The shaping of public services through calculative practices: The roles of accountants, citizens, professionals, and politicians

Abstract

This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and within public service organizations. The papers in the special issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calculative practices intervene in public services, and thus come to affect the experiences of such actors, offering important perspectives on how the latter act to resist, reshape, redefine, and change those very practices, or strategically and tactically use (or avoid the use of) accounting to impact the ways in which services are defined and delivered.

New developments in institutional research on performance measurement and management in the public sector

“…This rapidly growing body of research has emerged in the wake of broader processes of economisation (Miller and Power, 2013), which have led an increasing number of social phenomena, that have previously been subject to mainly qualitative, if any, forms of assessment, to be quantified and formally evaluated in contemporary society. This tendency is not least evident in the public sector and is manifest in the introduction of novel valuation devices, such as market prices, rankings and performance audits, in this context (Muniesa and Linhardt, 2011; Lamont, 2012; Lapsley et al , 2020). The use of such devices implies that various entities are imbued with socially constructed values in ways that are akin to how different conceptions of performance are constructed in institutional fields.…”

Thirty‐six years of the journal of Financial Accountability & Management: Scientometric review

“…In parallel, the editorial of Lapsley et al. (2020) emphasized FAM's role in marking the influence of accounting work and calculative practices in shaping management practices, organizational processes, and regulatory mechanisms in many organizational settings such as central and local government, hospitals, and higher and further education. Key actors, including politicians, accountants, boundary spanners, professionals, citizens, and public managers, used calculative practices, which can be molded and strategically used to rethink public services and how the public interest is attained.…”

Calculative measures of organising and decision-making in developing countries: the case of a quasi-formal organisation in Ghana

“…Employing Weber's concepts of traditionalism and rationalities (Weber, 1948(Weber, , 1958(Weber, , 1961(Weber, , 1968 and Colignon and Covaleski's (1991) three-layer analysis, we have in this paper demonstrated how the institutional and structural conditions embedded within the historically evolved features of the Ghanaian society create substantive rational calculative measures of organising and decision-making practices in a quasi-formal organisation, TimberCo Ghana. That calculative practices play an important role in the functioning of organisations and society is covered extensively in prior work (Miller, 1994;Hopwood, 1983;Hopper et al, 2009;Guven-Uslu et al, 2020;Lapsley et al, 2020). Previous accounting studies about calculative practices in developing countries have drawn on three different kinds of organisational settings.…”

“…For instance, how calculative practices have enabled formal organisations, to both represent and construct a particular version of reality, thereby masquerading the social consequences of their activities over the profits and welfare engendered to investors, have been widely discussed in prior work (Hines, 1988;Hopwood and Miller, 1994;Vollmer, 2003;Sikka, 2015). Considering the power of calculative practices, interpretative and critical accounting researchers have emphasised the importance of understanding the emergence of new calculative practices and the way such practices are implicated in power dynamics, agency and control in formal organisations as well as in the wider society (Covaleski et al, 1996;Miller, 2001;Vollmer, 2003;Lapsley et al, 2020).…”