| 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. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- 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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| 5. |
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Höglund, Linda, et al.
(författare)
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Strategic management in public sector : A Movement Beyond NPM?
- 2015
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Strategic management (SM) is now prominent on the agenda of public administration scholars and practitioners e.g. in Swedish Central Agencies, and is said to become increasingly relevant in public organizations due to new public management (NPM) changes. Some scholars even suggests that the models of SM takes us beoynd NPM towards something new where the SM becomes the core of the organization. SM has so far mainly been studied in a context of the private sector, and the main concern in public sector research on SM has been on how to translate the concepts of growth and profitability into a public sector context. There is however a lack of studies investigating how public organizations actually apply SM in practice. Calls have been made for exploration of SM approaches within contemporary public services organizations but also more exploration of the limitations of these models. We have studied the implementation of a SM-model in the Swedish Transport Administration, a central government agency. The empirical material is based on document studies and interviews with 85 top- , middle- and lower-level managers, strategists and other employees. SM is supposed to lead to e.g. decentralization, a long term holistic perspective and strategic thinking. However, our results indicate when public sector do their interpretation of how to use SM-models they tend to become quite centralized, fixated on short-term measurements and focused on operative matters. One explanation for this seems to be that SM is translated into a NPM discourse, altering the initial intentions with SM. This suggests that NPM becomes an important contextual aspect to consider when SM-models are implemented in the public sector.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Svärdsten, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Accounting, Calculative Infrastructures and Commensuration Work
- 2023
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Ingår i: The European Accounting Review. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0963-8180 .- 1468-4497. ; , s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Accounting scholars are paying increasing attention to the notion of commensuration, or the translation of different objects into common metrics that make the entities that are subject to performance evaluation comparable, and the effects this has on organizational behavior. This body of research draws attention to organizations’ commensuration work, defined as the efforts that evaluated organizations expend in pursuing and dealing with resistance to commensuration, but has mainly explored how such work emerges in response to a single set of comparable metrics such as individual rankings or ratings. By contrast, we ask how commensuration work unfolds in relation to a broader assemblage of calculative infrastructures. Such infrastructures can entail multiple, inter-related performance evaluation procedures that influence organizations’ commensuration work and give rise to complex patterns of reactivity, denoting the propensity of organizations to alter their behavior as they internalize external pressures for performance evaluation. Our empirical findings underline the importance of adopting a multi-layered view of commensuration work, that entails both direct and indirect forms of reactivity, as it unfolds in relation to a broader assemblage of calculative infrastructures. We discuss the implications of adopting such a view for future research on commensuration and related research on performance evaluation.
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| 10. |
- Svärdsten, Fredrik, 1977-
(författare)
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In the absence of detailed steering : A governmental attempt to adress the issues of recentralization and detailed performance control
- 2015
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration. - 2001-7405 .- 2001-7413. ; 19:2, s. 109-127
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the main unintended consequences of NPM-reforms is increased detailed -steering and recentralization due to attempts to decentralize the public sector, which, in turn, leads to restrictive hierarchical accountability relationships. This paper reports an attempt by the Swedish government to solve these problems by decentralizing the Swedish central agencies’ performance reporting and thereby broadening the possibilities of accountability in the Swedish central government. Whereas several studies have presented cases in which the “superior” (e.g., the government) is the main driver behind detailed performance control and recentralization, the findings in this paper show that centralized detailed control can be highly desirable for those accountable for their performance. In line with findings made in previous studies, the decentralization in the Swedish central government is now followed by a recentralization. However, this recentralization is mainly driven by the central agencies and not by the government. The paper suggests that to understand the dynamics between decentralization and recentralization in the area of public performance reporting, it is necessary to consider institutionalized reporting structures as well as the difficulties associated with defining performance. This allows for further insights into the possibilities of broadened accountability in the public sector.
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