Ebba Sjögren

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.

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.

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 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.

Valuation studies is an emerging feld with visible momentum. This is evidenced not only by the existence of this journal. In 2015 alone, several edited volumes and special issues were published on the explicit theme of examining valuations and how things are made valuable (Berthoin Antal et al. 2015; Cefai et al. 2015; Dussauge et al. 2015; Kornberger et al. 2015). One common feature of the histories of valuation studies which has been mentioned in these and other contributions is that valuation emerges as a long-standing core concern for a diverse array of scholars, as varying as it is delimited: by time, geography, and/or academic discipline. 

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.

This report presents findings from an interview-based study of capital market actors’ use of interim and annual reports. We would like to thank all interviewees who generously took time to share their practices, experiences and views with us. Without you, this research would not have been possible. The study was initially conceived following discussions with representatives of the Swedish Enterprise Accounting Group (SEAG), a group within the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise has kindly supported the research by financing direct outlays for travel and transcriptions. However, all conclusions are our own. 

Using an example from the health-care sector, we illustrate consequences of implementing knowledge-based decision making relating to the exercise of political control. The Swedish Pharmaceutical Benefits Board decides the subsidization status of prescription pharmaceuticals. Building on a study of the agency's work, we explore the effects of institutional arrangements stemming from rationalistic demands for knowledgeable and justifiable outcomes related to political structures for control. Knowledge about the medical and economic effects of pharmaceuticals is routinely ambiguous. This makes it necessary to negotiate “decision-able” knowledge rather than to merely collect it. This touches on matters of broader political consequence, which the formal model for governing the administration does not take into account. This masks decisions as neutral administrative choices. A further conclusion concerns the lack of mechanisms for repoliticizing politically salient issues that have been delegated to administrative bodies.