| 1. |
- 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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| 2. |
- Doganova, Liliana, et al.
(författare)
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Five years! Have we not had enough of valuation studies by now?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Valuation Studies. - 2001-5992. ; 5:2, s. 83-91
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The disparate and heterogeneous body of work that falls under the rubric of “valuation studies” has really taken off in recent years. There are a number of exciting edited volumes and special issues that have been published in the past couple of years (e.g. Berthoin Antal et al. 2015; Cefai et al. 2015; Dussauge et al. 2015; Kornberger et al. 2015). This journal, recently just an idea, is now completing Volume 5 with its tenth issue. Sometimes we hear mumbled irritations about how valuation studies are about everything—and are actually everywhere. “Victory!” we could then answer in triumph, not without noticing how the valuation of valuation studies (and, indeed, of Valuation Studies) goes hand-in-hand with a sense of academic terrain, and the occupation thereof.
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| 3. |
- Doganova, Liliana, et al.
(författare)
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Valuation Studies and the Critique of Valuation
- 2014
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Ingår i: Valuation Studies. - : Linkoping University Electronic Press. - 2001-5992. ; 2:2, s. 87-96
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 4. |
- Hartmann, Berit
(författare)
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Bridging the GAAP? : IFRS in accounting practice
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates how International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) come to act within an organizational context. In particular, the thesis explores how the requirements for goodwill accounting and leasing influence organizational calculative practices, transforming and shaping operations management. Drawing on actor-network theory, this study moves away from a priori distinctions, following the construction and mobilization of accounting numbers across institutionalized boundaries within and around the organization.The empirical investigation took place in a large, worldwide active media group that is listed on a European stock exchange. The group is a particular interesting setting because of its diverse business structure and its German code-law accounting roots. Business combinations are a major growth factor within the industry and a high degree of decentralization in the organization placed responsibility for investment decisions at low hierarchical levels. Goodwill accounting and impairment testing were therefore highly significant calculative practices in the group.The study finds that the constitutive role of the financial reporting standards in the organization both solves tensions and dilemmas around the number and creates new ones when crucial interests are lost in translation. These tensions and dilemmas arise between the aim of standardization and closure for the construction of a legitimate value of the future, and the aim to mobilize numbers in order to motivate and create value for a future.Originally intended for the financial representation of organizational substance and performance, the standards become associated with operations management activities, helping to create the faithful records that sum up the organization. This interrelation helps to close concern around the representation of the future in a ‘fair’ value by distributing the calculative practices over a wide network of actors spanning inside and outside the organization. However, the relationship also forces a connection between calculations and ambitions that otherwise would have preferred to stay separate.This thesis offers a new perspective on IFRS implementation by emphasizing organizational activities. Through a focus on integration and the link between financial and management accounting, the ‘implementation problems’ highlighted in previous literature gain a refined theorization. When taking organizational practice seriously, integration becomes a process that may find temporal stability but will never be final. In the process, conflicts might be solved but new dilemmas will arise. In turn, concepts like decision usefulness, comparability and earnings management cannot exist in a stable form but are rather constructed in networks that disregard commonly assumed boundaries inside and around the organization.
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| 5. |
- Helgesson, Claes-Fredrik, Professor, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Five years! Have we not had enough of valuation studies by now?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Valuation Studies. - : Linköping University Electronic Press. - 2001-5992. ; 5:2, s. 83-91
-
Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The disparate and heterogeneous body of work that falls under the rubric of “valuation studies” has really taken off in recent years. There are a number of exciting edited volumes and special issues that have been published in the past couple of years (e.g. Berthoin Antal et al. 2015; Cefai et al. 2015; Dussauge et al. 2015; Kornberger et al. 2015). This journal, recently just an idea, is now completing Volume 5 with its tenth issue. Sometimes we hear mumbled irritations about how valuation studies are about everything—and are actually everywhere. “Victory!” we could then answer in triumph, not without noticing how the valuation of valuation studies (and, indeed, of Valuation Studies) goes hand-in-hand with a sense of academic terrain, and the occupation thereof.
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| 6. |
- Mennicken, Andrea, et al.
(författare)
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Editorial note : Valuation and Calculation at the Margins
- 2015
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Ingår i: Valuation Studies. - : Linköping University Electronic Press. - 2001-5992. ; 3:1, s. 1-7
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 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.
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| 7. |
- Sinha, Vikash Kumar
(författare)
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Shaping Risk Management in Banks
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The recent financial crisis of 2007-08 was a watershed moment in the history of banking. The unprecedented event led to severe scrutiny by standard setters and regulators on how the business of banking is run. As a result of this strict scrutiny, a wide variety of reforms aimed at the second line of defense (risk management) ensued globally. These reforms stirred debate among the five actors (regulators, standard setters, normalizers, consultants, and implementers – banks and their interest organizations) that affected not only the shaping of risk management standards but also their implementation in banks. Motivated by these contemporary events, this thesis examines the shaping of risk management in the banking sector.Through the three exploratory field studies in Sweden and Italy, the thesis posits two important contributions. First, the thesis posits a framework, demonstrating how the dynamic shaping of risk management is changing the conceptions of risk management in the banking sector. More specifically, the thesis (in Paper I) demonstrates how the definition of liquidity was changed from its traditional notion of a match between cash inflow and outflow to managing net cash outflow demands by keeping high-quality liquid assets. Furthermore, the thesis (in Paper II) shows how non-convergence of operational risk practices forced regulators to change their activity and detail-oriented advanced approach of risk measurement that (unintentionally) allowed the variation of practices to flourish. In a similar vein, the thesis (in Paper IV) demonstrates how the extension of internal audit to the non-tangible domain of “risk culture” raises doubts about the notion of “verification” and “control” attached to the practices of internal audit in lending credibility to risk management practices.Second, the findings indicate the different participation approaches of various interested actors in the shaping of risk management practices. Here, the thesis (in Paper IV) demonstrates how the five actors (regulators, standard setters, normalizers, consultants, and implementers – banks and their interest organizations) influenced the conception of internal audit of risk culture. On the issue of internal audit of the Basel risk models (in Paper III), the thesisi demonstrates the filtering approaches of multiple institutional demands via the internal organizational conditions that enable full or partial agency of low-level internal auditors in shaping their practices of lending credibility to risk management.Given the findings, the thesis explicates two important implications for practitioners. First, the findings of the thesis indicate that reformulations of risk measurement and internal audit would require standard setters, regulators, normalizers, consultants, and implementers to understand a balance between what to control and whom to empower. Second, banks would need to carefully design the level of freedom to be given to internal audit and risk control teams in managing the complex institutional demands through organizational structure and skilling initiatives.
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| 8. |
- Svärdsten Nymans, Fredrik, 1977-
(författare)
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Constituting performance : Case studies of performance auditing and performance reporting
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to problematize how and under what conditions organizational performance is constituted in the practices of performance auditing and accounting. Organizational performance disclosure is a world-wide phenomenon for enabling accountability relationships in large organizations regardless of the societal sector they operate in. In constitutive accounting literature, there is a well-established notion that accounting and performance auditing enable “government at a distance” by representing organizational actions and results of those actions, i.e. by constituting performance. Accounting and performance auditing have been regarded as “technologies of government” that make government from spatial and temporal distances possible by linking political and programmatic ambitions, i.e., the will of a superior, to everyday organizational conduct. However, whereas many previous studies of accounting and performance auditing as technologies of government focus on the discourses over the technologies of accounting and performance auditing, this thesis focuses its analysis on the operationalization of these technologies in local organizational settings. By studying the constitution of performance in the practices of accounting and performance auditing this thesis contributes by problematizing that which supposedly makes government at a distance possible.The thesis is based on two case studies of performance audit and two case studies of performance reporting. On the basis of these papers, the thesis studies the constitution of performance in performance auditing and accounting. Whereas the constitution of performance may seem stable and unproblematic at the level of discourse, this thesis suggests that constituting performance is a complex process of social construction that requires significant organizational efforts and that the ability of accounting and performance auditing to connect political and programmatic ambitions to daily organizational conduct cannot be taken for granted. The thesis suggest that once we acknowledge that performance is a socially constructed representation of organizational actions and begin to pay attention to how performance is constituted in local organizational settings, we can find new ways of addressing the ongoing challenge of constituting performance in accounting and performance auditing and increase our understanding about the ability of these practices to enable government at a distance.
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