This research is a study of the implementation of a risk analysis method (RAM) in a French local government. Based on the sociology of translation framework, this study shows that the success of the implementation of this management device is due to the transformation of its initial characteristics. Indeed, the RAM was initially designed to analyze the risks of outsourcing public services and thereby to aid elected officials with decision making. But in the hands of the actors in charge of its implementation, it progressively became a means for the members of the administrative services to inform elected officials about the consequences of their choices. This paper thus describes the ‘trajectory’ of this management device in a local government and, in doing so, emphasizes how it progressively became what it is (and what it is not) at present in this local government.
The roles of accountant characters in a coherent genre of entertainment media, and over time, remain surprisingly under-researched. In this study, it is argued that the roles of accountants in society can be interpreted from longitudinal analyses of the roles played by accountant characters in entertainment media narratives depicting fictional worlds. Analysis is provided of narratives in which actantial and thematic roles are played by accountants in 178 US superhero comics’ narrative sequences between 1938 and 2018. The sequences were those in which at least one character is presented as an accountant. The study reveals that accountants have increasingly been portrayed in more positive than negative roles since the beginning of the twenty-first century and have become symbolic superheroes. At the same time, this study also shows that individual accountants do not last long in these narratives, even though they have a positive role. This article shows how one genre of entertainment media has conveyed an improved image of accountants in fictional worlds, to give them progressively a place of importance comparable perhaps to the one that their professional bodies argue they occupy in modern society. Even if some negativity is still attached to the accountant, their image is progressively changing for a better one based on the roles they played because they are accountants.
Résumé Cet article propose une lecture interactionniste du processus d’implantation d’une nouvelle méthode de consolidation dans une collectivité locale française. À partir de l’analyse de la dialectique entre acteurs et outil, il ressort de cette étude que l’appropriation de cette méthode a conduit à la redéfinition de son cadre de fonctionnement puis de son cadre d’usage. Ces transformations ont ainsi constitué des points de passage qui ont permis de mobiliser l’ensemble des acteurs, et expliquent la réussite du processus d’implantation. La méthode est ainsi devenue un « objet frontière ».
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