| 1. |
- Bay, Charlotta, et al.
(författare)
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Accounting talk and emotions- a study of the sense making process of accounts
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper is concerned with the role of emotions in reading and interpreting financial accounts. Even though people’s capacity to understand accounting to a large extent has been taken as given in the accounting research field, some studies have shown that accounting information nor the ability to interpret it, seldom inhibit any universal meaning. Prior research demonstrates how accounting users tend to engage in various kinds of sense making activities, referred to as “accounting talk”, in which cognitive capacities are developed, helping people translating accounting information into local contextualized knowledge. Whereas previous studies of accounting talk have focused on how the individual’s cognitive resources are developed, this paper broadens the analytical scope to include the emotive resources for making sense of financial accounts. The paper provides a detailed close-up of how pension-savers interpret and react to financial accounts presented to them during individual pension advisory meetings. Informed by a sociological approach to emotions, the empirical results indicate that emotions play several but different roles in people’s interpretations of financial accounts, and should not necessarily be perceived as inhibiting people’s cognitive sense-making ability. In fact, the relation between rational reasoning and emotions in relation to accounts should be understood as a symbiotic interdependence.
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| 2. |
- Borell, Anton, 1991-
(författare)
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In Between Competing Ideals : On the Relationships among Accounting, NPM, and Welfare
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- We know that public organizations today are expected to manage activities on multiple, and somewhat incongruent ideals. Since the development of the New Public Management (NPM) wave, public organizations have been increasingly subject to governance by markets, economic frugality and outputs for the purpose of improving efficiency. At the same time, they are also required to manage their daily work according to the ideals of needs, equity and professional expertise, which have traditionally been foundational to the realization of a welfarian agenda. Together, these requirements make up dual expectations of public organizations as well as the accounting technologies used to manage them: a form of paradoxical management that seeks to measure, evaluate and document both efficiency and welfare. But how do actors realize these plural ideals in practice? And what is the role of accounting in this? These are some of the aspects and problems with control that lie at the very heart of this dissertation.Based on 41 interviews and 28 observations in a Swedish school context, this dissertation shows how the paradoxical expectations become manifest in the design and use of accounting technologies. On the one hand, it shows how school actors attempt to integrate welfare and NPM in practice by relying on accounting technologies, which results in hybrid outcomes. On the other hand, the dissertation also shows the fragility of such a style of governance, which continuously leads to failures and breakdowns that actors have to readdress as a consequence of attempting to achieve competing ideals by relying on accounting.By leaning on governmentality as a metatheoretical framework, this dissertation contributes to some new understandings of control in public sector contexts. First, in contrast to the literature on colonization, which suggests that the expansive use of accounting is a direct threat to welfarian ideals, this dissertation shows that accounting can equally serve as a means for welfarian ideals to eclipse NPM. Second, in contrast to the stream of separation that treats the loose or minimal use of accounting as a mechanism for sealing off welfare from NPM-led intrusions, the dissertation shows that even a marginal or loose application of accounting can in fact be conceived as a threat to welfarian ideals. Third, this dissertation also provides additional understanding in relation to the hybridity approach, not only by illuminating how NPM and welfare were brought together through various hybrids, but also by showing how these hybrids were facilitated by accounting technologies, whose functions served to make integration a practically viable outcome amenable to both breakdowns and reintegration. Overall, the dissertation thus contributes to current knowledge on public sector governance in general, and more specifically about the relationships among accounting, NPM, and welfare, in terms of their entanglement, disentanglement, interdependencies, and modes of reproduction in public sector life, a gap also echoed by recent calls in research.
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| 3. |
- Catasús, Bino, et al.
(författare)
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Demography, ideologies and finance : A history of calculation and Swedish pensions
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper reports from a study of four pension reforms in Sweden over the last century. The paper tests the dominant idea that pension systems as well as accounting technologies are a part of the neoliberal influenced financialization of the private sphere. Although corroborating the proposition about financialization, the paper suggests that programs such as financialization is temporal because they are challenged by obligatory points of controversy. These obligatory points of controversy recur over time as issues that pension systems need to handle with decisions and calculations. The study finds that the obligatory points of controversy, however, are never solved because they interact and are in flux. In Sweden, the three controversies that are repeated are the discussion of demography, finance and ideology. These three issues forces the decisionmaker to answer such issues as “what is it to be Swedish?”, “can we afford this?” and “what is our idea of involvement between of the state/the private sector?”
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| 4. |
- Catasús, Bino, et al.
(författare)
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The "death" of calculation : Exploring the conditions of calculative practices
- 2020
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper draws attention to people’s pension savings and their responses to the increasing calls urging them to engage in practices of calculation about their future life as retirees. Recurring studies report that these calculation exercises have turned out to raise problems to people, provoking – at times – frustration or even indifference among pension savers. But why is that so? Why do people not engage in this kind of calculations?Prior literature suggests that mechanic calculation presupposes a set of conditions. Individual knowledge-based capacity (Lusardi and Mitchell 2007) as well as commensurate translations that enables possibilities for comparisons between different kinds of choices (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Callon & Law, 2005) are but a few conditions that are suggested to be fulfilled in order to make rational calculation feasible. There are situations, however, when calculation is called for and expected to be attended to without controversy, but still turn out as moments where rational principles of calculation do not seem to apply (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Calculating one’s pension might be argued to represent one such situation. Based on our empirical observations, the basis for rational calculation seems to be challenged when pension savers are asked to imagine an existence taking place in a future several decades ahead from the life they lead today. Hence, in order to further explore the reasons to this experienced calculative dilemma, we ask: What role does future play in practicing pension calculations?The aim of this paper is to extend our understanding of the conditions of calculation. The idea is to investigate situations in which calculation entail dilemmas of rationality. To frame the conditions of calculation, we draw on Jaspers’ idea of boundary situations (2010). A boundary situation is a moment in which a person is faced with discrepancies and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved by means of rational thinking. We suggest that people’s pension management offers such a moment, investigating how people read and understand pension accounts in the light of a future that involves different kinds of ‘deaths’: the termination of professional life; the consequences of physical decay, and the end of life itself.The study demonstrates that practices of calculations inevitably links to imagining the future but also, and by consequence, how calculations become circumscribed when these future imaginations involve existential concerns that rule out rational reasoning. In such cases, calculations transforms into a practice that stretches beyond rationality, suggesting that when the future is unimaginable, calculation becomes nonsensical or even absurd. This, in turn, adds a time dimension to the conditions of calculation, an issue which to date has not explicitly been addressed in prior accounting literature.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Eriksson, Kim, et al.
(författare)
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A new performance management and measurement is made to bea helpful intervention
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article focus on the conditions and reasons why organisational members articulate support for a newly introduced outcome-focused performance measurement and management system (PMS) in a public sector context. It does so through an analysis of the introduction of a performance measurement and management system named “Delivery Qualities” in a Swedish central government. The PMS was introduced by the Swedish government as a solution to societal critic, which initiated a process of handling and processing PMS in the case organisation. We argue that the reasons why members of the case organisation embraced the outcome-focused PMS are because it was not existing PMS. In the case, it is suggested that the outcome-focused PMS was, in essence,providing a more suitable link to ideas and ambition in the organisation.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson, Kim, 1990-
(författare)
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Att anordna styrning : tillblivelse av en mångfald av styrteknologier
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last couple of decades, management control studies have taken an increased interest in the multiplicity of management controls. Broadly speaking, research has focused on the consequences of management controls. However, research has rarely examined how a multiplicity of management controls comes to exist. Answering this question will shed light on the variety of rationales, processes, and conditions that contributes to creating management control in organizations. Therefore, this thesis has the following research question: How does a multiplicity of management controls come to exist in an organization? This thesis investigates management control in a Swedish central government agency through documents, interviews, workshops, listening to presentations, and meetings. The study focuses on the development of management control from the decision to create a new central government agency in 2009 to 2015 when management control was being reformed in the agency because it had become too extensive. Between 2009 and 2015, new management control technologies were continuously added. Overall, the analysis illustrates that management control technologies are being added through three interrelated aspects. First, the analysis illustrates three processes that contributed to the management control technologies being introduced: reproducing process – i.e., management control technologies reproduced in the new agency; reactive processes – i.e., government-specific management control technologies created, for example, to respond to criticism from external actors; and proactive processes – i.e., management control technologies modified for a new context. Second, the analysis illustrates that similarities and differences of management control technologies enable the coexistence of these technologies. Third, the analysis illustrates that management control technologies are linked to a reference point that is expressed as a pursuit of holism, a local condition for the multiplicity of management controls. These findings suggest that the emergence of management controls becomes possible through three interrelated aspects. This thesis contributes to the management control domain by highlighting the complex processes, rationales, and conditions that enable a multiplicity of management controls to co-exist.
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