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The purpose of this paper is to expand on emergent data activism literature to draw distinctions between different types of data management practices undertaken by groups of data activists.

The authors offer three case studies that illuminate the data management strategies of these groups. Each group discussed in the case studies is devoted to representing a contentious political issue through data, but their data management practices differ in meaningful ways. The project Making Sense produces their own data on pollution in Kosovo. Fatal Encounters collects “missing data” on police homicides in the USA. The Environmental Data Governance Initiative hopes to keep vulnerable US data on climate change and environmental injustices in the public domain.

In analysing the three case studies, the authors surface how temporal dimensions, geographic scale and sociotechnical politics influence their differing data management strategies.

The authors build upon extant literature on data management infrastructure, which primarily discusses how these practices manifest in scientific and institutional research settings, to analyse how data management infrastructure is often crucial to social movements that rely on data to surface political issues.

The literature on HR metrics does not address the political issues that surround the definition and interpretation of these metrics. However, the need for agreement about HR metrics between different stakeholders is underlined by the framework of the sociology of quantification. This research aims to complement the literature on HR metrics by studying the process of defining and interpreting appropriate HR metrics, focusing on the example of the gender pay gap.

A case study with interviews and participant observation is conducted on a French company.

The results show that HR metrics are essential to prove the existence of inequalities. However, there are disagreements between management, unions and gender equality referents concerning appropriate HR metrics and their use.

Contrary to the literature on the subject, which remains predominantly positivist and normative, this article sheds light on the political issues surrounding the definition and use of HR metrics and shows the importance of involving a range of actors (managers, unions and employees) in the entire process.

Empirically, this paper questions whether accounting can help cope with crisis and preserve some form of feminist ideals. Theoretically, this paper aims to explore how accounting affects the division of emotional work in times of crisis.

The paper relies on a qualitative study that investigates “life under lockdown” during the COVID crisis and focuses on middle-class well-educated couples aspiring for some form of gender equality and who introduced accounting tools (schedules, charts, to-do-lists, etc.) in their daily life to achieve it.

The paper argues that accounting tools are not able to prevent couples from adopting traditional ways of carrying out emotional work. By favoring the masculine way of displaying emotions, they make invisible women's efforts for comforting. They even mask the unequal distribution of emotional work under some form of “neoliberal equality”. Also, in a context where middle-class standards are perceived as crucial to meet for both parents to keep their social position, accounting tools, by holding parents accountable for these standards, let no time to find alternative ways of living. Consequently, traditional roles become impossible to reverse.

The paper investigates accounting, gender and emotions by showing the importance of making emotional work visible at a household but also at an organizational and societal level. It calls for an “integrative” emotional display that is crucial for resilience in times of crisis and invites to challenge neoliberal middle-class standards that make household life difficult for most women. Theoretically, it invites for further exploring how accounting tools are constructed and negotiated and how unpredictable elements of life other than emotions affect gender when accounting tools are introduced in times of crisis.

This article contributes to the literature on gender-in-accounting by introducing the concept of emotional work and showing how accounting tools affect the gendered division of emotional work in praxis.