2,792 research outputs found
Accounting, actorhood and actors: A comment on: Casting call: The expanding nature of actorhood in U.S. Firms, 1960–2010 by Patricia Bromley and Amanda Sharkey
Get PDFThe paper by Bromley & Sharkey (2017) brings to the fore the notion of actorhood as developed in the work of John Meyer and his colleagues, which has been only tangentially mobilised within accounting scholarship. This commentary proposes some reasons for this limited mobilisation and discusses the intellectual value of the concept of actorhood for accounting research and new institutionalism in organisation studies more broadly. In particular, it offers some reflections on how actorhood in new institutionalism, action in actor-network theory and subjectification in the Foucauldian tradition may be placed in a productive dialogue
Commensuration and styles of reasoning:Venice, cost-benefit, and the defence of place
Get PDFThis paper discusses some preconditions for "making things the same" by means of quantification and economic calculation. It examines a controversial cost-benefit analysis, conducted as part of the environmental appraisal of a large public sector project in Italy: the long-debated scheme for flood protection in Venice. By tracing the different "styles of calculation" that characterised the economic and environmental appraisal of the project, the paper analyses the inter-relationship between economic representations of the urban and natural environment, its political symbolism, and various attempts to intervene upon it. It follows how the objectivity of numbers is debated, stabilised or disrupted, as differing appeals to realism and accuracy are advanced in the context of different modes of intervention and practical aims. The paper shows that the "commensuration" and "standardisation" that numbers can bring about rest on how the object of calculation as well as, crucially, its subject are represented and conceived.</p
Performance measurement in global governance:Ranking and the politics of variability
Get PDFThe past thirty years have witnessed the spread of rankings, ratings and league tables as governance technologies which aim to regulate the provision of public goods by means of market pressures. This paper examines the process of company analysis underlying the production of a ranking known as the Access to Medicine Index. We conceptualize the Index as a “regulatory ranking” with the explicit mission of addressing a perceived regulatory gap and market failure: the lack of access to medicine in the Global South. The Index, which ranks the world's largest pharmaceutical companies with regards to their access to medicine policies and practices, aspires to help address the problem of access to medicine through stakeholder consultation, transparency and competition. This study unbundles the epistemic work underlying the performance measurement process leading to the creation of the Index. We trace how the goal of stakeholder consensus, the need to project objectivity and the aspiration to govern through competition shape analysts' epistemic work. We discuss how through notions such as “the good distribution” and “aspirational indicators”, performance measurement and ranking become entangled in a “politics of variability” whereby company data need to be variably interpreted in order to optimise the possibilities of intervening in companies through competitive pressures, while at the same time complying with the imperatives to remain in the space of perceived stakeholder consensus and to provide a faithful representation of companies performance to inform public debates. We reflect on the challenges posed by these analysis processes for the regulatory aspirations of the ranking.</p
The Institutional Drama of Conservation
No full textThis study uses the case of the "Safeguard" of Venice-in which there is a continuous tension between the aspiration to "modernize" and to "restore" the city, its economy, and its surrounding lagoon environment-to highlight the symbolic function of heritage in shaping government policies. It demonstrates how the effectiveness of the national government as a guarantor of the Safeguard of Venice was questioned both in the name of tradition and of modernization and discusses the unintended consequences of this continuous dramatization of the state and its policies for the city. The study points at some challenges posed by heritage conservation on state identity at a time of increasing transnationalization of heritage policies and private sector involvement. © 2012 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved
Numbers in regulatory intermediation: Exploring the role of performance measurement between legitimacy and compliance
Get PDFMuch regulatory intermediation has come to entail forms of calculation and performance measurement. In this paper we analyze the role of performance measurement in regulatory intermediation in a transnational multistakeholder setting where intermediation lacks an official mandate. We do this through a study of the Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies in terms of their access to medicine policies and practices in developing countries. We conceptualize multi- stakeholder intermediaries as “second order rulemakers” reconciling diverse and often competing implicit and explicit rules across the governance field. We then detail various intermediation roles of performance measurement between attaining input and output legitimacy and enticing compliance among targets. Our case demonstrates how the selective formalization of measurement processes and the related ability to move back and forth from the role of intermediary to that of “ad hoc rulemaker” are important conditions for achieving and maintaining legitimacy. Furthermore, it shows that for multistakeholder intermediaries that rely on performance measurement, compliance by targets depends on the uptake of performance information by powerful constituencies. This illustrates how addressing legitimacy concerns and enticing compliance through performance measurement should be examined as co-emerging processes
Between Stakeholders and Third Parties: Regulatory Rankings and the Organization of Competition
No full textGovernance initiatives based on rankings are predicated on the possibility of making companies compete for the achievement of social goals by means of public comparisons of performance. The public of such performance - the ranker and various stakeholders in whose name the ranker speaks - thus fulfills the role of a “third party” whose favor is sought by competitors in what Simmel analyzed as “pure” or “indirect” competition. Yet little is known about how rankers seek to produce or entice such favor in order to enact competition. Through the case of the Access to Medicine Index, we examine the process of selective foregrounding, enticing and orchestration of different stakeholders through the gearing of the ranking’s information infrastructure aimed at optimizing the type and intensity of the competitive pressure exercised on the ranked. We illustrate how the ranker segments the public into different third parties, some well-identified stakeholders alongside a more anonymous audience. We find that stakeholders perceived as wielding legitimate power in the eyes of companies (such as investors) are actively equipped with the tools to witness competition, whereas stakeholders seen as powerful but involved in an agonistic relation with the companies (such as radical Non-Governmental Organizations) are discretely groomed at a distance, while those stakeholders with no perceived power over companies tend to remain unequipped. Whilst the gaze of stakeholders as third parties is differentiated along the lines of a hierarchy of observations, the voice of stakeholders as representatives of different interests is equalized and unified so as to adhere to an ideal of consensus. We reflect on how the needs of competition and those of stakeholder representation come to intersect in the particular governance space of access to medicine. Competition, far from being the automatic consequence of rankings, emerges as a contrived and laborious enactment requiring painstaking attention to publics and their selective equipment as third parties. Understanding the modes of such enactment is thus crucial for appreciating rankings’ governance outcomes
Indexal Thinking – Reconfiguring Global Topologies for Market-Based Intervention
Get PDFThrough the example of a “regulatory ranking” – an index produced with the aim to regulate the pharmaceutical market by pushing companies in the direction of providing greater access to medicine in developing countries – this chapter focuses on indexing and ranking as infrastructural processes which inscribe global problem spaces as unfolding actionable territories for market intervention. It foregrounds the “Indexal thinking” which structures and informs regulatory rankings – their aspiration to align the interests of different stakeholders and to entice competition among the ranked companies. The authors detail the infrastructural work through which such ambitions are enacted, detailing processes of infrastructural layering/collage and patchwork through which analysts naturalize/denaturalize various contested categories in the ranking’s territory. They reflect on the consequences of such attempts at reconfiguring global topologies for the problems these governance initiatives seek to address.</p
Rita B. Stadig Correspondence
Get PDFEntry is a handwritten biographical sketch of Rita Stadig author of Our Maine Heritage, a history of Maine
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