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

Contemporary civil society organisations (CSOs) face ever more settings of closing space, and an emerging literature has begun to show how such hostile conditions shape accountability practices for local CSOs. However, less is known about how funders of such organisations themselves account for involvement with advocacy-based CSOs that are a target of state-sanctioned repression. Drawing on annual reports and associated documents issued by the prominent Russian human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) Memorial and its international non-governmental funders over three decades, we derive four modes of transparency of funders vis-à-vis their commitment to Memorial and their involvement in Russia. We also analyse shifts and patterns in funders’ public disclosures, against a backdrop of mounting hostility against foreign-funded CSOs in Russia. We find that funders are generally restrictive in what they disclose about their involvement in a hostile setting and responsive to deteriorating circumstances for a potentially vulnerable grantee. In particular, funders embedded in the hostile conditions faced by their grantee engage in protective opacity to render their own and recipient organisations’ activities and associates more opaque. We argue that this shielding tactic can support and sustain funders’ involvement in hostile conditions where public dissemination of information has the potential to be weaponised. Our findings offer a timely problematisation of the hitherto dominant trope that NGO funders are distanced and self-interested promoters of greater transparency and upward accountability.

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.