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Organisations produce effects that go beyond the economic framing within which they operate, referred to as overflows in this paper. When an organisation comes under pressure to address these overflows they must decide how to respond. Previous research has placed social and environmental reporting as an important tool organisations mobilise in their attempts to mediate these pressures and the groups that give rise to them. However, these reports are typically only released once a year while the pressures that organisations face can arise at any time and are ongoing and constant. The purpose of this paper is to explore situated organisational practices and examine if and how management controls are mobilised in relation to the actions of pressure groups.

This paper takes a case study approach to understand how an organisation attempts to mediate the pressures from a number of overflows: carbon emissions, changing lifestyles, aspartame and obesity. To undertake this research a performative understanding of management control is utilised. This focusses the research on if and how management controls are mobilised to assist with attempts to mediate pressures.

Analysis of the data shows that many different management controls, beyond just reports, were mobilised during the attempts to mediate the pressure arising from the actions of groups affected by the overflows. The management controls were utilised to: identify pressures, demonstrate how the pressure had been addressed, alleviate the pressure or to dispute the legitimacy of the pressure.

This paper shows the potential for new connections to be made between the management control and social and environmental accounting literatures. It demonstrates that future research may gain much from examining the management controls mobilised within the situated practices that constitute an organisations response to the pressures it faces.

In the last decade, greater attention has been paid to the role of management accounting and control (MAC) in making professional organizations more horizontal. The authors argue that earlier research has not shown how the interrelatedness between professional identities and MAC influences attempts to make organizations more horizontal. In this paper the authors respond to the call for more research on the relationship between horizontalization and accounting and control. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the emerging literature on the relationship between accountability arrangements and professional identities.

Theoretically the authors have an actor-network theory (ANT) approach. Empirically, the authors followed two episodes where actors at top management levels in two Swedish health care organizations introduced horizontalization.

The two episodes support the view that the role of MAC when making professional organizations more horizontal is limited. Professionals dominate what happens at the operational level and they do not act on MAC rules and performance targets in opposition of their professional identity. However, in alliance with other interessement devices MAC may have a role in creating overflows, that is, pointing out imperfections in the existing frame. The authors noticed no signs that professionals developed hybrid identities as in previous research.

The authors apply ANT to move beyond the commonly used contingency and new institutional sociology perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the implementation of risk management as a tool for internal audit activities, focusing on unexpected effects or uncertainties generated during its application.

Public and confidential documents as well as semi-structured interviews are analysed through the lens of actor-network theory to identify the effects of risk management devices in a Finnish municipality.

The authors found that risk management, rather than reducing uncertainty, itself created unexpected uncertainties that would otherwise not have emerged. These include uncertainties relating to legal aspects of risk management solutions, in particular the issue concerning which types of document are considered legally valid; uncertainties relating to the definition and operationalisation of risk management; and uncertainties relating to the resources available for expanding risk management. More generally, such uncertainties relate to the professional identities and responsibilities of operational managers as defined by the framing devices.

The paper offers three contributions to the extant literature: first, it shows how risk management itself produces uncertainties. Secondly, it shows how internal auditors can assume a central role in the risk management system. Thirdly, it develops Callon's framing/overflowing framework with the notion that multiple frames are linked and create unexpected dynamics, and applies it to the study on the effects of risk management tools in an internal audit context. It shows how, despite recurring attempts to refine risk management, further uncertainties are continuously produced, thus providing an empirical illustration of how reframing and overflowing intertwine in a continual process.

This paper aims to explain why public sector performance reporting that emphasises external accountability may turn out differently from the official stated aims.

Using a comparative case method, two different accountability innovations are examined using framing and overflowing ideas.

The accountability reports became bureaucratic communications between the reporting and central agencies. The reports were transformed because the performance reporting produced a number of overflows and reduced the importance of broad audiences (e.g. citizens). These overflows resulted from the central agency reformers' preoccupation with cost cutting opportunities and the reporting agencies' presumption of the reformers' real purpose. In the resulting interactions, the accountability purpose ended up being mostly reduced to disclosure of traditional input and output measures and some insignificant stories designed to avoid public criticism of the accountability reform but also to hinder others in identifying objects for cost cutting.

To conduct international comparative research is logistically challenging, but provides the best chances of understanding the systemic aspects of accountability reforms that contribute to the reforms' observable and perplexing outcomes. Ideally, it would be interesting to study such reforms over their full lives; however, they may be longer than the researchers' careers.

Accountability purposes are disturbed by classical cost cutting thinking. Thus, despite many ostensibly good ideas of creating transparency for the public, other stronger forces may severely hinder such accountability developments. Concepts of framing and overflowing may be used to better understand the outcomes of accountability innovations; this can be extended beyond the public sector.

Provides useful information on why public sector performance reporting that emphasises external accountability may turn out differently from the official stated aims.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how proponents of biodiversity offsetting have sought to produce an ecologically defensible mechanism for reconciling economic development and biodiversity conservation.

The paper analyses a case study biodiversity offsetting mechanism in New South Wales, Australia. Michel Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor is used to explain how accounting devices are brought into the mechanism, to (re)frame a space of calculability and address anxieties expressed by conservationists about calculations of net loss/gain of biodiversity.

The analysis shows that the offsetting mechanism embeds a form of accounting for biodiversity that runs counter to the prevailing dominant anthropocentric approach. Rather than accounting for the biodiversity of a site in terms of the economic benefits it provides to humans, the mechanism accounts for biodiversity in terms of its ecological value. This analysis, therefore, reveals a form of accounting for biodiversity that uses numbers to provide valuations of biodiversity, but these numbers are ecological numbers, not economic numbers. So this is a calculative, and also ecocentric, approach to accounting for, and valuing, biodiversity.

This paper contributes to the extant literature on accounting for biodiversity by revealing a novel conceptualisation of the reconciliation of economic development and biodiversity conservation, producing an ecologically defensible form of sustainable development. The paper also makes a methodological contribution by showing how Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor can be used to enable the kind of interdisciplinary engagement needed for researchers to address sustainable development challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species in achieving biodiversity conservation and preventing the extinction of species. The Red List is a calculative device that classifies species in terms of their exposure to the risk of extinction.

The paper draws on theorising in the Social Studies of Finance literature to analyse the Red List in terms of how it frames a space of calculability for species extinction. The analysis then traces the ways that this framing has overflowed, creating conditions for calculative innovations, such that assemblages of humans and calculative devices (i.e. agencements) are constructed with collective capabilities to act to conserve biodiversity and prevent species extinctions.

This paper has traced three ways that the Red List frame has overflowed, leading to calculative innovations and the construction of new agencements. The overflow of relations between the quality of “extinction risk”, produced by the Red List, and other qualities, such as location, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of formulating conservation strategies. The overflow of relations between the identity of the “threatened species”, produced by the Red List, and other features of evaluated species, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of impelling participation in conservation efforts. The overflow of ecological relations between species, discarded by the Red List’s hierarchical metrology of extinction risk classifications, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of confronting society with the reality of an extinction crisis.

The paper contributes to the accounting for biodiversity literature by addressing its fundamental challenge: explaining how accounting can create conditions within society in which biodiversity conservation is made possible.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a criterion for the global asymptotic stability of fixed-point state–space digital filters using saturation overflow arithmetic.

The method of stability analysis used in this paper is the second method of Lyapunov. The approach in this paper makes use of a precise upper bound of the state vector of the system and a novel passivity property associated with the saturation nonlinearities.

The presented criterion leads to an enhanced stability region in the parameter-space as compared to several existing criteria.

When dealing with the design of fixed-point state–space digital filters, it is desirable to have a criterion for selecting the filter coefficients so that the designed filter becomes free of overflow oscillations. The criterion presented in this paper provides enhanced saturation overflow stability region and therefore facilitates the designer greater flexibility in selecting filter parameters for overflow oscillation-free realization of digital filters.

The approach uses the structural properties of the saturation nonlinearities in a greater detail. The exploitation of upper bound of the system state vector together with a new passivity property of saturation nonlinearities is a unique feature of the present approach. The presented approach may lead to results not covered by several existing approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new criterion for the exponential stability and

_∞ performance of state-space digital filters under the influence of any combination of quantization/overflow nonlinearities.

The proposed criterion uses the

_∞ approach that is suitable for the design of discrete system in the presence of external disturbance. Analysis and synthesis in an

_∞ setting is advantageous as it proposes effective disturbance attenuation, less sensitivity to uncertainties and many practical applications.

The criterion not only guarantees exponential stability but also reduces the effect of external interference. A numerical example demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method is given.

The main result of the paper is reported for the first time and it is useful to ensure the stability of digital filters in the presence of external disturbance and any combination of quantization/overflow nonlinearities.

The purpose of this empirical study is to investigate extrinsic motivations that may affect adding or acknowledging user-generated content (UGC) on business websites, which are based on voluntary crowdsourcing.

A conceptual model of extrinsic motivations for knowledge sharing in UGC-based websites was developed, suggesting reciprocity, awareness of rewards and prestige as main extrinsic motivations for adding content. The model was examined via an online survey of users of three websites that varied in the attributes of knowledge shared and reward type: The Traveler (tangible rewards), Stack Overflow (virtual rewards) and Waze (virtual rewards).

Importance of extrinsic motivations varied among websites, as it may be affected by attributes of the knowledge shared. Reciprocity positively affected recommending the website, and adding content affected acknowledging content.

Investigating extrinsic motivations is important because websites may take actions that affect them. Further research is required to reveal the potential of voluntary crowdsourcing in business contexts addressing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, prosumption and open innovation.

When reciprocity is a major aspect of a UGC website, badges and similar mechanisms may serve as a main extrinsic motivation to share knowledge.

The novel empirically validated model provides theoretical and practical insights for designing mechanisms for increasing extrinsic motivation for knowledge sharing according to specific characteristics of UGC websites.

This paper aims to illustrate the role of management devices in enacting strategy and strategic decisions, resulting in the development of a Shared Service Centre (SSC) in a Danish municipality. It shows how devices interact in defending, rejecting and reframing strategy, leading to the closure of the SSC to pave the way for new strategic ideas.

It uses a longitudinal case-based approach, which draws on actor-network theory, particularly Callon’s (1998) notions of framing and overflowing. These notions help describe strategic events and processes by highlighting the active role of non-human entities, such as management devices, in enacting and reformulating strategy.

Different devices have become key actants in shaping and formulating the new strategy in the municipality and the strategic decision to construct an SSC. However, different devices mobilise different localities that protest, reject and participate in the closure of the SSC through a reframing strategy.

The study is subject to the general limitations of case-based research. Thus, the propositions should be further investigated to elaborate the performative role of management devices.

The findings facilitate a deeper understanding of factors triggering strategic development in the public sector. Also, it identifies aspects leading to failures by investigating how different devices allow local actors to stay connected and affect the SSC’s creation.

This study is the first to use a performative method to highlight the temporary and local nature of enacting strategic decisions to construct an SSC in the public sector.