Martin Carlsson-Wall

Purpose
The paper investigates the relationship between accounting and promises in the context of digital change.

Design/methodology/approach
Relying on emergent literature on accounting and promises, a qualitative field study has been conducted covering 57 interviews with municipal directors, digitalization strategists, administration managers and CFOs in a Swedish region consisting of 13 municipalities.

Findings
The paper provides insights into how municipalities draw on accounting in attempts to reconstruct promissory narratives of the digital. By highlighting two contrasting cases, we show how this can involve practices of either restoration or transformation. Likewise, we find that attempts to restore promises can sometimes have unanticipated effects, in our case a transformation of the promise instead.

Originality/value
We introduce a “promise” lens to the literature on accounting and digital change and empirically describe how accounting is implicated in shaping promises in the context of public sector digital change.

This paper focuses on hybrid board governance and the challenges faced by the board of directors when implementing social impact measurements. Interviews with 36 board chairs and general secretaries in social hybrids in Sweden show that while boards support social impact measurements, they face obstacles in implementing them. Drawing on the institutional logics framework, we identify three main reasons for these implementation problems. First, amid field level regulations focusing on cost efficiency, boards find it difficult to switch to a social impact that lacks a single metric that can be measured annually. Second, board members struggle to find sufficient time when they serve on a pro bono basis, and it is difficult to hold them accountable when limited progress occurs. Finally, acknowledging board practice variation, we highlight the need to distinguish between “beneficiary-driven” and “membership-driven” social hybrids. In the former, boards face the challenge of operationalizing the long-term benefits for end beneficiaries; in the latter, interactions with members are so operationally focused that boards struggle to maintain a long-term agenda for implementing social impact measurement. Given these challenges, we propose that future research should explicitly incorporate the board level in theorizing how hybrid organizations manage institutional logics and performance measurement.

Purpose
In this paper, the authors empirically and theoretically analyze the scaling and control of talent development to highlight an important part of commercialization in football clubs, especially in the light of a growing transfer market.

Design/methodology/approach
Conducting a single case study of a Swedish football club, the authors adapt a view of the club as a “high-intensity” organization (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004), one that inherently relies on strong identification of employees and the fostering of talent. This view allows us to detail the importance of both socio-ideological and technocratic forms of control involved in the talent development process.

Findings
The authors show how socio-ideological and technocratic forms of control were combined to establish the football club as a “talent factory” in the league, as well as the corresponding challenges when scaling talent development activities and how these challenges were handled. In doing so, the authors contribute to the broader accounting literature on talent- and human resource management, as the authors provide an example of how football clubs may commercialize without necessarily violating their fundamental sports values.

Originality/value
Talent management has mainly been studied in terms of increasing player wages and a focus on the cost of talent. As opposed to these perspectives, the authors highlight the revenue potential in developing players in the light of a growing transfer market and the relevance of talent development for the commercialization of football clubs.

Based on a case study of a large Swedish local government municipality, we explored the extent to which a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (CERP) system enabled the role performance of public sector management accountants. Our findings suggest that the CERP system enabled central management accountants to mobilize their specific expertise because it eliminated manual work, increased transparency, and made them feel more comfortable with the numbers. However, the less flexible features of a CERP system provided by external vendors, such as limited customization, posed a challenge for the local management accountants serving the different needs of a diverse range of managers and business units. Looking at the different attitudes that central and local management accountants developed toward the CERP system, we found that although both focal groups in our analysis belonged to the same occupation, they framed the role of technology differently. Although local management accountants framed it as a tool that should enable them to draw on their local expertise to produce tailor-made information for their local units, central management accountants saw the CERP system as a tool that allowed them to consume prefabricated “high-quality” information to assure efficient and risk-free accounting processes throughout the entire organization. Given this, cloud technology constitutes a risk that accounting and control processes become unduly inflexible and cumbersome at the local level. Coping with an inflexible cloud-based system may therefore add to the list of challenges that public sector management accountants experience when trying to be(come) business partners. © 2021 The Authors. Financial AccountabilityXX1Management published by John WileyXX1Sons Ltd

This paper traces the evolution of risk management practices in a global technology company between 2000 and 2015. We extend recent research that has highlighted the emotional aspects of riskwork. We detail how a passionate interest-'we can do better at risk management'-emotionally 'hooked' the staff in the company's Sourcing Unit. Risk management, emotion, and management controls were intertwined. When top management singled out one of the key metrics clearly as a risk-related metric for the Sourcing Unit, the employees felt a strong sense of relief, which gave rise to subsequent extensive risk measurement. We also contribute to the more general debate about accounting and its entanglement with emotions. Little is known about the 'birth' and the reasons for durability of passionate interests. Following Tarde (1903/2013), such 'birth' and endurance can be explained by analyzing how passionate imitation emerges as a result of a series of dislocal events-in our case a fire, new performance metrics, and natural disasters. These events triggered emotions that provided the necessary energy for three forms of passionate imitation: a) 'we need to imitate our main competitor' and risk mapping; b) 'others in the organization are imitating us and our suppliers should imitate us' and risk measurement; and c) 'others in the organization (more specifically the Product Development Unit) should imitate us' and proactive risk avoidance. This passionate imitation helped explain why the sourcing staff continued to be emotionally 'hooked' to risk management, that is, how the passionate interest endured and became vested.

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the role of management controls in managing heterogeneous interests during extreme situations.Design/methodology/approachThrough interviews and observations, the authors analyse the Swedish Migration Agency's management controls and study routines during the peak of the European Migrant Crisis.FindingsPrior to the crisis, the strategy used by the employees was to mediate between two interests (labelled legal security and empathy) to create a workable compromise. During the crisis, however, the authors observed filtering in the form of the previous hierarchical ordering of interests was further strengthened as the employees increasingly relied on just a single interest (the interest which they previously had deemed to be the most important) at the expense of the other interest. The findings suggest that behavioural and social controls helped such filtering; social controls helped certain employees to filter the empathy interest as more important during extreme situations and behavioural controls helped other employees to filter the legal security interest as more important. This help us explain why the authors observe less mediation between the two heterogeneous interests and rather a stricter dominance of one of the interests. The authors also illustrate how especially behavioural controls may become unsupportive of the operations during extreme situations as it consisted of rule-based standards, built to cope with "normal" situations. The heterogeneous interests affected the probability of actors, at times, ignoring behavioural controls when such controls were unsupportive. Actors whose day-to-day operations were mainly guided by the legal security interest remained tightly coupled to behavioural controls even when they felt that these controls were no longer useful. On the other hand, actors who were mainly guided by the empathy interest ignored behavioural controls when they felt that they were unsupportive.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors acknowledge that bias might arise from the reliance on retrospective views of past processes and events, which the authors primarily gathered through interviews.Practical implicationsThe authors highlight an important relationship between heterogeneous interests (i.e. legal security and empathy) and management controls during the crisis and how this relationship can lead actors to fundamentally different actions.Originality/valueThe two bodies of study on the role of management controls in managing heterogeneous interests and the role of management controls during the crisis have been largely unconnected and it is in this intersection that this study contributes.

This paper shows how certain management controls become more guiding than others in the management of new product development (NPD). We detail how the opportunity space within which managers maneuver NPD can be underpinned by a hierarchically arranged management control infrastructure governed by management control anchor practices that enable 'anchored prioritizations' through which some concerns become 'more important' than others. As the anchor practice in our case was an integrative liaison device, we also contribute to research that emphasizes the use of social controls in NPD settings. As management control anchor practice, integrative liaison devices can go beyond the 'pure' sharing and integration of knowledge and play a crucial role in framing accountability-induced conflicts and negotiations. We also contribute to the notion of management control anchor practices by considering the dynamics between a constitutive rule and the strategies used to enact it. Management control anchor practices play a crucial role in the light of 'conservative dynamism' where strategies through which a constitutive rule is enacted are constantly adjusted. A key role of a management control anchor practice hereby is to avoid the emergence of a state of excessive proliferation where strategies are formed merely based on opportunism or short-term contingencies.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of “the” accounting entity, demonstrating how it is a contestable socio-political construction informed by a nexus of market, state and community actors. Design/methodology/approach: A case study method is utilised to follow debate relating to Swedish football clubs’ responsibility for the payment/non-payment of policing costs between 1999 and 2014. The case study uses documentary and interview data, focusing on one of the high-risk Stockholm clubs. Findings: The paper makes four main contributions: first, demonstrating how the accounting entity is a changeable and contestable construction; second, outlining how distinctions informing contests about the accounting arena are materialised through accounting calculations and other devices; third, showing the importance of community in a coordinated sense in mediating accounting practices; and fourth, contributing to the literature on accounting and sport, highlighting the importance of state actors in this arena. Originality/value: This research draws on original empirical data providing unique insights into debates regarding the responsibility for the payment of police costs in the context of sports-related violence. The authors show the importance of characterising accounting for sporting organisations as a shifting and contestable nexus of market, state and community actors.

Purpose: This paper aims to analyse how a multinational organisation uses technocratic and socio-ideological controls to manage tensions arising when integrating its international subsidiaries. Design/methodology/approach: Through interviews and company documentation, the authors analyse how a global German family business firm integrates its international subsidiaries into the corporate context. Findings: The findings suggest that technocratic and socio-ideological controls in combination help the firm manage three tensions – vertical vs lateral relations, standardisation vs differentiation of practices and centralisation vs decentralisation of decision-making – arising in the course of internationalisation. These results have important analytical implications for the understanding of how a high level of compliance to technocratic control initiatives is achieved. Prior work has, in the main, focussed on the resistance to technocratic controls without paying much attention to compliance. Specifically, the authors show how managers can use socio-ideological control to achieve a high level of compliance among employees when implementing technocratic controls. Practical implications: The results suggest that managers in multinational firms need to pay careful attention to the tensions that are created when they internationalise and to apply a combination of technocratic and socio-ideological controls to manage these tensions. Originality/value: There is limited knowledge of how managers use socio-ideological control to enact a particular form of experience for their employees and to create a highly valued sense of purpose. The findings suggest that these controls, in combination with technocratic ones, serve important roles when organisations expand internationally. 

This paper seeks to (re)theorise the interpenetration of accounting and emotionality. Whilst researchers have devoted increasing attention to the effects of emotions, we argue that extant research is problematic in two ways. First, emotions have been treated as an intrapsychological phenomenon rather than an inter- or relational phenomenon. Second, current work focusses on how accounting produces emotions, failing to consider how emotions inform accounting. To address these two shortcomings, we mobilise the economic anthropology of Tarde (1902), and the subsequent work by Latour and Lepinay (2009) and Latour (2010; 2013), to argue that all interests are inherently 'passionate interests'; they are matters that 'hook' actors emotionally. This theoretical lens is used to narrate a field study considering the (changing) passionate interests and their connections to accounting in an elite Swedish football club. Specifically, we analyse a nexus of four passionate interests that 'hook' many (in different ways and with different degrees of intensity) - violent behaviour, winning the league, preserving the club family, and derbies. More generally, this paper argues that: first, organisations are a nexus of passionate interests; second, such interests recursively inform the doing of accounting; third, passionate interests are quantifiable via a range of financial and non-financial performance measures, enabling the construction and coordination of collectives; and, fourth, some performance measures matter more than others when (a) they are simple and unambiguous, (b) grounded in enduring passionate interests with deep historical roots that tie together members of proximate communities, and (c) travel beyond organisations and penetrate diverse arenas of everyday life, reproducing the emotive intensity of passionate interests.