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This paper explores and identifies customer-value-related sacrifices that consumers attach to interactive health/life insurance. This paper aims to increase understanding of why individual consumers are not willing to embrace behaviour-tracking-based insurance applications.

The authors analysed data from a qualitative survey of Finnish insurance consumers who were not keen on adopting interactive insurance products.

Developed through thematic analysis, the framework presented in this paper illustrates consumers’ value sacrifices on four dimensions: economic, functional, emotional and symbolic value.

The framework and insights emerging in the study hold several implications related to increased understanding of consumers’ perceptions of insurance and to developing interactive insurance services. In addition, this work provides a promising foundation and avenues for further considerations related to digital ethics in insurance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first piece applying a value sacrifice perspective in studying consumers’ unwillingness to adopt interactive insurance products.

The competition in the academe has always been tough, but today, the academe seems to be more like an industry than an academic community as academics are evaluated through quantified and economic means.

This article leans on Heidegger’s thoughts on the essence of technology and his ontological view on being to show the dangers that lie in this quantification of researchers and research.

Despite the benefits that information systems (ISs) offer to people and research, it seems that technology has made it possible to objectify researchers and research. This has a negative impact on the academe and should thus be looked into especially by the IS field, which should note the problems that exist in its core. This phenomenon of quantified academics is clearly visible at academic quantification sites, where academics are evaluated using metrics that count their output. It seems that the essence of technology has disturbed the way research is valued by emphasising its quantifiable aspects. The study claims that it is important to look for other ways to evaluate researchers rather than trying to maximise research production, which has led to the flooding of articles that few have the time or interest to read.

This paper offers new insights into the current phenomenon of quantification of academics and underlines the need for critical changes if in order to achieve the academic culture that is desirable for future academics.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.

Within societies in the 21st century, individuals who are embedded in a controlled context that impedes their political actions deal with the tensions they are experiencing through attempts at resistance. Several studies that examine individual infrapolitics in organizations explain how the subtle mix of compliance and resistance are constructed at the level of individual identity in a complex mechanism that both questions the system and strengthens it. However, the interplay between managers' identities and management accounting tools in this process is a topic that deserves more investigation. The aim of this article is to understand how the subtle resistance of individuals constructs neoliberal reforms through management accounting (MA).

The authors conducted a case study on three health and social organizations two years after major reforms were implemented in the health and social services sector in Québec, a province of Canada. These reforms were part of a new public management dynamic and involved the implementation of accounting tools, here referred to as New Public Management Accounting (NPMA) tools.

The authors’ findings show how managers participate in reforms, at the same time as attempt to stem the dehumanization they generate. Managers engage in subtly resisting, for themselves and for their field professional teams, the dehumanization and identity destruction that arises from the reforms. NPMA tools are central to this process, since managers question the reforms through NPMA tools and use them to resist creatively. However, their subtle resistance can lead to the strengthening of the neoliberal dynamic of the reform.

The authors contribute to both the literature of infrapolitics and MA by showing the role of NPMA tools in the construction of subtle resistance. Their article enriches the MA literature by characterizing the subtle forms of resistance and showing how managers engage in creative resistance by using the managerial potential flexibility of NPMA tools. The article also outlines how NPMA tools play a role in the dialectic process of resistance, since they aid managers in resisting reform-induced dehumanization but also support managers in reinventing and reinforcing what they are trying to fight. The authors’ study also illustrates the dialectic dynamic of resistance through NPMA in all its dimensions: discursive, material and symbolic. Finally, the authors contribute to management accounting literature by showing that NPMA tools are not only the objects of neoliberalization but also the support of backstage resistance to neoliberalization.