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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.

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 paper is to introduce the concept of performative struggle through the use of an interpretative case story focussed on a strategic decision-making process concerning infrastructural development. Performativity is about “world-making” (Carter et al., 2010), based on the assumption that conceptual schemes are not only prescriptions of the world, for the practices flowing from these abstract ideas bring into being the world they are describing. The focus on agency and multiplicity in the academic debate on performativity in organizational settings are combined, resulting in the conceptualization of a multitude of performative agents struggling to make the world.

The methodological approach of this paper is based on an interpretative analysis of contrasting narratives that are told by political-executives in a strategic decision-making process. These narratives are based on in-depth interviews and participant observation. The interpretative case story, exhibiting the strategic decision-making practices of Aldermen, Delegates and Ministers – focusses on the moments of performative struggle based on strategic narrative practices.

The interpretative case story will exhibit the way in which a multiplicity of agents reflects on the performative dimension of the decision-making process, anticipates on its performative effects and attempts to manipulate the strategic vision that is actualized into reality. Moreover, the agents are not primarily concerned with the actualization of a specific infrastructural project; they are more concerned with the consequences of decision making for their more comprehensive strategic visions on reality.

The notion of performative struggle has not yet been explicitly studied by scholars focussing on performativity. However, the concept can be used as an appropriate lens for studying meaning making within ethnographic studies on organizational processes such as for instance culture change intervention and strategy formation. The concept of performative struggle is especially useful for understanding the political dimension of meaning making when studying an organizational life-world through the use of ethnographic research.

The originality of this paper lies in the innovative conceptualization of struggle between a multiplicity of reflexive agents in the debate on performative world-making. Moreover, the incorporation of the perspective of performative struggle within organizational ethnographic research is valuable for the development of organizational ethnographic methodology.

This research explores the various ways in which performative inquiry was implemented in a graduate organizational theories course within an educational leadership cohort at a medium- sized urban Canadian research university. Drawing on Fink’s framework for significant learning experiences, the researchers used performative inquiry to enact the “Practice” and “Reflection” domains of his pedagogical model. The data show that as the course unfolded, the class experienced a shift from instructor-centered transmission of information to a curriculum co- constructed by students and instructors. We conclude with ways in which educational leadership professors can incorporate performative inquiry as a teaching strategy to enhance the learning process for aspiring educational leaders.

This paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl’s embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant bodies in the after-school program. While these performances take place out-of-school and in an arts studio, the tensions and explorations also resonate with broader issues around student embodied, performative and becomings that run counter to normalized school expectations.

A contemporary approach to nexus analysis (Medina and Wohlwend, 2014; Wohlwend, 2021) unpacked two critical performative encounters (Medina and Perry, 2011) using concepts of historical bodies (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) informed by sociomaterial thing-power (Bennett, 2010).

Playing while painting pottery collides and converges with the tacitly desired and expected ways of embodying student in this after-school artspace. Emily’s outer-space alien persona ruptured expected discourses when her historical body and embodied performances threatened other children. While her embodied performances facilitated her becoming a fully present participant in the studio, she fractured the line between play and reality in violent ways.

As literacy researchers, the authors are in a moment of reckoning where student embodied performances and historical bodies can collide with all-too-real violent threats in daily lives and community locations. Situating these performances in the nexus of embodied literacies, unsanctioned play and thing-power can help educators respond to these moments as ruptures of tacit expectations for girlhoods in school-like spaces.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

The paper traces different foundational conceptions of performativity and then articulates and substantiates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. It advances one of these conceptions by producing a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

Seven conceptions of performative accountings are articulated: accounting as a (counter)performative illocution; accounting as a performative perlocution; accounting as a self-fulfilling prophecy; accounting as an overflowing frame; accounting as a controlled relational agency; accounting as a mediator; and accounting as an exclusionary practice. It is argued how a posthumanist understanding of accounting as an exclusionary practice turns accounting from a world-knowing practice into a world-making practice. As such, it should be called to account.

Posthumanist qualitative accounting research that conceives of accounting as an exclusionary practice focuses on how accounting is a material-discursive practice that intra-acts with other practices, and on how there is a power-performativity in the intra-actions that locally and temporarily (re)produces meaningful positions for subjects and objects and the boundaries between them.

A posthumanist understanding teaches practitioners to be attentive to and accountable for the exclusions that come with accounting or, more generally, with measurement. Accounting raises ethical concerns.

This paper articulates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity and makes the case for empirical non-anthropocentric examinations of accounting as an exclusionary practice.

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 performative chapter offers three movements that celebrate aspects of Norman Denzin's prolific and influential career: an ode to an aging cowboy that signal's Denzin's work on the West and Native Americans, a corresponding piece that signals Denzin's commitments to performance studies and autoethnography, and a litany of his scholarship as a bibliography of worship with his commitment to critical and creative forms of writing.

This paper attempts to conceive the “narrated event” by considering the use of open‐ended a‐synchronous “blogs” in a current PhD study looking at the perceptions of 30 senior secondary students over their final year of secondary schooling.

The paper discusses the role of identity‐play in the construction of narrative accounts and specifically, how those accounts, when solicited in a blog study, might come to represent a “performance” of the narrator.

The implications of how we, as qualitative researchers, obtain our data places limitations on what kind of voice we allow the subjects of our enquiry. “Agency” requires dialogic interaction which “brings self and other together so that they may question, debate, and challenge one another” (Conquergood). Not only the ear, but also the voice of the listener thus bind the extent to which the subject can narrate their own stories. Thus, the subject is reflective, she constructs a dialogue where “underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject” (Deleuze).

By employing dialogic/performative narrative methods (Riessman), along with online methods (Fielding), this paper positions online blogs within the broader methodological discussions around identity and narrative by facilitating a conversation between subjectivity, trustworthiness, the value of blogs as meaningful data, and how a conceptualisation of blogs as narrative performance helps give agency to those “tellings”.

While digital platforms tend to be unproblematically presented as the infrastructure of the sharing economy – as matchmakers of supply and demand – the authors argue that constituting the boundaries of infrastructures is political and performative, that is, it is implicated in ontological politics, with consequences for the distribution of responsibilities (Latour, 2003; Mol, 1999, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013). Drawing on an empirical case study of Uber, including an analysis of court cases, the authors investigate the material-discursive production of digital platforms and their participation in the reconfiguring of the world (Barad, 2007), and examine how the (in)visibility of the digital infrastructure is mobilized (Larkin, 2013) to this effect. The authors argue that the representation of Uber as a “digital platform,” as “just the technological infrastructure” connecting car drivers with clients, is a political act that attempts to redefine social responsibilities, while obscuring important dimensions of the algorithmic infrastructure that regulates this socioeconomic practice. The authors also show how some of these (in)visibilities become exposed in court, and some of the boundaries reshaped, with implications for the constitution of objects, subjects and their responsibilities. Thus, while thinking infrastructures do play a role in regulating and shaping practice through algorithms, it could be otherwise. Thinking infrastructures relationally decentre digital platforms and encourage us to study them as part of ongoing and contested entanglements in practice.