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This study aims to investigate the hybridization practices that medical managers engage with to promote accounting and performance measurement in the hybrid setting of healthcare. In doing so, the authors explore how medical managers enact and become practitioners of hybridity.

The authors adopt a practice lens to conceptualize hybridization as an emergent, situated practice and capture the micro-activities that medical managers engage with when they enact hybridity. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with medical managers, business managers and coding professionals and collected documents at an English National Health Service (NHS) hospital over the course of five years.

The findings accentuate two emergent practices through which medical managers instill hybridity to individuals who are hesitant or resistant to hybridization. Medical managers engage in equivocalizing and de-stigmatizing practices to broaden the understandings, further diversify or reconcile the teleologies of clinicians in non-managerial roles. In doing so, the authors signal the merits of accounting in improving care outcomes and remove the stigma associated to clinical engagement with costs.

The study contributes to hybridization and practice theory literature via capturing how hybridity is enacted in practice in a healthcare setting. As medical managers engage with and promote accounting information and performance measurement technologies in their practice environment, they transcend professional boundaries and hybridize the professional spaces that surround them.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intricate ways in which accounting is implicated in the unfolding of strategizing in a pluralistic setting. The authors treat strategizing as a practical coping mechanism which begins in response to a problem and unfolds over time into an episode. This approach enables the authors to explore strategizing pathways and the ways they can mobilise accounting to advance from practical coping to explicit strategic intent.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with Clinical Directors, Business Managers and Finance personnel at three NHS hospitals. Documents were also collected, such as business cases and financial reports. The authors employed theories on strategizing agency, episodes and practical coping to select examples of strategizing and indicate how strategizing is constructed and performed. The authors present the results of this qualitative analysis in three strategizing narratives.

The analysis highlights how Clinical Directors’ strategizing with accounting, in response to their financial problems, can take on contesting, conforming and circumventing modes. As the strategizing pathway unfolds, accounting acts as an obligatory passage point through which Clinical Directors pursue their strategic intent. Along each pathway the authors identify, first, where practical coping takes on a clear strategic intent and, second, whether this emergent strategy proves efficacious.

The authors contribute to the nascent body of accounting and strategizing studies through seeing strategizing with accounting, not as the formulation of explicit organisational strategy as “done” in board rooms and strategy meetings, but as an impromptu response to a critical financial problem within a localised organisational setting. In response to a problem, actors may realise their immanent strategizing through their engagement with accounting practices.

In the current digital era where online content is riddled with fabricated metrics and rankings, this research aims to investigate the underpinning mechanisms of the calculative practices which actors engage with to evaluate digital platform content in the absence of well-defined performance measures.

The paper focuses on the online, photo-sharing platform Instagram which is devoid of common performance measures such as rankings, ratings and reviews. The authors applied netnographic methods to capture users' actions and interactions at the Greek Instagram community. The authors adopt a practice lens as informed by Schatzki's ‘site ontology’ to capture actors' calculative practices as organised by rules, teleoaffective structures and general and practical understandings.

Platform actors engage in aesthetic and palpable evaluations of other user profiles and their posted content. They employ permissible (e.g., using third-party apps) and illicit (e.g., lobbying and procuring engagement) tactics to measure and manage digital platform performance, fabricate metrics and blur others' evaluations, in pursuit of prestige and material teleologies. Their calculative practices are conditioned by an implicit social etiquette, which permeates the platform both horizontally and vertically.

First, the paper captures and theorises the mechanisms which underpin actors' calculative practices for performance measurement in the absence of robust judgement devices. Second, it demonstrates how ambiguous assemblages of material and prestige teleologies, aesthetic and palpable evaluative regimes and implicit rules and practical expertise collectively invoke platform actors' calculative practices and the construction of performance measures. In doing so, it contributes to performance measurement literature via demonstrating how management accounting is implicated in the evaluation of digital platform outputs.

The paper provides insight on how platform actors fabricate performance metrics, what they perceive as ‘good’ online content and what constitutes an ‘impactful’ user account or a ‘successful’ social media campaign. Such findings are valuable to management accountants, entrepreneurs and practitioners who seek to evaluate digital platform performance.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on 30 years of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), and contemplates the future. It makes a case for diversity, including a broad range of theories and research methodologies, as a defining feature of AAAJ. As we have done since 1988 in AAAJ’s first editorial, we continue to urge interdisciplinary accounting researchers to undertake innovative research and be both original and creative, avoiding the narrow focus and detachment from society that is characteristic of globally pervasive North American economics-based accounting research.

The paper employs an analysis and critique of trends in interdisciplinary research, drawing upon the previous 29 editorials/commentaries published in AAAJ. It also elucidates the field of scholarship associated with AAAJ in 2016 as evidence of the patterning of recent research and publishing trends.

This paper identifies challenges confronting interdisciplinary researchers in the globalised academic community. These include our obsession with theoretical engorgement and our adversarial rather than cooperative approach to knowledge development. Furthermore, the authors argue that researchers must reflect on their motivation, informing theories and values if they intend to contribute to practice, policy and a wider societal good. Accounting researchers have a responsibility to go beyond observation, engaging in and constructing a more equal and fair society.

This commentary reflects on developments in AAAJ and its community over three decades. The authors also address the wider AAAJ community, including the Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting (APIRA) conference attendees, AAAJ special issue editors, the editorial board, ad hoc reviewers, authors and supporters across AAAJ’s 30 years.