Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Förvaltningshögskolan

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Browsing Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Förvaltningshögskolan by Subject "accounting"

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    Accounting, Professions, and Performativity: Exploring the limits of accountingisation in professional organisations
    (2022-08-18) Firtin, Cemil Eren
    This thesis explores the practice of calculations and their consequences in different professional contexts. Specifically, it aims to extend the discussion on the relationship between accounting and public sector professionals by elaborating on the concept of accountingisation using a performative approach. Accountingisation has been discussed in the literature in terms of the colonising and transformative effects of accounting on professionals. This concurs with observations that expansion of calculative practices in public sector organisations brings about economisation and the perception of accounting as performative. This is a one-sided depiction of accountingisation. However, a gap remains in that professionals’ agency has been overlooked in this relationship. Such a gap consequently necessitates further research in order to refine the argument that accountingisation is not only a one- way effect of accounting on professionals per se, but rather rooted within the mutual relationship between them. This thesis attempts to fill such a gap by focusing on the concepts of performativity and accountingisation in a range of professional contexts. Empirically, the study consists of four case studies illustrating calculative practices unfolding between accounting and professionals in each individual context. These are (I) pay determination for teachers in Swedish schools, (II) performance measurements within an emergency unit in a Swedish hospital, (III) cost-benefit analyses in a social care organisation in a Swedish municipality, and (IV) medical professionals’ reactions in pandemic initiatives in Turkey. In these studies, data has been collected from interviews, observations, and documents, and analyses have been conducted qualitatively by focusing on (counter-) narratives framing descriptions of the empirical phenomena. Based on the findings of these individual studies, this thesis draws its conclusions that (1) accounting can be both performative and counter-performative in shaping professional organisations, and such differentiation depends on the way in which the constellation between professional and accounting calculations is organised; (2) professions are found to be performative in relation to accounting in their shaping of the ways that things are done through their own calculations, such as professional standards measuring and assuring the quality of work, and ethics and norms valuing the good/bad conduct of work; and (3) accounting is not always necessarily imposed on the professional contexts, but professionals may also voluntarily engage in its construction by bringing forth (counter-) accounts. (4) A final finding shows that accountingisation manifests differently in terms of the different organisation of professional and accounting calculations in different professional contexts. In the light of these findings, this thesis extends the overall discussion of accountingisation by shifting focus from considering it as a one-way effect of accounting on professionals and public sector organisations to diverse and mutual performative relations between professionals and accounting.
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    The Profit of Prevention. A study of Social Investments in a Swedish Region
    (2022-03-08) Lagström, Cristian
    This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the use and implications of accounting technologies in the governing of public services. It explores social investments, a proliferating public sector management technology based broadly on the idea to govern long-term public goals “by numbers”. The core of social investments is to calculate the socio- economic profitability of preventative measures. As such, it reflects the complexities and capacities of governing towards long-term goals in a changing public landscape. Building on a view of accounting and economic ideas as mutually constitutive, the thesis focuses the processes and practices of rendering social investments operable in practice. The research question which guides the study is: How is social investments realized in an organizational setting? The study is carried out in a Swedish region. Guided by Actor Network Theory (ANT) and its constructivist approach to study things in the making, the study follows the actions and actors by which social investments is created as a management technology. Field material consists of interviews, observations and documents and was generated between 2014 and 2018. The findings of the study are presented in four papers. The first paper takes the long-term thinking associated with the social investment perspective as its empirical focus. The second paper focuses the role of calculative practices in a changing public landscape and analyses the process by which social investments was introduced as a means of handling the wickedness of social problems, and turned into practice. The third paper engages with the concepts of hybridity and hybridization arguing for a deeper understanding of the constitutive role accounting play in the formation of hybrid settings. In particular the paper suggests acknowledging processes of de-hybridization. The fourth paper develops further the theorization of hybridity and introduces the concept of multiple translation points in order to understand how social investments was translated differently across different nodes of the actor-network. Based on the findings of the papers this thesis concludes that social investments went through multiple transformations in order to be rendered operable in an organizational setting. Calculations of long-term impact came to play a marginal role, still an inter-organizational space for dialogue about the profit of prevention was created.