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- 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. |
- 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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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Höglund, Linda, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Strategic management accounting in the public sector context : the case of the Swedish Transport Administration
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management. - : Emerald Group Publishing Limited. - 1096-3367 .- 1945-1814. ; 33:4, s. 468-486
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- PurposeThe objective of this paper is to generate further knowledge about strategic management accounting (SMA) in the public sector context. The authors attempt to do this through a study of SMA work in a public sector agency (PSA), the Swedish Transport Administration (STA). The paper elaborates on the formation of the agency's strategies and the challenges the agency's SMA work had to deal with, and focuses its analysis on the interplay between SMA and the characteristics of the public sector as well as how it is constitutive of strategy.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical material was gathered between 2013 and 2015 and consists of documents that include the STA's appropriation, mandate, strategic and operational plans, and balanced scorecard, as well as interviews with 35 civil servants at various levels of the STA.FindingsThe study finds that, depending on the performances of PSAs in their specific environment and the influences from the environment's constituents, SMA may function as an instrument that makes or breaks strategies. The characteristics of the public sector context may therefore affect SMA, and by extension, strategy, in several ways. First, the present case shows that the inherent reduction that the focus of SMA techniques entails, and their inability to deal with the complexity of a PSA's context, places them at constant risk of becoming strategically irrelevant in the eyes of knowledgeable local managers in a PSA. Second, interventions from the government may override a PSA's SMA and in effect make a PSA's strategic focus ambiguous. Third, outside monitoring performed by such actors as the National Audit Office and the mass media may influence a PSA's SMA work both directly and indirectly when the agency and the government are responsive to the agenda set by such scrutiny.Originality/valueThe paper broadens the scope of earlier SMA research in the public sector by including the specific characteristics of the public sector in the analysis and how accounting techniques may come to compete for strategic placement as they are propelled from within and from without the organization.
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
- Svärdsten Nymans, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Audit credibility and LGBTQI rights : certification operation in the margins
- 2024
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Ingår i: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. - 0951-3574. ; 37:9, s. 53-74
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge about the diversity of credibility arrangements in new audit spaces “in the margins” of auditing and the implications of such arrangements.Method: The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study of the LGBTQI certification run by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) during its first decade of business. We have interviewed employees and studied documents at the certification units within the RFSL. We have also interviewed certified organizations. Findings: We highlight two features that explain the unusual credibility arrangements in this audit practice: the role of beneficiaries in the organizational arrangements chosen and the role of responsibility as an organizing value with consequences for responsibility allocation of this certification. These features make it possible for the RFSL to act as a credible auditor even though it deviates from common arrangements for credible audit. Originality/value: The RFSL certification is different in several ways. First, the RFSL acts as both trainer and auditor. Second, the trainers/auditors at the RFSL have no accreditation to guarantee their credibility. Third, the RFSL decides itself what standards should apply for the certification and adapts these standards to the operation being audited. Therefore, this case provides a good opportunity to study alternative credibility arrangements in the margins of auditing as well as their justifications.
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| 10. |
- Svärdsten Nymans, Fredrik, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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Partially responsible? Partial organization and (de-)responsibilization in sustainability standard work. Illustrations from two opposite certification practices
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The paper contributes to the emerging discussions on responsibility implications of partial organization in the world of standards, that is, decided order outside of and among formal organizations around the use of standards (e.g., Arnold, 2020; Gustafsson & Tamm Hallström, 2018; Gustafsson, 2020; Brunsson et al. 2022). More specifically, we are interested in responsibility implications in how sustainability is performed in contemporary markets through sustainability standards and certifications. Rather than focusing on how sustainability standards are implemented (or not) in organizations, the paper answers the recent call by Christensen, Morsing and Thyssen (2017) to examine productive implications of organizational work with sustainability standards in terms of contestation, reflection and innovation around sustainability issues.Accordingly, we examine if, how and why different modes of organizing standard work construct and shape responsibility in and around organizations complying with sustainability standards. We draw on two empirical studies of certification practices with different degrees of partial organization: one where one and the same organization sets standards and performs certification (the Swedish LGBTQI certification used by e.g., preschools and libraries), and another where different “independent” organizations write standards and perform certification (the Swedish eco-label KRAV for organic produce used by e.g., farmers and retailers). Our findings show that the conditions for contestation, reflection and innovation, and thus the performance of sustainability in markets, indeed are affected by the way certification standards are (partially) organized – and thereby the number of organizations involved in partially organizing others – however in more intricate ways than expected. ReferencesArnold, N. (2020) Accountability in transnational governance: The partial organization of voluntary sustainability standards in long-term account-giving. Regulation and Governance, 28, 1–17.Brunsson, N., Gustafsson, I., & Tamm Hallström, K. (2022). Un-responsible organization. How more organization produces less responsibility. Forthcoming in Organization Theory.Gustafsson, I. (2020). How standards rule the world: The construction of a global control regime. Edward Elgar Publishing.Gustafsson, I., & Tamm Hallström, K. (2018). Hyper-organized eco-labels – An organization studies perspective on the implications of Tripartite Standards Regimes. Food Policy, 75, 124–133.
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