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The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications that Power’s book had to the author’s research in public sector auditing.

In this paper, the author reflects and debates the inspiration that Michael Power’s book The Audit Society had on the author’s own research.

The author finds that this book had a significant influence on how he succeeded theorizing his studies on auditing, and how he could contribute to the audit literature. It is stunning how the book succeeded in synthesizing audit research, encouraging scholars to understand auditing as a social practice, i.e. how auditing can be theorized using various social science theories and how the book also appealed to broader social science.

This paper is a reflection that covers around a 20-year period with potential mis-representations of how exactly sequences of actions and thoughts were.

This paper helps to clarify how it is that audit operates and influences everyday life of persons involved with auditing.

This paper casts doubts as to what actions are carried out in the name of audit and that audit is not just a value free activity but involved with political agendas.

The originality of this paper is that it fleshes out how a seminal book can have significant implications on how research is carried out.

This paper shows how Bruno Latour’s novel work and methodological approach can enrich management and organization studies, accounting and science and technology studies on what it takes to redesign sustainable societal infrastructures. Latour’s notions of trials of strength, macro-actor and design as redesign are used in a case study to describe and analyse how the laboratory becomes decisive in negotiating the bridge design and project budget to the benefit of a more sustainable transport infrastructure.

Latour’s notion of the detective-author is used to research and write a longitudinal qualitative case study that reconstructs the project processes and chain of related events by following the actors/actants.

The case analysis shows how a project design becomes an emerging powerful macro-actor through the mobilization of laboratory simulations and calculations. The role of the project budget changes; from a strong supporting role as input to a decision option in favour of a cheaper stayed bridge to a weak role as an output from a process of redesign supporting a much larger, costlier and more sustainable suspension bridge.

We use Latour’s methodological approach to engage primarily in detailed process descriptions to go beyond the often-pointless call for further theory development and to rather account for what is at work in specific situations. Latour’s notions of redesign as an outcome from trials of strength, we consider a useful approach to further our understanding since it also takes account of the distributed knowledge production that is integral to the actors’ cognitions and recognitions. Relatedly, the specific Latourian notion of redesign opens up new avenues for researching the more or less powerful role accounting devices such as a project budget can play in valuing, supporting and/or undermining the design of sustainable societal infrastructures.

This paper aims to explain why public sector performance reporting that emphasises external accountability may turn out differently from the official stated aims.

Using a comparative case method, two different accountability innovations are examined using framing and overflowing ideas.

The accountability reports became bureaucratic communications between the reporting and central agencies. The reports were transformed because the performance reporting produced a number of overflows and reduced the importance of broad audiences (e.g. citizens). These overflows resulted from the central agency reformers' preoccupation with cost cutting opportunities and the reporting agencies' presumption of the reformers' real purpose. In the resulting interactions, the accountability purpose ended up being mostly reduced to disclosure of traditional input and output measures and some insignificant stories designed to avoid public criticism of the accountability reform but also to hinder others in identifying objects for cost cutting.

To conduct international comparative research is logistically challenging, but provides the best chances of understanding the systemic aspects of accountability reforms that contribute to the reforms' observable and perplexing outcomes. Ideally, it would be interesting to study such reforms over their full lives; however, they may be longer than the researchers' careers.

Accountability purposes are disturbed by classical cost cutting thinking. Thus, despite many ostensibly good ideas of creating transparency for the public, other stronger forces may severely hinder such accountability developments. Concepts of framing and overflowing may be used to better understand the outcomes of accountability innovations; this can be extended beyond the public sector.

Provides useful information on why public sector performance reporting that emphasises external accountability may turn out differently from the official stated aims.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation of public sector research in the 1998–2018 period.

The paper uses the extant literature of this era to study the theorisation of, and the findings of, public sector research.

This is a vibrant field of a study in a wide range of study settings and with many interdisciplinary studies. The influence of new public management is pervasive over this period. There are numerous instances of innovations in study settings, in key findings and the approach taken by investigators.

This is not a comprehensive review of all literature in this period.

This study also explored the relevance of academic research of this era to policymaking by governments.

This paper offers a distinctive critique of theorisation of public sector accounting research. It reveals the dominant theoretical reference points in use during this period and observes the increasing tendency for theoretical pluralism to investigate complex study settings.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the implementation of risk management as a tool for internal audit activities, focusing on unexpected effects or uncertainties generated during its application.

Public and confidential documents as well as semi-structured interviews are analysed through the lens of actor-network theory to identify the effects of risk management devices in a Finnish municipality.

The authors found that risk management, rather than reducing uncertainty, itself created unexpected uncertainties that would otherwise not have emerged. These include uncertainties relating to legal aspects of risk management solutions, in particular the issue concerning which types of document are considered legally valid; uncertainties relating to the definition and operationalisation of risk management; and uncertainties relating to the resources available for expanding risk management. More generally, such uncertainties relate to the professional identities and responsibilities of operational managers as defined by the framing devices.

The paper offers three contributions to the extant literature: first, it shows how risk management itself produces uncertainties. Secondly, it shows how internal auditors can assume a central role in the risk management system. Thirdly, it develops Callon's framing/overflowing framework with the notion that multiple frames are linked and create unexpected dynamics, and applies it to the study on the effects of risk management tools in an internal audit context. It shows how, despite recurring attempts to refine risk management, further uncertainties are continuously produced, thus providing an empirical illustration of how reframing and overflowing intertwine in a continual process.

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish two roles of theories, domain theory and method theory, and examine their relationships in management accounting research. Are these two roles explicitly distinguished in management accounting studies? Can this be achieved in an unambiguous manner? Where do ambitions for theoretical contribution lie in management accounting studies that employ method theories?

The authors develop a conceptual framework for analysing possible relationships between domain theories and method theories in studies and illustrate the theoretical arguments with examples from management accounting studies employing Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as their method theory.

There can be various types of relationships between domain theories and method theories, and the theoretical ambition of the analysed studies typically focused on domain theories. However, ambiguity can exist with regard to the location of a study's theoretical ambition. Both domain theories and method theories tend to be moving fields, and their interaction can add to this feature.

The suggested conceptual clarification assists in the reconciliation of extreme perspectives that relate to management accounting and theory. It will also help researchers to systematically design their own work and evaluate that of others. An increased understanding of how a field develops as a result of interaction with method theories might perhaps alleviate concerns regarding the value of mobilizing the latter.

The analysis contributes to the on-going debate on the value and effects of employing method theories, or theoretical lenses, in management accounting research.

This paper examines the influence of the normal science tradition, epitomized by the notion that “theory is king”, on contemporary accounting research and the epistemological tensions that may emerge as this idea is applied to particular ways of studying accounting. For illustrative purposes, the authors focus on research informed by actor-network theory (ANT) which can be seen as an “extreme case” in the sense that it is, in principle, difficult to reconcile with the normal science aspirations.

The paper offers an analysis based on a close reading of how accounting scholars, using ANT, theorize, and if they do engage in explicit theorizing, how they deal with the tensions that might emerge from the need to reconcile its epistemological underpinnings with those of the normal science tradition.

The findings of this paper show that the tensions between normal science thinking and the epistemological principles of ANT have, in a few cases, been avoided, as researchers stay relatively faithful to ANT and largely refrain from further theory development. However, in most cases, the tensions have ostensibly been ignored as researchers blend the epistemology of ANT and that of normal science without reflecting on the implications of doing so.

The paper contributes to emerging debates on the role of the normal science tradition in contemporary accounting research, and also extends recent discussions on the role of theory in accounting research inspired by ANT. The paper proposes three reasons for the observed blending of epistemologies: unawareness of tensions, epistemological eclecticism and various political considerations.

This paper presents an in‐depth study of the processes of constructing a new strategy in a large Danish government‐owned ferry company undergoing privatisation. To explain the emerging characteristics of accounting, the sociology of translation is used. The paper provides a story of a translation of strategy and related management initiatives using Callon's four moments of translation. The story illustrates how, during the translation process, accounting changed its characteristics and uses from principles of control to principles of financialisation. Such emergent forms of accounting also reflect the political manoeuvring in the organisation as the result of network relationships. However, networks are open to erosion and undermining by active agents, changing the purposes of accounting. Whereas other authors within accounting, applying the sociology of translation, usually conceptualise accounting as inscriptions, this study explicates accounting as an interessement device. Finally, the study suggests that the sociology of translation may be a promising explication of accounting change.