Ebba Sjögren

This paper explores maintenance work, based on a study of the measurement apparatus for CO 2 emissions in a multinational manufacturing company. Previous research shows how absent data or underdeveloped measurement practices hamper the introduction of sustainability accounting and reporting (SAR). However, due to a focus on implementation processes, less is known about how organisations maintain SAR over time. We trace measurement challenges faced due to internal and external changes. These threatened to undermine the robustness of the measurement apparatus, i.e. its capacity to hold together and produce figures over time. We conceptualise how the case organisation maintained a robust measurement apparatus for CO 2 through the concurrent and sequential use of different modes of calibration. We also characterise a role for targets as a benchmark for measurement, beyond their commonplace use for performance management purposes. ARTICLE HISTORY

Economic theory assumes accurate price information to be readily available in markets. In real markets, however, actual price information can be private and confidential, forcing buyers to rely on official list prices despite their known inaccuracy in representing actual prices. Little is known about the workings of such markets. In a comparative study of four national markets for specialist pharmaceuticals, we find differences in how list prices are set, used, and communicated. Based on this, we conclude that list prices are indexical entities whose relation to actual prices varies consistently yet unsystematically across markets, making them poor proxies for actual prices. Despite this, buyers use list prices as indicators of willingness to pay and to generate images of successful market outcomes. Finally, we conclude that price formation in markets where actual prices remain opaque is linear and non-recursive, giving such markets a relational character irrespective of the goods being exchanged.

This article critically analyzes public procurement of innovation (PPI) as an instance of using markets or market-like aspects as a means to resolve public concerns. It reports findings from a case of procuring radiation therapy equipment for a university hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. By extending a line of literature built on economic sociology as well as science and technology studies (STS), the study elaborates on public actors' efforts in framing markets to promote innovation. The case illustrates how the participating actors constructed the notion of innovativeness to be introduced into health care as means of addressing various public concerns. It also reveals the intended—and unintended— consequences of PPI as manifested in various actors' claims on the value of PPI realized in practice. The study suggests that it is extremely difficult to frame a market for the realization of innovation via procurement as a policy instrument because we cannot predict the ultimate impacts of devices and practices employed in such initiatives. By formulating a practice-based critique of PPI, our study invites important questions about the potentiality of such instruments for governing innovation without delimiting their consequences to the successor failure dichotomy as prescribed in predefined tools and strategies.

Purpose This paper aims to analyse the longitudinal performative effects of accounting, focusing on how accounting shapes the stability/instability of economic frames over time. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.

Previous literature has attributed differences in individuals' inventive productivity to a range of environmental, organizational and individual traits. However, the behavior of individuals with different inventive productivity has not been empirically explored in detail. Based on interviews with twenty Swedish academic inventors of diverse patenting experience, this paper analyses how serial and occasional inventors acted in patent initiation, patent application and subsequent patent management for specific inventions. Two modes of behavior are identified: passive and active. Individuals' inventive productivity was not aligned with behavioral mode, with both modes of behavior exhibited by occasional as well as serial academic inventors. Individual academic inventors also varied in mode of behavior across different patent processes. These findings suggest that commonly used volume-based classifications of academic inventors obscure potentially relevant behavioral differences. This insight has implications for contemporary policy and organizational practice. It also highlights the need for further investigation of when academic inventors assume an active or passive mode of behavior in processes of academic commercialization.

Purpose: The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation. Design/methodology/approach: Qualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed. Findings: Few visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings. Research limitations/implications: Case study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved. Practical implications: The study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned. Originality/value: To date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.

This article analyses how formalization of promotion criteria and procedures influences clarity and transparency of academic assessment. Based on a longitudinal, structural micro‐study of a new tenure track system in a Swedish higher education institution, we find that inequality was reproduced through the choice of explicitly gendered metrics across all areas of assessment (research, teaching and service). We further demonstrate how the formalization of a ‘good enough’ standard, in addition to a standard of ‘excellence’, reinforced the scope for interpretational flexibility among assessors. This combination of explicitly gendered metrics and dual standards of performance gave gatekeepers’ broader discretion in hiding or communicating failure, with gendering effects. Finally, we conclude that the choices made about how to formalize assessment work placed a small group of senior academics firmly behind closed doors, thus ensuring that gatekeepers’ discretion and power was entrenched rather than restricted by formalization.

This paper explores how various accountability demands are addressed in interactions between a privately-owned supplier of outsourced elderly care and the local government administration that finances these services. We find a dynamic and situation-specific attribution of accountor and constituent roles, in contrast to prior research’s routine consideration of these roles as being predetermined by existing relationships of hierarchy and influence. We also propose the concept of role attribution to characterize this strategy for handling complexity in public sector accountability processes. This finding complements previous research, which has described three main strategies for handling competing accountability demands: decoupling, structural differentiation and compromising. Role attribution differs from these strategies, which focus mainly on accountor’s actions to handle multiple constituents. In contrast, role attribution was found to involve the supplier and purchaser of public services pursuing a specific resolution to an accountability demand by positioning themselves as jointly aligned with certain prospective constituents in the environment. Role attribution highlights that an accountor-constituent pair can cooperate to deal with shared accountabilities and operational interdependencies in relation to common prospective constituents. Thus, while inter-organisational relationships can be a source of complexity for accountors, as already documented in prior research, our findings show ways in which the dynamic and situation-specific accountor and constituent roles can serve as a resource. The two organizations moved back and forth between cooperating to handle accountability demands from actors in the environment, and assuming different accountor and constituent roles within their relationship.

This paper has analysed a change process within an organisation providing home-based elderly care. Using a theoretical framework from metaphor theory and insights from the literature on ‘accounting talk’, we followed how metaphorical representations of accounting were introduced and developed by the change agent. New core values and practices emerged within the home help unit that were in line with the ideas and inferences made by these accounting metaphors. The metaphorical representations of accounting concepts linked the unfamiliar domain of accounting to a more familiar domain, and provided rationales for organisational change. Our findings highlight the importance of change agents and ‘accounting talk’ for determining the trajectory of organisational change processes. The findings also suggest that metaphors are a potentially powerful tool for both changing organisational members’ general understanding of financial issues, and forging specific links between accounting concepts and work practices.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the broader effects of monitoring practices in the European Union. The empirical setting is Solvit, a Commission-initiated network tasked with informal resolution of misapplications of internal market directives by national authorities. All Member States must operate a Solvit centre within their administrations. Using a governmentality approach, the article investigates the normative underpinnings of the technologies deployed by Solvit and the experts which operate them. A survey study of the Solvit network shows the development of an EU identity and a cognitive judicialization which contributes to a depoliticization of issues. This allows Solvit to expand its remit from ex post monitoring to ex ante regulation. While a governance instrument can be designed for a delimited task, a governmentality approach highlights more general mechanisms by which such an instrument's influence and reach may be extended beyond its modest appearances. © 2013 The Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2013 John WileyXX1Sons Ltd.