisciplinary community-serving approaches and strengthened self-confidence. Six months later, most had related their projects to social problems (e.g. poverty) in their communities. Moreover, the results motivated integration of gender-sensitive curricula based on service-learning in East Africa.

Based on the results, the authors suggest a framework for gender-sensitive curriculum development that can stimulate service-learning in master’s students. Implementation of such a curriculum could eventually contribute to community development, including, e.g. poverty reduction.

Studies on service-learning are rare in Africa, especially in postgraduate education. Gender-sensitive studies on service-learning are generally scarce and the same holds for studies on encouraging STEM students to integrate social innovation into their thesis work. By combining these aspects, this study presents an original contribution to existing research.

This paper aims to analyse the longitudinal performative effects of accounting, focusing on how accounting shapes the stability/instability of economic frames over time.

To explore the performative effects of accounting over time, a longitudinal case study narrates the transformation of a large, listed manufacturing company's financial strategy over 20 years. Using extensive document collection, the authors trace the shift from an “industrial” frame to a “shareholder value” frame in the mid-1990s, followed by the gradual entrenchment of this shareholder value frame until its decline in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008.

Our findings show how accounting has different performative temporalities, capable of precipitating sudden shifts between different economic frames and stabilising an ever-more entrenched and narrowly defined enactment of a specific frame. We conceptualise these different temporalities as performative moments and performative momentum respectively, explaining how accounting produces these performative effects over time. Moreover, in contrast to extant accounting research, the authors provide insight into the performative role of accounting not only in contested but also “cold” situations marked by consensus regarding the overarching economic frame.

Our paper draws attention to the longitudinal performative effects of accounting. In particular, the analysis of how accounting entrenches and refines economic frames over time adds to prior research, which has focused mainly on the contestation and instability of framing processes.