Description
This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent field of social studies of finance (SSF) and, subsequently,
sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might benefit research interests in accounting and vice
versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the fields might be intensified in what is identified
as an emerging accounting and finance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader field of research
exploring the use of financial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the
possibility of articulating a strong sociological
Tracking the numbers: Across accounting and
?nance, organizations and markets
Hendrik Vollmer
a,
*
, Andrea Mennicken
b
, Alex Preda
c
a
University of Bielefeld, Faculty for Sociology, P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
b
London School and Economics and Political Science, Department of Accounting and Centre for Analysis of Risk and
Regulation, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
c
University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Studies, Sociology, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, United Kingdom
Abstract
This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent ?eld of social studies of ?nance (SSF) and, subse-
quently, sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might bene?t research interests in accounting and vice
versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the ?elds might be intensi?ed in what is identi?ed
as an emerging accounting and ?nance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader ?eld of research
exploring the use of ?nancial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the
possibility of articulating a strong sociological programme of research is considered.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Over the last three decades, Accounting, Organi-
zations and Society has been o?ering a broad plat-
form for interdisciplinary, accounting-related
scholarship. Regularly, this journal has been wel-
coming scholars from neighbouring ?elds to get
involved in extending the perspectives of accounting
research towards a wider and comparative under-
standing of how various forms of calculative prac-
tices a?ect, and interrelate with, the social settings
in which they operate. One interesting new ?eld of
study which has taken shape outside accounting
research is the ?eld of social studies of ?nance
(henceforth SSF). This ?eld, now emerging at inter-
sections of economic sociology, science and technol-
ogy studies, cultural anthropology, and cultural
geography, has much to o?er to researchers inter-
ested in the practices, agencies, programmes and
technologies of calculation. This introductory essay
to the special AOS section will provide a prelimin-
ary tour of SSF, explore its intersections with
accounting research and test some common ground
on which research interests shared across SSF and
accounting might be brought to co-operate.
What uni?es social studies of ?nance and those
of accounting as ‘‘social and institutional practice”
(Hopwood & Miller, 1994) is their engagement with
social settings characterised by a high frequency
of circulating numbers. A remarkable number of
researchers have by now become involved in
investigating how the use of numbers and a range
of di?erent social settings co-develop, change or
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.06.007
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Voll-
mer), [email protected] (A. Mennicken), apreda@sta?mail.
ed.ac.uk (A. Preda).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
persist. Yet, SSF and sociologically oriented
accounting research have developed as distinct ?elds
with relatively little interchange. Probably the most
palpable di?erence between SSF and interdisciplin-
ary research in accounting is that the latter has lar-
gely focussed on aspects of calculative practices
subject to formal organization. Accounting studies
have been extending traditional preoccupations
with business enterprises towards the employment
of numbers in programmes and technologies of gov-
ernment (Miller & Rose, 1990), and the respective
roles of accounting professionals (for an overview
see e.g. Cooper & Robson, 2006) across the sectors
and topologies of a ‘‘shifting sphere of the eco-
nomic” (Hopwood, 1992), moved, moulded and
put in place by embedding calculative practices in
di?erent kinds of organizations. SSF have, on the
other hand, mainly been exploring the construction
of markets and market cultures (Abola?a, 1996,
1998; Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002) and the roles
of calculative models and technologies (‘‘market
devices”) in the framing of social and socio-techni-
cal interaction in market settings (Callon, 1998a;
Callon, Millo, & Muniesa, 2007; MacKenzie &
Millo, 2003; Muniesa, 2003; Preda, 2006).
On an institutional level, accounting research
has, even in its most socially theorized forms, been
developing mainly within the boundaries of the
accounting discipline and its academic establish-
ments. Researchers involved in SSF appear to be
mostly associated with sociology and anthropology
units of universities. One might hypothesize that
such di?erences in institutional environments, in
line with contrasting professional a?liations, may
have been constituting major reasons why corre-
spondence across SSF and interdisciplinary
accounting research has remained quite limited.
The review elements of this introductory essay
would like to indicate why this presents an unfortu-
nate and at least unnecessary state of comparative
neglect. Without claiming to be comprehensive
either in reviewing or in diagnosing symptomatic
shortcomings of an unevenly distributed academic
attention, we would above all like to demonstrate
the potential of a shared ?eld of research concerned
with the circulation of ?nancial numbers across the
diverse settings of social life, and we would like to
suggest that there is indeed strong potential in a
common academic track which social studies of
?nance and accounting might collectively explore.
Finding a particularly appropriate label for a
?eld opening up for researchers from di?erent scien-
ti?c disciplines is not easy. Speaking of interdisci-
plinary ?nance and accounting studies would
perhaps appropriately mirror the self-designation
of that particular research tradition – science and
technology studies – from which both SSF and
social research in accounting have been gaining
major theoretical inspirations. Yet opening up inter-
disciplinarily might not only bring together unac-
customed cohabitants, it might also make it
di?cult to institutionalize an e?ective research
agenda. In order to articulate itself as a specialized
track of scienti?c discourse, a prospective ?eld of
accounting and ?nance studies might then perhaps
need an impulse similar to the one science and tech-
nology studies received from David Bloor’s formu-
lation of the strong programme in the sociology of
knowledge in the 1970s (Bloor 1992 [originally
1976]). In closing this introductory essay, we would
like to put the question to the readers of this special
section what a strong programme of research in
?nance and accounting studies might look like,
encouraging the elaboration of research agendas
seeking to transcend boundaries in and between
the two ?elds.
Financial cognition, calculative agency,
performativity, and sets of participants: a brief tour of
SSF
Perhaps one of the best starting points for intro-
ducing SSF is the concept of information. Taking
information as a starting point is justi?ed by the
centrality of this notion not only to the practices
of participants in ?nancial markets, but also to the
theoretical apparatus of ?nancial economics. Mar-
ket participants are characterized by a constant
search for relevant information, a search which
shapes their decisions and is re?ected in the dynam-
ics of transactions and securities prices. Financial
economics sees prices as incorporating all the infor-
mation available to market participants (e.g. Stigler,
1961), while the incorporation mechanisms are pub-
licly available. Information appears as crucial not
only with respect to how participants perceive,
order, and justify their activities and decisions, but
also with respect to price behaviour. Consequently,
SSF, which – broadly put – investigate the knowl-
edge processes underlying ?nancial transactions,
assign this notion a prominent place in their
research programmes.
The way in which SSF approach information,
however, di?ers in some signi?cant respects from
620 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
the presentation and discussion of this concept in
?nancial economics, as well as in social structural
varieties of economic sociology. In ?nancial eco-
nomics, information is understood as signals, akin
to the electric impulses circulating through the
wires of a telephone switchboard. This speci?c
notion fuses together a view of markets as distrib-
utors of information (and therefore of resources),
formulated in the 1930s by Friedrich von Hayek
(within the debates about the economic failures of
communism), with a methodological approach
developed in operations research during WWII
and oriented towards the detection of meaningful
patterns underlying apparently random signals
(Mirowski, 2002, pp. 37,60; Klein, 2001). In this
perspective, signals are additive: they trigger a reac-
tion in the receiver, while being independent of the
cognitive properties of the latter. An understanding
of information as signals separates information
from cognition, and makes possible a distinction
between meaningful signals and noise, with the lat-
ter being understood as a lack of determined
patterns.
Social structural approaches in economic sociol-
ogy operate with a notion of information very sim-
ilar to the above. Information is understood as
signals circulating through networks of social rela-
tionships, with the latter, in their turn, acting both
as information channels and as signals (e.g. Pod-
olny, 2001, 2005; White, 2002, pp. 100–101). Net-
works of social relationships circulate information,
but, from the perspective of a third party, they
appear as information too, about the (non)existence
of social ties, their duration, etc., information which
is used in business decisions. In this perspective, net-
works are analogous with electric circuits, and the
absence or presence of ties is taken to indicate the
limits and possibilities for the distribution of signals.
The distinction between cognition and information
thus is a?rmed, although it is acknowledged that,
within networks, information is processed according
to frames of interpretation shared by members.
Frames of interpretation, in their turn, can be pro-
vided by common assumptions, but also by what
White (2000) calls discourses, understood as com-
mon activities, i.e., institutionalized occasions for
conversations and contact maintenance. In a nut-
shell, frames of interpretation are provided by
shared activities and occasions within a network,
activities and occasions which stabilize signals, mak-
ing them accountable and transferable across
situations.
Such shared occasions and activities hint at the
fact that (?nancial) information might after all not
be entirely independent of the cognitive properties
and practices of potential and actual receivers, and
that recipients of information cannot be seen as pas-
sive with respect to how signals are processed. Nei-
ther can such aspects of cognition be seen as
independent from, nor as una?ected by the interac-
tions of market participants. What becomes neces-
sary, then, is a speci?cation of (a) the interaction
mechanisms which constitute information, and (b)
how such interaction mechanisms underlie cognitive
processes, understood not as neural operations, but
as cooperative, practical achievements of partici-
pants. In the face of such contingencies, an excessive
emphasis put on networks of social relationships
might not only run the risk of suggesting a natural
tendency of networks towards closure but also that
there will tend to be just as many frames of interpre-
tation as there are networks, with dominant frames,
once set in place, contributing to network closure.
This ends up leaving little room for explaining con-
?icting dynamics and change, both across and
within networks.
SSF, in turn, tend to depart from an understand-
ing of information as signals circulating on a circuit
board, and re-orient the investigative focus towards
?nancial cognition, understood as a practical, inter-
action-based achievement of market participants.
The notion of ‘‘?nancial cognition” draws attention
to processes of interactive knowledge production
and the roles that cognitive schemas – in combina-
tion with technical instruments, ?nancial models,
speci?c room layouts, group interactions etc. – play
in the formation and execution of investment and
trading strategies (e.g. Beunza & Stark, 2005; De
Bondt, 2005). Broadly speaking, two directions
within SSF might be distinguished: one of them is
represented by close up, microsociological studies
of ?nancial cognition, and the other by performativ-
ity studies exploring conditions and consequences of
?nancial models and ?nance theory at an aggregate
level.
Field studies of cognitive practices re-focus the
attention from information as signals to interac-
tion-based cognitive processes, seen as determining
what market participants will accept as information,
how they will process and store it, and how they will
use it in their activities. Such cognitive processes
include, among others, observation, classi?cation,
calculation, and memorization, understood as prac-
tical, accountable activities taking place within and
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 621
depending on webs of social interactions (e.g.
Lynch, 2006; Maynard, 2006). Drawing, inter alia,
on ethnomethodology and phenomenology, one of
the methodological implications of this approach
is the direct, longitudinal, in situ observation of cog-
nitive activities, as they are performed by market
participants in their everyday actions and in interac-
tion with other human participants, as well as with
artefacts. This view, then, stresses the fact that
(?nancial) cognition is a distributed, cooperative
activity (Hutchins, 1995), irreducible to a ?xed set
of universal rules.
The shift from signals to cognitive practices also
triggers a series of consequences for how core mar-
ket activities, such as trading, are subsequently con-
ceived. For instance, numerical data (such as price
and volume) are acknowledged as crucial with
respect to the trading process. While structural
and institutional approaches in economic sociology
(e.g. Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 2001; Smith 1989;
Uzzi & Lancaster, 2004) see numerical data as
endowed with meaning and trust by the authorita-
tive nature of the channels through which they cir-
culate, by formal rules, and by framing procedures
(e.g. attaching rationalizations and justifying narra-
tives to numbers), ?eld studies of ?nancial cognition
see the reception, selection, and uses of such data as
depending on practical cognitive activities such as
observation, classi?cation, and calculation (see e.g.
Kaltho?, 2005).
This becomes even more relevant in electronic,
anonymous trading, where traders rely less on wide-
spread social networks and direct exchanges with
known partners, and where activities such as screen
observation become crucial. These di?erences have
prompted some observers to argue that global elec-
tronic markets embody principles di?erent from
those of exchanges based on personal interactions.
While the latter can be conceived as networked sys-
tems, the former might more adequately be
regarded as scopic systems (e.g. Knorr Cetina,
2007; Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002; Knorr Cetina
& Preda, 2007). In contexts such as those of online
trading, numerical data do not appear to carry self-
evident properties (Zaloom, 2006), or to work as
signals which the trader decodes. Rather, what hap-
pens from the traders’ perspective is that highly
unstable ?ickers on the screen are subjected to an
interaction-based observation process involving def-
initional, stabilizing, and integrative procedures.
Out of this process numerical data emerge endowed
with relevant properties, which are attached to
rationalization devices (such as narratives) and used
as a tool and a resource for further action. Thus,
traders are not confronted from the start with num-
bers as meaningful signals which can be decoded at
a glance. The very situation of electronic trading,
where multiple, unstable screen displays shift all
the time, makes this impossible. Financial data
appear as the outcome of a series of practical, inter-
action-based cognitive activities, which involve both
human participants and technological systems.
While highly technologized transaction environ-
ments highlight the role of cognitive activities, they
also shed light on the role played by formal models
(such as those for calculating theoretical prices for
derivatives) in transactions. Formal models, which
are easy to integrate into an electronic trading envi-
ronment with high computing capacities, are devel-
oped within ?nancial economics. SSF have been
addressing these formal models in asking whether
they bear performative functions – that is if, instead
of representing an external reality, such models
directly intervene in the production of the reality
they claim to represent (e.g. MacKenzie, Muniesa,
& Siu, 2007; but see also Hacking, 1983). Suspicions
of performativity have been ampli?ed by the ever
growing role played by intermediary groups, such
as ?nancial experts and analysts, in contemporary
global markets. However, tracing performativity
e?ects beyond the use of formal models, other
expert and status group speci?c forms of analyses
might take over not so much representational as
performative functions in being adopted by market
participants as tools of intervention in transactions.
The concept of performativity, introduced to
SSF by Michel Callon (1998a), and subsequently
speci?ed by Donald MacKenzie (2006), MacKenzie
& Millo (2003), Didier (2007), addresses the blurred
distinction between representational and interven-
tionist uses of economic models by ?nancial practi-
tioners. It highlights the role of group interests and/
or con?icts in the implementation of formal models,
as well as the capacity of the latter to transform
transaction forms, rules, and objects. While Mac-
Kenzie stresses that performativity can also have
negative e?ects (e.g. when use of models is imitated,
to the e?ect of unravelling transactions), Callon
focuses more on the basic assumptions underlying
the use of formal models. Initially, Callon wanted
to distance himself from the sociological debates
about the (in)existence of the homo oeconomicus
by arguing that the latter should be understood as
a set of behavioural scripts enacted in practice. Such
622 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
scripts require sets of artefacts, including formal
models. Therefore, in a further step of the argu-
ment, the question was raised whether such artefacts
– essential in changing transaction rules – are
endowed with agential features, called calculative
agency (Barry & Slater, 2002; Callon, 2004, p. 123).
Calculative agency is characterized by (a) fram-
ing, (b) disentanglement, and (c) performativity.
Framing represents the distinctions used by partici-
pants in order to establish what is calculable and
what is not. Disentanglement means drawing
boundaries between relevant and irrelevant elements
with respect to calculability, while performativity
indicates the use of technologies (including abstract
models) in market transactions. Therefore, framing
and disentanglement appear as prerequisites for per-
formativity; the question, however, is what exactly
is meant by calculability. Obviously, this latter must
mean something else than applying sets of mathe-
matical rules to the processing of numerical data.
Callon and his collaborator Muniesa (2005, pp.
1229, 1231; Muniesa & Callon, 2007; but see also
Callon et al., 2007) see calculability as intrinsic to
the character of markets not only as allocation
mechanisms, but mainly as collective devices for
assigning value. They follow here an argument com-
ing from the French school of conventions (e.g. Bol-
tanski & The´venot, 2006), according to which
societies set in place various valuation mechanisms,
market exchanges being just one of them. Calcula-
bility therefore designates the (collaborative) pro-
cesses which make possible the assignment of
numbers (such as prices) to entities (be they ?nan-
cial securities or consumable goods), an assignment
which, in its turn, endows these entities with relative
stability and makes possible their circulation
throughout society.
In this perspective, calculability would include
commensurability and standardization, features
which stress that classi?cation is a cognitive opera-
tion. One of the questions almost automatically
raised here is that of the various groups of partici-
pants involved in making entities commensurable
and in standardizing them. Financial experts are
such a group and, indeed, we encounter the argu-
ment according to which ?nancial analysts, for
instance, perform precisely the function of making
securities commensurable (Beunza & Garud, 2007)
and of classifying them within certain categories
(e.g. Zuckerman, 1999, 2004). If we move away
from a functionalist approach to the activities of
such groups, however, we can see that, at least in
some situations, formal models are used to justify
decisions which serve speci?c interests. Based on
their analysis of the airwave spectrum auctions,
Mirowski and Nik-Kah (2007) warn that perform-
ativity should not be understood as attributing to
economists socio-political powers they do not actu-
ally possess. The material interests of entrenched
economic groups play a considerable role in the
shaping of markets (perhaps even more so in the
case of one-o? events like an airwave auction), with
formal models serving (at least sometimes) a legiti-
mating function.
The debates around the performativity of eco-
nomic models and interest groups (see also Yonay
& Breslau, 2006) raise the issue of the link between
calculation (and numerical data), on the one hand,
and group di?erences, strati?cation and inequality,
on the other hand (cf. Preda, 2005). This debate is
relevant with respect to microsociological ?eld stud-
ies of ?nancial cognition too-for instance, the
assumption of cognitive distinctions between insti-
tutional and non-institutional traders, so often
encountered in ?nancial modelling, would require
a ?eld-based comparison between the two: do
non-institutional traders indeed use numbers in a
di?erent way from institutional ones? Do they uti-
lize di?erent calculative practices or technologies?
While some ?nancial models (e.g. Shleifer, 2000,
pp. 13, 33) work with the assumption of a distinc-
tion between informed and less informed, rational
and less rational investors and traders, correspond-
ing to one between institutional and non-institu-
tional market participants, SSF do not take such a
distinction as given or natural. Since technological
systems have widened access to online trading and
to ?nancial information, it cannot be assumed that
institutional investors and traders (who have more
?nancial resources) automatically have access to
better information or that they behave rationally,
while non-institutional participants do not. From
the SSF perspective, the main question is to see
how such di?erences are constituted in practical
actions (if at all) by speci?c participants, and to
what e?ects. The approach is to regard these di?er-
ences not only as discursive devices, legitimating the
positions of speci?c participants and groups, but
also to see whether and how they are created in
the practical actions of trading, for instance (e.g.
Smith 2006; Zaloom, 2006). If distinctions are gen-
erated in action, then the next step would be to
investigate their cognitive role with respect to the
production of information. For instance, are
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 623
distinctions between informed/uninformed traders
produced within the process of trading and, if yes,
are they co-constitutive of this process? Do they
in?uence the observation, memorization, and calcu-
lation processes through which traders generate
information?
A programme of ?eld research focussing on cog-
nitive practices does not mean ignoring issues like
emotions in trading activities. Recent developments
in the sociology of emotions have opened the way
for treating these not as opposed to, but within a
cognitive framework (e.g. Berezin, 2005; Collins,
2004). From the perspective of SSF, this increases
the appeal of an interaction- and cognition-oriented
theoretical frame as a replacement for old dichoto-
mies (cf. Abola?a, 1998, pp. 72–76).
But this and the abovementioned themes are still
awaiting sustained research. Di?erences among
social groups with respect to investment holdings
have long been noticed (e.g. Keister, 2000; Swed-
berg, 2005), and di?erences in ?nancial power
between institutional and non-institutional inves-
tors/traders are obvious. Yet, we still lack a thor-
ough comparison of these participants, one which
should focus on practical trading actions. Methodo-
logically, SSF seem well equipped to tackle such
issues – the ?eld is host to microanalytical studies
(e.g. Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002; Le´pinay,
2007; Muniesa, 2003), anchored primarily in partici-
pant observation, discourse and conversation analy-
sis, as well as more macroanalytical ones studying
?nance and ?nancial markets at a more aggregate
level (studies of performativity, e.g. have a decidedly
macroanalytical orientation, see MacKenzie, 2006;
MacKenzie, Beunza, & Hardie, 2006; MacKenzie
& Hardie, 2007; Muniesa & Callon, 2007), historical
(e.g. Preda, 2006) as well as contemporary research.
The methodological variety is accompanied by the
attention paid to empirical studies (the case study
occupying here a prominent role) as a source of the-
oretical innovation (Stake, 2000). Yet comparative
issues like di?erences between groups and types of
participants do, so far, not appear to have pro?ted
much from this variety.
A second empirical issue, connected to the above,
is that of the relationships among various kinds of
?nancial expertise and expert groups. Expert aca-
demic knowledge (as embodied in formal models
of price behaviour, for instance) is not the only kind
of expertise available to market participants. Along-
side it, various types of expertise co-exist in relation-
ships which, while not always easy, have proven
durable. An example in this respect is provided by
forms of ‘‘technical analysis” or ‘‘chartism”, a body
of expert knowledge which, contested by academic
economics since at least the 1930s, has become insti-
tutionalized and is widely used by market partici-
pants. Moreover, from a perspective looking at
trading as practical action, the distinctions between
expert and lay knowledge do not appear as clear cut
anymore: (?nancial) expertise itself requires practi-
cal knowledge and is moored in the day-to-day rou-
tines of its practitioners. As studies of scienti?c
expertise show (e.g. Collins & Evans, 2003; Lynch,
Cole, McNally, & Jordan, 2008), expert and lay
knowledge cannot be taken as completely separated
from each other. The use of (formal) pricing models
in trading actions intertwines with the practical
knowledge of market practitioners, who may ignore
or use them in ways which are not prescribed by
experts. To give an example, non-institutional
online traders, while having pricing models embed-
ded in their trading software, choose not to use
them. The questions then become: how do users of
pricing models matter (e.g. Oudshoorn & Pinch,
2003)? How are models put to practical uses in the
process of trading and to what e?ects?
Social structural approaches to (?nancial) mar-
kets have emphasized their network character, as
well as the role of group hierarchies (e.g. Podolny,
2005); neo-institutionalist approaches have primar-
ily stressed formal rules, routines, and politics in
the constitution of markets (e.g. Carruthers, 1996;
Dobbin, 1994; Fligstein, 1996). Until now, SSF have
been rather cautious in formulating a general de?ni-
tion of (?nancial) markets, as well as in adopting a
reifying emphasis on ‘‘culture”. This does not mean,
however, a lack of theoretical perspective. While
studies of the interaction order of market transac-
tions have emphasized social control through tem-
poral coordination, studies of performativity have
seen markets as ‘‘socio-technical agencements”
(Callon, 2007, pp. 323–326) – that is, as a nexus of
human participants and technologies which, while
generating a speci?c body of knowledge, generates
behavioural scripts as well. This non-functionalist
view highlights the fact that markets consist of pat-
terns of knowledge and behaviour which go beyond
allocation mechanisms. All in all, one could venture
that, theoretically, SSF see markets as knowledge-
based, hybrid arrangements (i.e., including human
participants and artefacts) of social control.
To ?nish this brief tour with a projection of
future research directions inherent in SSF, these will
624 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
have to include the continuation of the investigation
of ?nancial markets, as well as the branching out
into the analysis of domains subjected to what is
called ‘‘marketization” (e.g. health care, carbon
markets). Since technological innovation in ?nan-
cial markets occurs at rapid pace, SSF is confronted
with a very dynamic domain of investigation. The
increased participation of non-institutional traders
in ?nancial transactions, the advance of anonymous
electronic trading and the increasing integration of
trading platforms at trans-continental level pose
many challenges to the ?eld investigation of,
amongst other things, screen-related cognitive activ-
ities (with calculation occupying a prominent role)
and their embedding in institutional and non-insti-
tutional contexts. The incorporation of heteroge-
neous entities into the area of ?nancial
transactions (e.g. housing) and the transformations
that such entities subsequently underwent (neces-
sary in order to make them tradeable) provide an
additional object of investigation for SSF, one in
which calculability also plays a prominent role. At
the same time, the expansion of principles such as
cost-e?ectiveness, pro?t-making, and the applica-
tion of market mechanisms as regulatory instru-
ments into domains of activity, such as health care
or environmental protection (which have been such
prominent issues in accounting research), perpetu-
ates questions about the performativity of eco-
nomic, ?nance and accounting models.
Consequently, SSF will be drawn to expanding
inquiries beyond the boundaries of ?nancial mar-
kets into other aspects of the ‘‘shifting sphere of
the economic” (Hopwood, 1992) – to meet with
accounting?
Accounting intersections
Social and institutional studies of accounting
share many commonalities with SSF. Both ?elds
are interested in similar research objects: models,
instruments and practices of calculation. To a cer-
tain extent, they also share similar research ques-
tions. Both, for example, are concerned with the
study of the ways in which calculative practices
shape, and are shaped by, the social, organizational
and institutional settings in which they operate.
Both draw attention to the complex interrelations
that exist between technologies of calculation, orga-
nizational structures, social and socio-technical
interactions, cultures and institutions. Further, both
research strands place particular emphasis on the
constituting, rather than mirroring, roles of num-
bers and calculative devices. Both assume that cal-
culative practices actively create, rather than
merely re?ect, economic realities. Both regard the
functionality of calculative systems, agencies and
regimes as something which needs to be explained
rather than assumed.
In addition, social and institutional studies of
?nance and accounting have common, intersecting
theoretical reference points. In both ?elds, research-
ers for instance make use of, and contribute to the
further development of, concepts and approaches
that, initially, had been developed in the contexts
of science and technology studies (e.g. Callon,
1986; Hacking, 1983; Knorr Cetina, 1999; Latour,
1987; Law, 1986; MacKenzie 1990; Porter, 1995).
Both social studies of accounting and SSF, amongst
other things, are interested in untangling the rela-
tionships between science and practices of economic
calculation.
In the ?eld of accounting research, Miller &
O’Leary, for instance, analyzed the factory Caterpil-
lar as a ‘‘laboratory” (Miller & O’Leary, 1996) and,
in a recently published article, studied investment
appraisals at Intel with reference to Wise’s (1988)
concept of ‘‘mediating machines” (Miller &
O’Leary, 2007). Robson (1992, 1994) looked at
accounting numbers as ‘‘inscriptions” and utilized
Latour’s (1987) notion of ‘‘action at a distance” in
his study of the rise of in?ation accounting in the
UK. Power (1995) wrote about ‘‘Auditing, Exper-
tise and the Sociology of Technique” and edited a
book exploring the relations between calculation,
accounting and science (Power, 1994a). Chua
(1995) made reference to actor-network theory in
her study of the fabrication of accounting images
in three public hospitals. Dechow and Mouritsen
(2005) drew on actor-network theory in their study
of the workings of Enterprise Resource Planning
systems. And Young (2006) used Hacking (1986)
for her study of the construction of ?nancial state-
ment users in US-American accounting standard
setting.
SSF have even closer connections to the ?eld of
science and technology studies, as many of the cur-
rent SSF scholars started out as science and technol-
ogy students (e.g. Michel Callon, Karin Knorr,
Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Alex Preda).
SSF scholars seek to establish the ’science and tech-
nology framework’ as an alternative to the more
conventional, social structural approaches to the
study of markets in economic sociology. They focus
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 625
on the ‘‘machineries of knowing” (Knorr Cetina,
1999, p. 5, cited in MacKenzie, 2006, p. 12), the epi-
stemic cultures, models, instruments and socio-tech-
nical interactions that shape and make up ?nancial
markets. As was illustrated above, this focus helps
SSF researchers to unpack notions common to both
economics and more traditional approaches in eco-
nomic sociology (like ?nancial information, eco-
nomic agencies, representations, markets etc.).
Amongst other things, SSF have utilized the
notion of market device (dispositif) to study ‘‘the
material and discursive assemblages that intervene
in the construction of markets” (Muniesa, Millo &
Callon, 2007, p. 2). Likewise, one ?nds many refer-
ences to Foucault-inspired concepts of assemblage,
constellation and dispositif in social studies of
accounting (e.g. Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood,
1985; Miller, 2008; Miller & O’Leary, 1996). In
accounting, notions of assemblage and constellation
have, for example, been used to draw attention to
the fact that accounting and other calculative prac-
tices and instruments are deeply entwined in issues
and events that are of wider social, economic and
political concern. The concepts of assemblage
and constellation are used to unpack the dynamic
and constitutive role of accounting practices and
instruments (Miller, 2008, p. 57). Similar to SSF,
also accounting scholars have emphasised the need
to study calculative practices ‘‘as a relatively dis-
crete, yet temporarily stabilised assemblage of
devices for intervening with multiple conditions of
emergence” (Miller, 2008, p. 53).
Finally, SSF and accounting share similar meth-
odological frameworks. Both ?elds employ a range
of di?erent, but mainly qualitative, methods of
investigation, such as discourse analysis, participant
observation, document analysis, conversation anal-
ysis and qualitative interviewing. The case study
approach occupies not only a central role in SSF,
but also in social and institutional studies of
accounting.
Yet, there also exist important di?erences
between SSF and accounting research, e.g. with
respect to institutional location, disciplinary divi-
sions of academic labour, the respective empirical
?elds of investigation and theoretical orientations,
each of which have shaped the ?elds in di?erent
ways, thereby reducing possibilities for exchange
and interaction amongst the two groups. SSF have
focussed mainly on the study of ?nancial markets,
the roles of economics and ?nance theory in con-
structing those markets, the relevance of networks
of social and socio-technical interaction in them,
their cognitive and cultural underpinnings and the
e?ects of ?nancial markets on the workings of cor-
porations (see e.g. Abola?a, 1996; Knorr Cetina &
Preda, 2005; MacKenzie, 2006; MacKenzie & Millo,
2003; MacKenzie et al., 2007). Yet, as Miller (2008)
has pointed out, SSF have studied calculative prac-
tices without much reference to broader pro-
grammes and ideas of social order, modalities of
power and their e?ects on the self and notions of
‘‘actorhood” (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). Further,
questions concerning the relevance of calculative
devices for processes and forms of organization
have somewhat been neglected. In contrast, social
and institutional studies of accounting have been
mainly concerned with the investigation of orga-
nized calculative practice: histories, practices, social
and organizational e?ects of bookkeeping, cost
accounting, in?ation accounting, performance mea-
surement, auditing, corporate ?nancial reporting,
budgeting, investment appraisals, etc., and their
intertwining with di?erent modes of governing at
the level of the economy, organizations and the con-
duct of persons. But, hitherto, accounting research
has been awarding little attention to the roles of cal-
culative practices in the construction of markets.
Researchers have largely been focussing on the con-
tribution of accounting ideas and techniques to the
inner workings of private and public sector organi-
zations (e.g. Ahrens, 1997; Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1988; Preston, Cooper, & Coombs, 1992), processes
of macroeconomic management and change (e.g.
Neu & Graham, 2006; Suzuki, 2003), and dynamics
of accounting professionalization (e.g. Anderson-
Gough, Grey, & Robson, 1998; Boland, 1982; Cara-
manis, 2002; Cooper & Robson, 2006).
Further, it should be noted that social studies of
accounting do not represent a coherent, clearly
identi?able strand of research. They have been built
on a multiplicity of di?erent, at times con?icting
theories and approaches. Besides science and tech-
nology studies, approaches rooted in sociological
New Institutionalism, Foucauldian studies of gov-
ernmentality, critical theory, political economy
approaches, ethnomethodology and symbolic inter-
actionism have been used as theoretical reference
points (cf. Mennicken, 2005). Many studies have
been concerned with investigating the implication
of accounting in processes of organizational con-
trol, government and regulation (for an overview
see Miller, 2008). Questions have been addressed,
such as: How does accounting get implicated in
626 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
the creation of particular organizational and eco-
nomic conceptions? How does accounting achieve
and maintain the position of organizational signi?-
cance? How is it involved in processes of economic,
social and organizational change? How is it impli-
cated in the ‘‘governmentalisation” (Foucault,
1991), disciplining, liberalisation and calculation,
of society? How has accounting been involved in
processes of subjecti?cation – the formation and
government of ‘‘calculable spaces and calculable
selves” (Miller, 1992)?
In pursuing such questions, social and institu-
tional studies of accounting have enhanced our
understanding of social and behavioural aspects of
accounting, its constructed nature, politicizations
and performative e?ects. But the primary occupa-
tion with accounting in organized settings, at least
to a certain extent, has also contributed to the pro-
duction of blind spots. It has furthered the creation
of a situation in which linkages and interplays
between accounting and ?nance, and accounting
and markets, particularly ?nancial markets, at least
from a broader social science viewpoint have largely
remained overlooked and under-researched. Not
much is known about the social and cultural roles
that accounting numbers play in the construction
of ?nancial markets. There is no empirically well-
grounded understanding of the relationships that
exist (or do not exist) between accounting, capital
market structures and investment cultures.
Accounting research has not produced much insight
into the calculative practices of ?nancial analysts
and investors, and their uses of accounting concepts
and ?gures in the production of corporate valua-
tions. Nor has it come up with sustained investiga-
tions exploring in depth the junctions, disparities,
commonalities and interrelations between theories
and models of accounting and ?nance, the enact-
ment of those relations, and their formation and ref-
ormation, in diverse settings and cultures of
calculation.
At least to some extent, the production of such
blind spots has been furthered by the preoccupation
of sociologically oriented accounting research with
contexts and practices of organizational control
and management. But what triggered this preoccu-
pation? In part, it may be seen as an (unintended)
outcome of processes of inner-disciplinary special-
ization and di?erentiation. Over the years, in
accounting research and practice, a division of
labour has taken shape between management
accounting scholars, concerned with the roles of
accounting in the management of organizations,
on the one hand, and ?nancial accounting scholars,
concerned with markets, particularly stock market
oriented ?nancial reporting, analysis and valuation,
on the other. Most sociologically oriented account-
ing research has been carried out in the ?eld of man-
agement accounting. Financial accounting research
and investigations of the roles of accounting in
?nancial markets, with a few notable exceptions
(see e.g. Macintosh, Shearer, Thornton, & Welker,
2000; Roberts, Sanderson, Barker, & Hendry,
2006; Young, 2006), have mainly been the terrain
of ?nancial accounting specialists and economics-
based scholarship. In addition, accounting and
?nance represent two historically much related,
but institutionally increasingly segregated academic
?elds of investigation, with separate academic asso-
ciations, research centres and publication outlets. In
recent years, accounting and ?nance scholars have
been seemingly busier with the development and
partitioning of their own research ?elds and identi-
ties, than with seeking collaboration across the
?elds. Of course, exceptions exist, especially in
?nancial accounting research, but generally
researchers have been careful not to infringe too
much upon each others’ territory.
The papers presented in this special section may
o?er starting points for altering this situation by
illustrating opportunities to explore intersections
and points of connection between SSF and account-
ing research. But in what ways exactly can a dia-
logue with SSF enrich interdisciplinary accounting
research? Where can it contribute to the further
development of its research agendas, analytical
frameworks and methodological tools? And what,
in turn, can SSF learn from social studies of
accounting? Where and how can the two strands
of research fruitfully complement and enrich each
other?
Collaboration between the two ?elds could prove
to be fruitful and bene?cial in at least three di?erent
respects. (1) A closer engagement with SSF could
contribute to the transcending of current divisions
of labour existing between accounting and ?nance,
management accounting and ?nancial accounting
research. It could encourage sociologically oriented
accounting scholars to explore more the relevance
of accounting in and for ?nance, and it could moti-
vate them to take a closer look at actual practices of
?nancial accounting, an area which, as already men-
tioned above, so far, has largely remained neglected
by social and institutional accounting research (see
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 627
e.g. Hopwood, 2000). SSF view calculation and the
construction of calculability as a cooperative, prac-
tical achievement. They study the day-to-day pro-
duction of ?nancial knowledge in processes of
observation, classi?cation, computation and coop-
eration. Calculative practice is seen as a socially
and technically embedded activity. As was men-
tioned earlier, a research framework is employed
that places emphasis on close up, in situ observa-
tions. Such a framework o?ers to both accountants
and ?nance specialists a useful platform for self-
re?ection. As Hopwood has put it, SSF o?er ‘‘the
possibility that ?nance, like most other knowledges,
can be confronted by analyses of itself” (Hopwood,
2007). They make us focus on the intricate socio-
technical mechanisms and processes by which ?nan-
cial knowledge is produced. And they show that
similar research frameworks can be used for both
the study of accounting and the study of ?nance.
In this context, a closer engagement with SSF
could also have the e?ect that more attention will
be given to processes of calculative ‘‘hybridisation”
(Miller, Kurunma¨ki & O’Leary, 2007) and the con-
nections, commonalities and variations existing
between di?erent forms of calculative expertise.
More collaboration between SSF and accounting
can sensitize both ?elds for the embedding of calcu-
lative practices in competing or intersecting institu-
tional and professional realms of expertise with
di?erent groups of participants. It can help both
?elds to develop a more di?erentiated understand-
ing of the motivations and mechanisms underlying
the academic ‘‘disciplining” of calculative expertise,
as well as the reproduction of professional status
groups. It can contribute to the further investigation
of the entanglement of calculative activities in di?er-
ent, but at times hybridising knowledges and their
respective carrier groups (e.g. in economics and
?nance, accounting and medicine, accounting and
engineering).
(2) Increased exposure to SSF is likely to induce
accounting research to move the study of account-
ing beyond the context of organizations and pay,
instead, closer attention to how accounting becomes
incorporated into knowledges and infrastructures of
markets. In return, a closer engagement with
accounting research could enhance SSF’s under-
standing of the relevance of processes of organiza-
tion for market creation and involved modes of
power and governing styles. Mutually, awareness
can be raised for the interrelations and dynamics
existing between processes of ‘‘?nancialization”,
the capture of business by ?nance and ?nancial mar-
kets (e.g. Fligstein, 1990; Vollmer, 2003, p. 366), on
the one hand, and processes of ‘‘accountingization”,
the proliferation of accounting, audit, risk and per-
formance measurement into private and public sec-
tor organizations (e.g. Kurunma¨ki, Lapsley, &
Melia, 2003; Power, 1999, 2007), on the other. More
space for joint research programmes could be
opened up looking into both the organization of
markets and the marketization of organizations.
Important ?rst steps in this direction have, for
example, already been undertaken by Miller &
O’Leary (2007) in their paper on ‘‘Mediating Instru-
ments”, which looks at investment as an inter-?rm
and inter-agency process. Miller and O’Leary exam-
ine how certain instruments, like technology roadm-
aps and graphical presentations of statistical
predictions, act on capital budgeting decisions,
thereby, mediating between organizations and mar-
kets. Zorn, Dobbin, Dierkes, and Kwok (2005) and
Davis and Robbins (2005) have explored the social
processes through which ?nancial markets a?ect
the structure and organizing principles of corpora-
tions. Such research agendas are only emerging. In
order to gain a fuller picture about interrelations
between processes of ?nancial intermediation, orga-
nizing and market making, more investigations are
called for.
(3) More collaboration and intellectual exchange
between SSF and accounting can help re?ne our
interdisciplinary understanding of calculative prac-
tices and cultures. It can help establish research
agendas focussing in more generic terms on condi-
tions and consequences of economic calculation
and ?nancial numbers – across accounting and
?nance, organizations, markets and cultures, mod-
els and realities. It can stimulate the establishment
of common analytical ground and, thereby, help
advance our understanding of general patterns of
the use of numbers in social situations. More dia-
logue between the two ?elds is likely to further the
conduct of more systematic analyses and compara-
tive research into the various ways and mechanisms
by which ?nancial models, accounting numbers and
practices of computation and calculation become
involved in the creation, preservation or subversion
of social order across di?erent settings.
Such dialogue might then motivate researchers to
more persistently address the speci?city of di?erent
types of calculation. In his recent appeal ‘‘not to
treat practices of economic calculation in a some-
what undi?erentiated manner” (Miller (2008, pp.
628 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
52–53)) for example, calls for a more re?ned under-
standing of such relatively vague and universalistic
notions as ‘‘calculative device” or ‘‘calculative
practice”. More exchange between SSF and social
studies of accounting could stimulate the articula-
tion of research agendas that would devote more
attention to exploring di?erent taxonomies of calcu-
lation, comparing and contrasting speci?c proper-
ties of di?erent calculative instruments, like
?nancial models, pro?t computations, performance
ratios, budgets, etc., or, as Power (2004) has sug-
gested, distinguish between di?erent classes of activ-
ities, e.g. counting, control and calculation, when
analyzing attempts aimed at ‘‘governing by num-
bers” (Rose & Miller, 1992). The pool of compara-
tive material may be widened (see e.g. Mennicken &
Vollmer, 2007) to include not only di?erent forms of
economic calculation, but also forms of statistical
reasoning (e.g. Desrosie`res, 2002; Hacking, 1984;
MacKenzie 1978; Porter, 1986), mathematical
(Heintz, 2003; MacKenzie, 1999) and everyday
(Lave 1988) calculative practices. On the basis of a
comparative and di?erentiated understanding of
calculative practices, researchers in social studies
of ?nance and accounting may readdress their com-
mon concern with what is special about calculating
?nancially after all.
Fielding research in ?nancial numbers: towards social
studies of ?nance and accounting?
We would like to conclude this introductory
essay with some speculation about what a common
?eld for research in ?nancial numbers – across
accounting and SSF – might look like, what might
constitute its unifying empirical and theoretical
themes and how its academic discourse could be
more fully developed. Just like the preceding sec-
tions, this will re?ect the individual orientations of
the contributing authors, and should be taken as
an invitation to consider opportunities for locating
research activities in a somewhat broadened ?eld
of interdisciplinary research, not as a summary of
a ?nite or clearly de?ned set of directions for future
research. The following considerations thus try to
stretch rather than hold back the imagination of
readers interested in crossing the boundaries on a
more sustained basis.
Beyond some apparent di?erences, our brief tour
has identi?ed distinctive analytical assets SSF and
social research in accounting might place in research
projects across their present boundaries. As far as
SSF are concerned, a good deal of such assets
derives from deconstructing and reconstructing the
concept of ?nancial information, its embedding in
webs of mundane cognitive activities, in set-ups of
participants, technologies, models and discourses
lumping together interest groups, calculative prac-
tices, technologies, formal and informal framing
devices. The extraordinary scope in mobilizing
resources from di?erent scienti?c disciplines that
have come to be associated with accounting profes-
sionally or academically is perhaps the biggest asset
accounting research has been producing. Compara-
tively, its mobilization of approaches from organi-
zational research might somewhat stand out, and
it might supplement respective weaknesses in SSF.
1
Besides mutual and complementary analytical
interests and theoretical inspirations (science and
technology studies, actor-network theory etc.), a
couple of more speci?c analytical equivalences could
be identi?ed across the ?elds: take, for example, the
notion of an accounting assemblage (Miller &
O’Leary, 1996, pp. 125–126) which might adequately
(substituting ?nance for accounting) characterize the
heterogeneous infrastructural supports and net-
works of ?nancial cognition; or take studies of per-
formativity in SSF which might shed some light on
earlier debates about reality construction (e.g.
Hines, 1991; Neu, 1992), or more recently, about
hyperreality (Macintosh et al., 2000) in accounting.
Extending such correspondences, one might imagine
a series of exemplary mutual engagements, of empir-
ical and theoretical issues particularly serviceable for
coalescing prior research agendas across SSF and
accounting. These exemplary engagements might
range from dynamics of organization and marketiza-
tion within ?nancial cultures, accumulative micro-
studies of di?erent calculative practices, to
analyzing the pervasive signi?cance of status groups
and, ?nally, towards exploring the ?nancialization
of social life in more general terms.
1
For studies in the broader SSF ancestry, the works of
Fligstein (1987, 1990) are an evident exception, but preceding the
emergence of SSF as a distinct ?eld of research they do not
correspond easily with SSF’s more distinctive concerns with
?nancial cognition, performativity, or most generally: ?nancial
markets. Knorr Cetina and Preda (2005, pp. 3–5) set up the latter
as historically struggling to articulate itself against the pre-
eminence of organizational issues in traditional economic soci-
ology. Still, it should be noted that many empirical studies within
SSF (e.g. Abola?a, 2005; Kaltho?, 2005) explore social settings
that are formally organized, though without investigating much
the formal organization of calculative practice.
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 629
Exploring how ?nancial cultures are subject to
processes of organizing and marketizing might pro-
duce opportunities for combining various SSF top-
ics with accounting scholars’ expertise in the
organization of calculative practices, and, recipro-
cally, of making accounting scholarship correspond
with SSF research in exploring the construction of
markets. As performativity studies have been clos-
ing in on links between calculative practices (rules,
models, formulas, technical agencies, etc.) and
group di?erences (status groups, strati?cation),
organizations and markets might be seen as settings
in with such links are forged or separated: institu-
tionalized by organizing access (to information,
insider knowledge, expertise, technology) to partici-
pants with membership status and denying it to oth-
ers, marketized by putting groups of participants
into competing, structurally equivalent, or tradeable
network positions. Formal structures provide
shielded spaces, cubicles or ceremonial covers for
more informal calculative practices within and
across organizations. Market structures appear for-
mally more accessible, but, alongside the workings
of price mechanisms, they also erect technological
and cognitive boundaries of their own making and
allow status groups to establish and gradually
expand lateral control over strips of market activity.
Most generally, organizations and markets may
be seen as supplementary mechanisms for the collec-
tive assignment of value. If valuations are arrived at
by organizational decision-making or by reiterating
transactions on markets, neither need the respective
processes preclude one another, nor need they draw
on fundamentally di?erent institutional or technical
supports. Accounting systems institutionalized
within organizations, and market participants
adopting economic models may both be seen as
endowing formal models (accounting equations,
pricing formulas, etc.) with performative qualities
– both across markets and within formal organiza-
tions. Considering the similarities of the respective
accounting and ?nance assemblages embroiling par-
ticipants, discourses, institutions and technologies,
the association of formal organization with just
those parts of organized social settings that are
explicitly claimed to be subject to organizing (stan-
dard-setting, governance structures, etc.) might then
be just as inadequate as seeing markets as perennial
antagonists of bureaucratization. Analyzing the
production and transformation of ?nancial cultures,
one might instead more generally want to ask to
what extent organizing and marketizing processes,
which are both always piecemeal and vulnerable
to partisan exploitation, transform the ways in
which participants handle and circulate ?nancial
numbers (prices, costs, indicators, etc.) within and
across settings. Tracking this circulation with an
analytical attitude sensitive to the construction of
both markets and organizations within organiza-
tions and markets should put social studies of
accounting and ?nance in a unique position for
observing how social life is ordered and transformed
through the use of ?nancial numbers.
Tackling such questions will require sustained
engagements with the microstructures of calculative
practice. In both SSF and accounting, considerable
de-puri?cations have occurred in how calculation
and the use of numbers tend to be understood. In
SSF, basic scepticism towards the trust invested in
numbers has been inherited from science and tech-
nology studies backgrounds, in accounting research
it has been part and parcel of locating and analyzing
accounting in its social context of operation. The
impression of experts in control of circulating
inscriptions, ‘‘acting at a distance” (Latour, 1987)
on some subject matter, is as persuasive when think-
ing about scientists and engineers as when observing
managers and politicians trying to implement their
respective programmes of government, but perhaps
the latter has made more apparent than the former
the pervasive experience of failure at the heart of
governing by numbers (Rose & Miller, 1992, pp.
190–191). Somewhat surprisingly, macro-diagnoses
of governing by numbers being propelled into ever
more elaborate attempts by virtue of perpetually
mis?ring have yet to be systematically correlated
with microstudies of how numbers are produced
for circulation (e.g. Pentland, 1993). Has the e?ec-
tive combination of science and technology studies
(e.g. actor-network theory) with the Foucauldian
framework in understanding how social life is
brought under the spell of constant measurements,
inspections and evaluations gradually discouraged
investigations into the ways in which situated micro-
practices undermine or redirect e?orts at acting at a
distance?
2
In fact, the traditional (Mertonian)
2
Of course, this is not to unilaterally blame the Foucauldian
associates within this discursive alliance. The criticism of actor-
network theory by Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007), for example,
criticizes it for smuggling in mechanistic assumptions, neglecting
basic contingencies in the production of social order, and too
hastily subscribing to the ?ction of homo oeconomicus (albeit on
the basis of social constructivism).
630 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
examples of performativity have tended to highlight
destructive e?ects of micropractices (Guala, 2007, p.
136), and stock market crashes may point to poten-
tial counterperformativities of calculation (Mac-
Kenzie, 2007, p. 76). Thus, there is a lot to go
wrong with producing order through disseminating
calculative practices, and if participants in markets
and organizations tend to know about this – will
they not try to exploit the openings?
Even governance structures with a surface e?ec-
tiveness may be host to processes of creative compli-
ance in which the circulation of numbers, its very
standardization, inspection and ‘‘transparency”
equips participants with e?ective means of playing
at the interests of regulators or co-inmates (Vollmer,
2007, pp. 589–592). If the sociology of ?nance
attempts to be a sociology of valuation (Beunza &
Stark, 2005, pp. 98–99), it will need to microstudy
both ‘‘actual calculative practices of actors at work”
(Beunza & Stark, 2005, p. 99), and how participants
try to second-guess, outperform, hoodwink or abet
one another in putting ?nancial numbers on display.
Whether calculative practices in this broader sense
conform more to a notion of homo oeconomicus
or to one of homo ludens (Huizinga, 1949), is per-
haps a question of secondary signi?cance. One
way or the other, studying the full spectrum of
how ?nancial numbers are used in social life may
help to microtranslate (in the sense
doc_875574254.pdf
This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent field of social studies of finance (SSF) and, subsequently,
sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might benefit research interests in accounting and vice
versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the fields might be intensified in what is identified
as an emerging accounting and finance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader field of research
exploring the use of financial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the
possibility of articulating a strong sociological
Tracking the numbers: Across accounting and
?nance, organizations and markets
Hendrik Vollmer
a,
*
, Andrea Mennicken
b
, Alex Preda
c
a
University of Bielefeld, Faculty for Sociology, P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
b
London School and Economics and Political Science, Department of Accounting and Centre for Analysis of Risk and
Regulation, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
c
University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Studies, Sociology, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, United Kingdom
Abstract
This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent ?eld of social studies of ?nance (SSF) and, subse-
quently, sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might bene?t research interests in accounting and vice
versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual engagements across the ?elds might be intensi?ed in what is identi?ed
as an emerging accounting and ?nance track in the discourse of social science. The prospects of a broader ?eld of research
exploring the use of ?nancial numbers across social settings, markets, organizations and cultures are projected, and the
possibility of articulating a strong sociological programme of research is considered.
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Over the last three decades, Accounting, Organi-
zations and Society has been o?ering a broad plat-
form for interdisciplinary, accounting-related
scholarship. Regularly, this journal has been wel-
coming scholars from neighbouring ?elds to get
involved in extending the perspectives of accounting
research towards a wider and comparative under-
standing of how various forms of calculative prac-
tices a?ect, and interrelate with, the social settings
in which they operate. One interesting new ?eld of
study which has taken shape outside accounting
research is the ?eld of social studies of ?nance
(henceforth SSF). This ?eld, now emerging at inter-
sections of economic sociology, science and technol-
ogy studies, cultural anthropology, and cultural
geography, has much to o?er to researchers inter-
ested in the practices, agencies, programmes and
technologies of calculation. This introductory essay
to the special AOS section will provide a prelimin-
ary tour of SSF, explore its intersections with
accounting research and test some common ground
on which research interests shared across SSF and
accounting might be brought to co-operate.
What uni?es social studies of ?nance and those
of accounting as ‘‘social and institutional practice”
(Hopwood & Miller, 1994) is their engagement with
social settings characterised by a high frequency
of circulating numbers. A remarkable number of
researchers have by now become involved in
investigating how the use of numbers and a range
of di?erent social settings co-develop, change or
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.06.007
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Voll-
mer), [email protected] (A. Mennicken), apreda@sta?mail.
ed.ac.uk (A. Preda).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
persist. Yet, SSF and sociologically oriented
accounting research have developed as distinct ?elds
with relatively little interchange. Probably the most
palpable di?erence between SSF and interdisciplin-
ary research in accounting is that the latter has lar-
gely focussed on aspects of calculative practices
subject to formal organization. Accounting studies
have been extending traditional preoccupations
with business enterprises towards the employment
of numbers in programmes and technologies of gov-
ernment (Miller & Rose, 1990), and the respective
roles of accounting professionals (for an overview
see e.g. Cooper & Robson, 2006) across the sectors
and topologies of a ‘‘shifting sphere of the eco-
nomic” (Hopwood, 1992), moved, moulded and
put in place by embedding calculative practices in
di?erent kinds of organizations. SSF have, on the
other hand, mainly been exploring the construction
of markets and market cultures (Abola?a, 1996,
1998; Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002) and the roles
of calculative models and technologies (‘‘market
devices”) in the framing of social and socio-techni-
cal interaction in market settings (Callon, 1998a;
Callon, Millo, & Muniesa, 2007; MacKenzie &
Millo, 2003; Muniesa, 2003; Preda, 2006).
On an institutional level, accounting research
has, even in its most socially theorized forms, been
developing mainly within the boundaries of the
accounting discipline and its academic establish-
ments. Researchers involved in SSF appear to be
mostly associated with sociology and anthropology
units of universities. One might hypothesize that
such di?erences in institutional environments, in
line with contrasting professional a?liations, may
have been constituting major reasons why corre-
spondence across SSF and interdisciplinary
accounting research has remained quite limited.
The review elements of this introductory essay
would like to indicate why this presents an unfortu-
nate and at least unnecessary state of comparative
neglect. Without claiming to be comprehensive
either in reviewing or in diagnosing symptomatic
shortcomings of an unevenly distributed academic
attention, we would above all like to demonstrate
the potential of a shared ?eld of research concerned
with the circulation of ?nancial numbers across the
diverse settings of social life, and we would like to
suggest that there is indeed strong potential in a
common academic track which social studies of
?nance and accounting might collectively explore.
Finding a particularly appropriate label for a
?eld opening up for researchers from di?erent scien-
ti?c disciplines is not easy. Speaking of interdisci-
plinary ?nance and accounting studies would
perhaps appropriately mirror the self-designation
of that particular research tradition – science and
technology studies – from which both SSF and
social research in accounting have been gaining
major theoretical inspirations. Yet opening up inter-
disciplinarily might not only bring together unac-
customed cohabitants, it might also make it
di?cult to institutionalize an e?ective research
agenda. In order to articulate itself as a specialized
track of scienti?c discourse, a prospective ?eld of
accounting and ?nance studies might then perhaps
need an impulse similar to the one science and tech-
nology studies received from David Bloor’s formu-
lation of the strong programme in the sociology of
knowledge in the 1970s (Bloor 1992 [originally
1976]). In closing this introductory essay, we would
like to put the question to the readers of this special
section what a strong programme of research in
?nance and accounting studies might look like,
encouraging the elaboration of research agendas
seeking to transcend boundaries in and between
the two ?elds.
Financial cognition, calculative agency,
performativity, and sets of participants: a brief tour of
SSF
Perhaps one of the best starting points for intro-
ducing SSF is the concept of information. Taking
information as a starting point is justi?ed by the
centrality of this notion not only to the practices
of participants in ?nancial markets, but also to the
theoretical apparatus of ?nancial economics. Mar-
ket participants are characterized by a constant
search for relevant information, a search which
shapes their decisions and is re?ected in the dynam-
ics of transactions and securities prices. Financial
economics sees prices as incorporating all the infor-
mation available to market participants (e.g. Stigler,
1961), while the incorporation mechanisms are pub-
licly available. Information appears as crucial not
only with respect to how participants perceive,
order, and justify their activities and decisions, but
also with respect to price behaviour. Consequently,
SSF, which – broadly put – investigate the knowl-
edge processes underlying ?nancial transactions,
assign this notion a prominent place in their
research programmes.
The way in which SSF approach information,
however, di?ers in some signi?cant respects from
620 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
the presentation and discussion of this concept in
?nancial economics, as well as in social structural
varieties of economic sociology. In ?nancial eco-
nomics, information is understood as signals, akin
to the electric impulses circulating through the
wires of a telephone switchboard. This speci?c
notion fuses together a view of markets as distrib-
utors of information (and therefore of resources),
formulated in the 1930s by Friedrich von Hayek
(within the debates about the economic failures of
communism), with a methodological approach
developed in operations research during WWII
and oriented towards the detection of meaningful
patterns underlying apparently random signals
(Mirowski, 2002, pp. 37,60; Klein, 2001). In this
perspective, signals are additive: they trigger a reac-
tion in the receiver, while being independent of the
cognitive properties of the latter. An understanding
of information as signals separates information
from cognition, and makes possible a distinction
between meaningful signals and noise, with the lat-
ter being understood as a lack of determined
patterns.
Social structural approaches in economic sociol-
ogy operate with a notion of information very sim-
ilar to the above. Information is understood as
signals circulating through networks of social rela-
tionships, with the latter, in their turn, acting both
as information channels and as signals (e.g. Pod-
olny, 2001, 2005; White, 2002, pp. 100–101). Net-
works of social relationships circulate information,
but, from the perspective of a third party, they
appear as information too, about the (non)existence
of social ties, their duration, etc., information which
is used in business decisions. In this perspective, net-
works are analogous with electric circuits, and the
absence or presence of ties is taken to indicate the
limits and possibilities for the distribution of signals.
The distinction between cognition and information
thus is a?rmed, although it is acknowledged that,
within networks, information is processed according
to frames of interpretation shared by members.
Frames of interpretation, in their turn, can be pro-
vided by common assumptions, but also by what
White (2000) calls discourses, understood as com-
mon activities, i.e., institutionalized occasions for
conversations and contact maintenance. In a nut-
shell, frames of interpretation are provided by
shared activities and occasions within a network,
activities and occasions which stabilize signals, mak-
ing them accountable and transferable across
situations.
Such shared occasions and activities hint at the
fact that (?nancial) information might after all not
be entirely independent of the cognitive properties
and practices of potential and actual receivers, and
that recipients of information cannot be seen as pas-
sive with respect to how signals are processed. Nei-
ther can such aspects of cognition be seen as
independent from, nor as una?ected by the interac-
tions of market participants. What becomes neces-
sary, then, is a speci?cation of (a) the interaction
mechanisms which constitute information, and (b)
how such interaction mechanisms underlie cognitive
processes, understood not as neural operations, but
as cooperative, practical achievements of partici-
pants. In the face of such contingencies, an excessive
emphasis put on networks of social relationships
might not only run the risk of suggesting a natural
tendency of networks towards closure but also that
there will tend to be just as many frames of interpre-
tation as there are networks, with dominant frames,
once set in place, contributing to network closure.
This ends up leaving little room for explaining con-
?icting dynamics and change, both across and
within networks.
SSF, in turn, tend to depart from an understand-
ing of information as signals circulating on a circuit
board, and re-orient the investigative focus towards
?nancial cognition, understood as a practical, inter-
action-based achievement of market participants.
The notion of ‘‘?nancial cognition” draws attention
to processes of interactive knowledge production
and the roles that cognitive schemas – in combina-
tion with technical instruments, ?nancial models,
speci?c room layouts, group interactions etc. – play
in the formation and execution of investment and
trading strategies (e.g. Beunza & Stark, 2005; De
Bondt, 2005). Broadly speaking, two directions
within SSF might be distinguished: one of them is
represented by close up, microsociological studies
of ?nancial cognition, and the other by performativ-
ity studies exploring conditions and consequences of
?nancial models and ?nance theory at an aggregate
level.
Field studies of cognitive practices re-focus the
attention from information as signals to interac-
tion-based cognitive processes, seen as determining
what market participants will accept as information,
how they will process and store it, and how they will
use it in their activities. Such cognitive processes
include, among others, observation, classi?cation,
calculation, and memorization, understood as prac-
tical, accountable activities taking place within and
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 621
depending on webs of social interactions (e.g.
Lynch, 2006; Maynard, 2006). Drawing, inter alia,
on ethnomethodology and phenomenology, one of
the methodological implications of this approach
is the direct, longitudinal, in situ observation of cog-
nitive activities, as they are performed by market
participants in their everyday actions and in interac-
tion with other human participants, as well as with
artefacts. This view, then, stresses the fact that
(?nancial) cognition is a distributed, cooperative
activity (Hutchins, 1995), irreducible to a ?xed set
of universal rules.
The shift from signals to cognitive practices also
triggers a series of consequences for how core mar-
ket activities, such as trading, are subsequently con-
ceived. For instance, numerical data (such as price
and volume) are acknowledged as crucial with
respect to the trading process. While structural
and institutional approaches in economic sociology
(e.g. Carruthers & Stinchcombe, 2001; Smith 1989;
Uzzi & Lancaster, 2004) see numerical data as
endowed with meaning and trust by the authorita-
tive nature of the channels through which they cir-
culate, by formal rules, and by framing procedures
(e.g. attaching rationalizations and justifying narra-
tives to numbers), ?eld studies of ?nancial cognition
see the reception, selection, and uses of such data as
depending on practical cognitive activities such as
observation, classi?cation, and calculation (see e.g.
Kaltho?, 2005).
This becomes even more relevant in electronic,
anonymous trading, where traders rely less on wide-
spread social networks and direct exchanges with
known partners, and where activities such as screen
observation become crucial. These di?erences have
prompted some observers to argue that global elec-
tronic markets embody principles di?erent from
those of exchanges based on personal interactions.
While the latter can be conceived as networked sys-
tems, the former might more adequately be
regarded as scopic systems (e.g. Knorr Cetina,
2007; Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002; Knorr Cetina
& Preda, 2007). In contexts such as those of online
trading, numerical data do not appear to carry self-
evident properties (Zaloom, 2006), or to work as
signals which the trader decodes. Rather, what hap-
pens from the traders’ perspective is that highly
unstable ?ickers on the screen are subjected to an
interaction-based observation process involving def-
initional, stabilizing, and integrative procedures.
Out of this process numerical data emerge endowed
with relevant properties, which are attached to
rationalization devices (such as narratives) and used
as a tool and a resource for further action. Thus,
traders are not confronted from the start with num-
bers as meaningful signals which can be decoded at
a glance. The very situation of electronic trading,
where multiple, unstable screen displays shift all
the time, makes this impossible. Financial data
appear as the outcome of a series of practical, inter-
action-based cognitive activities, which involve both
human participants and technological systems.
While highly technologized transaction environ-
ments highlight the role of cognitive activities, they
also shed light on the role played by formal models
(such as those for calculating theoretical prices for
derivatives) in transactions. Formal models, which
are easy to integrate into an electronic trading envi-
ronment with high computing capacities, are devel-
oped within ?nancial economics. SSF have been
addressing these formal models in asking whether
they bear performative functions – that is if, instead
of representing an external reality, such models
directly intervene in the production of the reality
they claim to represent (e.g. MacKenzie, Muniesa,
& Siu, 2007; but see also Hacking, 1983). Suspicions
of performativity have been ampli?ed by the ever
growing role played by intermediary groups, such
as ?nancial experts and analysts, in contemporary
global markets. However, tracing performativity
e?ects beyond the use of formal models, other
expert and status group speci?c forms of analyses
might take over not so much representational as
performative functions in being adopted by market
participants as tools of intervention in transactions.
The concept of performativity, introduced to
SSF by Michel Callon (1998a), and subsequently
speci?ed by Donald MacKenzie (2006), MacKenzie
& Millo (2003), Didier (2007), addresses the blurred
distinction between representational and interven-
tionist uses of economic models by ?nancial practi-
tioners. It highlights the role of group interests and/
or con?icts in the implementation of formal models,
as well as the capacity of the latter to transform
transaction forms, rules, and objects. While Mac-
Kenzie stresses that performativity can also have
negative e?ects (e.g. when use of models is imitated,
to the e?ect of unravelling transactions), Callon
focuses more on the basic assumptions underlying
the use of formal models. Initially, Callon wanted
to distance himself from the sociological debates
about the (in)existence of the homo oeconomicus
by arguing that the latter should be understood as
a set of behavioural scripts enacted in practice. Such
622 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
scripts require sets of artefacts, including formal
models. Therefore, in a further step of the argu-
ment, the question was raised whether such artefacts
– essential in changing transaction rules – are
endowed with agential features, called calculative
agency (Barry & Slater, 2002; Callon, 2004, p. 123).
Calculative agency is characterized by (a) fram-
ing, (b) disentanglement, and (c) performativity.
Framing represents the distinctions used by partici-
pants in order to establish what is calculable and
what is not. Disentanglement means drawing
boundaries between relevant and irrelevant elements
with respect to calculability, while performativity
indicates the use of technologies (including abstract
models) in market transactions. Therefore, framing
and disentanglement appear as prerequisites for per-
formativity; the question, however, is what exactly
is meant by calculability. Obviously, this latter must
mean something else than applying sets of mathe-
matical rules to the processing of numerical data.
Callon and his collaborator Muniesa (2005, pp.
1229, 1231; Muniesa & Callon, 2007; but see also
Callon et al., 2007) see calculability as intrinsic to
the character of markets not only as allocation
mechanisms, but mainly as collective devices for
assigning value. They follow here an argument com-
ing from the French school of conventions (e.g. Bol-
tanski & The´venot, 2006), according to which
societies set in place various valuation mechanisms,
market exchanges being just one of them. Calcula-
bility therefore designates the (collaborative) pro-
cesses which make possible the assignment of
numbers (such as prices) to entities (be they ?nan-
cial securities or consumable goods), an assignment
which, in its turn, endows these entities with relative
stability and makes possible their circulation
throughout society.
In this perspective, calculability would include
commensurability and standardization, features
which stress that classi?cation is a cognitive opera-
tion. One of the questions almost automatically
raised here is that of the various groups of partici-
pants involved in making entities commensurable
and in standardizing them. Financial experts are
such a group and, indeed, we encounter the argu-
ment according to which ?nancial analysts, for
instance, perform precisely the function of making
securities commensurable (Beunza & Garud, 2007)
and of classifying them within certain categories
(e.g. Zuckerman, 1999, 2004). If we move away
from a functionalist approach to the activities of
such groups, however, we can see that, at least in
some situations, formal models are used to justify
decisions which serve speci?c interests. Based on
their analysis of the airwave spectrum auctions,
Mirowski and Nik-Kah (2007) warn that perform-
ativity should not be understood as attributing to
economists socio-political powers they do not actu-
ally possess. The material interests of entrenched
economic groups play a considerable role in the
shaping of markets (perhaps even more so in the
case of one-o? events like an airwave auction), with
formal models serving (at least sometimes) a legiti-
mating function.
The debates around the performativity of eco-
nomic models and interest groups (see also Yonay
& Breslau, 2006) raise the issue of the link between
calculation (and numerical data), on the one hand,
and group di?erences, strati?cation and inequality,
on the other hand (cf. Preda, 2005). This debate is
relevant with respect to microsociological ?eld stud-
ies of ?nancial cognition too-for instance, the
assumption of cognitive distinctions between insti-
tutional and non-institutional traders, so often
encountered in ?nancial modelling, would require
a ?eld-based comparison between the two: do
non-institutional traders indeed use numbers in a
di?erent way from institutional ones? Do they uti-
lize di?erent calculative practices or technologies?
While some ?nancial models (e.g. Shleifer, 2000,
pp. 13, 33) work with the assumption of a distinc-
tion between informed and less informed, rational
and less rational investors and traders, correspond-
ing to one between institutional and non-institu-
tional market participants, SSF do not take such a
distinction as given or natural. Since technological
systems have widened access to online trading and
to ?nancial information, it cannot be assumed that
institutional investors and traders (who have more
?nancial resources) automatically have access to
better information or that they behave rationally,
while non-institutional participants do not. From
the SSF perspective, the main question is to see
how such di?erences are constituted in practical
actions (if at all) by speci?c participants, and to
what e?ects. The approach is to regard these di?er-
ences not only as discursive devices, legitimating the
positions of speci?c participants and groups, but
also to see whether and how they are created in
the practical actions of trading, for instance (e.g.
Smith 2006; Zaloom, 2006). If distinctions are gen-
erated in action, then the next step would be to
investigate their cognitive role with respect to the
production of information. For instance, are
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 623
distinctions between informed/uninformed traders
produced within the process of trading and, if yes,
are they co-constitutive of this process? Do they
in?uence the observation, memorization, and calcu-
lation processes through which traders generate
information?
A programme of ?eld research focussing on cog-
nitive practices does not mean ignoring issues like
emotions in trading activities. Recent developments
in the sociology of emotions have opened the way
for treating these not as opposed to, but within a
cognitive framework (e.g. Berezin, 2005; Collins,
2004). From the perspective of SSF, this increases
the appeal of an interaction- and cognition-oriented
theoretical frame as a replacement for old dichoto-
mies (cf. Abola?a, 1998, pp. 72–76).
But this and the abovementioned themes are still
awaiting sustained research. Di?erences among
social groups with respect to investment holdings
have long been noticed (e.g. Keister, 2000; Swed-
berg, 2005), and di?erences in ?nancial power
between institutional and non-institutional inves-
tors/traders are obvious. Yet, we still lack a thor-
ough comparison of these participants, one which
should focus on practical trading actions. Methodo-
logically, SSF seem well equipped to tackle such
issues – the ?eld is host to microanalytical studies
(e.g. Knorr Cetina & Bru¨ gger, 2002; Le´pinay,
2007; Muniesa, 2003), anchored primarily in partici-
pant observation, discourse and conversation analy-
sis, as well as more macroanalytical ones studying
?nance and ?nancial markets at a more aggregate
level (studies of performativity, e.g. have a decidedly
macroanalytical orientation, see MacKenzie, 2006;
MacKenzie, Beunza, & Hardie, 2006; MacKenzie
& Hardie, 2007; Muniesa & Callon, 2007), historical
(e.g. Preda, 2006) as well as contemporary research.
The methodological variety is accompanied by the
attention paid to empirical studies (the case study
occupying here a prominent role) as a source of the-
oretical innovation (Stake, 2000). Yet comparative
issues like di?erences between groups and types of
participants do, so far, not appear to have pro?ted
much from this variety.
A second empirical issue, connected to the above,
is that of the relationships among various kinds of
?nancial expertise and expert groups. Expert aca-
demic knowledge (as embodied in formal models
of price behaviour, for instance) is not the only kind
of expertise available to market participants. Along-
side it, various types of expertise co-exist in relation-
ships which, while not always easy, have proven
durable. An example in this respect is provided by
forms of ‘‘technical analysis” or ‘‘chartism”, a body
of expert knowledge which, contested by academic
economics since at least the 1930s, has become insti-
tutionalized and is widely used by market partici-
pants. Moreover, from a perspective looking at
trading as practical action, the distinctions between
expert and lay knowledge do not appear as clear cut
anymore: (?nancial) expertise itself requires practi-
cal knowledge and is moored in the day-to-day rou-
tines of its practitioners. As studies of scienti?c
expertise show (e.g. Collins & Evans, 2003; Lynch,
Cole, McNally, & Jordan, 2008), expert and lay
knowledge cannot be taken as completely separated
from each other. The use of (formal) pricing models
in trading actions intertwines with the practical
knowledge of market practitioners, who may ignore
or use them in ways which are not prescribed by
experts. To give an example, non-institutional
online traders, while having pricing models embed-
ded in their trading software, choose not to use
them. The questions then become: how do users of
pricing models matter (e.g. Oudshoorn & Pinch,
2003)? How are models put to practical uses in the
process of trading and to what e?ects?
Social structural approaches to (?nancial) mar-
kets have emphasized their network character, as
well as the role of group hierarchies (e.g. Podolny,
2005); neo-institutionalist approaches have primar-
ily stressed formal rules, routines, and politics in
the constitution of markets (e.g. Carruthers, 1996;
Dobbin, 1994; Fligstein, 1996). Until now, SSF have
been rather cautious in formulating a general de?ni-
tion of (?nancial) markets, as well as in adopting a
reifying emphasis on ‘‘culture”. This does not mean,
however, a lack of theoretical perspective. While
studies of the interaction order of market transac-
tions have emphasized social control through tem-
poral coordination, studies of performativity have
seen markets as ‘‘socio-technical agencements”
(Callon, 2007, pp. 323–326) – that is, as a nexus of
human participants and technologies which, while
generating a speci?c body of knowledge, generates
behavioural scripts as well. This non-functionalist
view highlights the fact that markets consist of pat-
terns of knowledge and behaviour which go beyond
allocation mechanisms. All in all, one could venture
that, theoretically, SSF see markets as knowledge-
based, hybrid arrangements (i.e., including human
participants and artefacts) of social control.
To ?nish this brief tour with a projection of
future research directions inherent in SSF, these will
624 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
have to include the continuation of the investigation
of ?nancial markets, as well as the branching out
into the analysis of domains subjected to what is
called ‘‘marketization” (e.g. health care, carbon
markets). Since technological innovation in ?nan-
cial markets occurs at rapid pace, SSF is confronted
with a very dynamic domain of investigation. The
increased participation of non-institutional traders
in ?nancial transactions, the advance of anonymous
electronic trading and the increasing integration of
trading platforms at trans-continental level pose
many challenges to the ?eld investigation of,
amongst other things, screen-related cognitive activ-
ities (with calculation occupying a prominent role)
and their embedding in institutional and non-insti-
tutional contexts. The incorporation of heteroge-
neous entities into the area of ?nancial
transactions (e.g. housing) and the transformations
that such entities subsequently underwent (neces-
sary in order to make them tradeable) provide an
additional object of investigation for SSF, one in
which calculability also plays a prominent role. At
the same time, the expansion of principles such as
cost-e?ectiveness, pro?t-making, and the applica-
tion of market mechanisms as regulatory instru-
ments into domains of activity, such as health care
or environmental protection (which have been such
prominent issues in accounting research), perpetu-
ates questions about the performativity of eco-
nomic, ?nance and accounting models.
Consequently, SSF will be drawn to expanding
inquiries beyond the boundaries of ?nancial mar-
kets into other aspects of the ‘‘shifting sphere of
the economic” (Hopwood, 1992) – to meet with
accounting?
Accounting intersections
Social and institutional studies of accounting
share many commonalities with SSF. Both ?elds
are interested in similar research objects: models,
instruments and practices of calculation. To a cer-
tain extent, they also share similar research ques-
tions. Both, for example, are concerned with the
study of the ways in which calculative practices
shape, and are shaped by, the social, organizational
and institutional settings in which they operate.
Both draw attention to the complex interrelations
that exist between technologies of calculation, orga-
nizational structures, social and socio-technical
interactions, cultures and institutions. Further, both
research strands place particular emphasis on the
constituting, rather than mirroring, roles of num-
bers and calculative devices. Both assume that cal-
culative practices actively create, rather than
merely re?ect, economic realities. Both regard the
functionality of calculative systems, agencies and
regimes as something which needs to be explained
rather than assumed.
In addition, social and institutional studies of
?nance and accounting have common, intersecting
theoretical reference points. In both ?elds, research-
ers for instance make use of, and contribute to the
further development of, concepts and approaches
that, initially, had been developed in the contexts
of science and technology studies (e.g. Callon,
1986; Hacking, 1983; Knorr Cetina, 1999; Latour,
1987; Law, 1986; MacKenzie 1990; Porter, 1995).
Both social studies of accounting and SSF, amongst
other things, are interested in untangling the rela-
tionships between science and practices of economic
calculation.
In the ?eld of accounting research, Miller &
O’Leary, for instance, analyzed the factory Caterpil-
lar as a ‘‘laboratory” (Miller & O’Leary, 1996) and,
in a recently published article, studied investment
appraisals at Intel with reference to Wise’s (1988)
concept of ‘‘mediating machines” (Miller &
O’Leary, 2007). Robson (1992, 1994) looked at
accounting numbers as ‘‘inscriptions” and utilized
Latour’s (1987) notion of ‘‘action at a distance” in
his study of the rise of in?ation accounting in the
UK. Power (1995) wrote about ‘‘Auditing, Exper-
tise and the Sociology of Technique” and edited a
book exploring the relations between calculation,
accounting and science (Power, 1994a). Chua
(1995) made reference to actor-network theory in
her study of the fabrication of accounting images
in three public hospitals. Dechow and Mouritsen
(2005) drew on actor-network theory in their study
of the workings of Enterprise Resource Planning
systems. And Young (2006) used Hacking (1986)
for her study of the construction of ?nancial state-
ment users in US-American accounting standard
setting.
SSF have even closer connections to the ?eld of
science and technology studies, as many of the cur-
rent SSF scholars started out as science and technol-
ogy students (e.g. Michel Callon, Karin Knorr,
Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Alex Preda).
SSF scholars seek to establish the ’science and tech-
nology framework’ as an alternative to the more
conventional, social structural approaches to the
study of markets in economic sociology. They focus
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 625
on the ‘‘machineries of knowing” (Knorr Cetina,
1999, p. 5, cited in MacKenzie, 2006, p. 12), the epi-
stemic cultures, models, instruments and socio-tech-
nical interactions that shape and make up ?nancial
markets. As was illustrated above, this focus helps
SSF researchers to unpack notions common to both
economics and more traditional approaches in eco-
nomic sociology (like ?nancial information, eco-
nomic agencies, representations, markets etc.).
Amongst other things, SSF have utilized the
notion of market device (dispositif) to study ‘‘the
material and discursive assemblages that intervene
in the construction of markets” (Muniesa, Millo &
Callon, 2007, p. 2). Likewise, one ?nds many refer-
ences to Foucault-inspired concepts of assemblage,
constellation and dispositif in social studies of
accounting (e.g. Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood,
1985; Miller, 2008; Miller & O’Leary, 1996). In
accounting, notions of assemblage and constellation
have, for example, been used to draw attention to
the fact that accounting and other calculative prac-
tices and instruments are deeply entwined in issues
and events that are of wider social, economic and
political concern. The concepts of assemblage
and constellation are used to unpack the dynamic
and constitutive role of accounting practices and
instruments (Miller, 2008, p. 57). Similar to SSF,
also accounting scholars have emphasised the need
to study calculative practices ‘‘as a relatively dis-
crete, yet temporarily stabilised assemblage of
devices for intervening with multiple conditions of
emergence” (Miller, 2008, p. 53).
Finally, SSF and accounting share similar meth-
odological frameworks. Both ?elds employ a range
of di?erent, but mainly qualitative, methods of
investigation, such as discourse analysis, participant
observation, document analysis, conversation anal-
ysis and qualitative interviewing. The case study
approach occupies not only a central role in SSF,
but also in social and institutional studies of
accounting.
Yet, there also exist important di?erences
between SSF and accounting research, e.g. with
respect to institutional location, disciplinary divi-
sions of academic labour, the respective empirical
?elds of investigation and theoretical orientations,
each of which have shaped the ?elds in di?erent
ways, thereby reducing possibilities for exchange
and interaction amongst the two groups. SSF have
focussed mainly on the study of ?nancial markets,
the roles of economics and ?nance theory in con-
structing those markets, the relevance of networks
of social and socio-technical interaction in them,
their cognitive and cultural underpinnings and the
e?ects of ?nancial markets on the workings of cor-
porations (see e.g. Abola?a, 1996; Knorr Cetina &
Preda, 2005; MacKenzie, 2006; MacKenzie & Millo,
2003; MacKenzie et al., 2007). Yet, as Miller (2008)
has pointed out, SSF have studied calculative prac-
tices without much reference to broader pro-
grammes and ideas of social order, modalities of
power and their e?ects on the self and notions of
‘‘actorhood” (Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). Further,
questions concerning the relevance of calculative
devices for processes and forms of organization
have somewhat been neglected. In contrast, social
and institutional studies of accounting have been
mainly concerned with the investigation of orga-
nized calculative practice: histories, practices, social
and organizational e?ects of bookkeeping, cost
accounting, in?ation accounting, performance mea-
surement, auditing, corporate ?nancial reporting,
budgeting, investment appraisals, etc., and their
intertwining with di?erent modes of governing at
the level of the economy, organizations and the con-
duct of persons. But, hitherto, accounting research
has been awarding little attention to the roles of cal-
culative practices in the construction of markets.
Researchers have largely been focussing on the con-
tribution of accounting ideas and techniques to the
inner workings of private and public sector organi-
zations (e.g. Ahrens, 1997; Covaleski & Dirsmith,
1988; Preston, Cooper, & Coombs, 1992), processes
of macroeconomic management and change (e.g.
Neu & Graham, 2006; Suzuki, 2003), and dynamics
of accounting professionalization (e.g. Anderson-
Gough, Grey, & Robson, 1998; Boland, 1982; Cara-
manis, 2002; Cooper & Robson, 2006).
Further, it should be noted that social studies of
accounting do not represent a coherent, clearly
identi?able strand of research. They have been built
on a multiplicity of di?erent, at times con?icting
theories and approaches. Besides science and tech-
nology studies, approaches rooted in sociological
New Institutionalism, Foucauldian studies of gov-
ernmentality, critical theory, political economy
approaches, ethnomethodology and symbolic inter-
actionism have been used as theoretical reference
points (cf. Mennicken, 2005). Many studies have
been concerned with investigating the implication
of accounting in processes of organizational con-
trol, government and regulation (for an overview
see Miller, 2008). Questions have been addressed,
such as: How does accounting get implicated in
626 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
the creation of particular organizational and eco-
nomic conceptions? How does accounting achieve
and maintain the position of organizational signi?-
cance? How is it involved in processes of economic,
social and organizational change? How is it impli-
cated in the ‘‘governmentalisation” (Foucault,
1991), disciplining, liberalisation and calculation,
of society? How has accounting been involved in
processes of subjecti?cation – the formation and
government of ‘‘calculable spaces and calculable
selves” (Miller, 1992)?
In pursuing such questions, social and institu-
tional studies of accounting have enhanced our
understanding of social and behavioural aspects of
accounting, its constructed nature, politicizations
and performative e?ects. But the primary occupa-
tion with accounting in organized settings, at least
to a certain extent, has also contributed to the pro-
duction of blind spots. It has furthered the creation
of a situation in which linkages and interplays
between accounting and ?nance, and accounting
and markets, particularly ?nancial markets, at least
from a broader social science viewpoint have largely
remained overlooked and under-researched. Not
much is known about the social and cultural roles
that accounting numbers play in the construction
of ?nancial markets. There is no empirically well-
grounded understanding of the relationships that
exist (or do not exist) between accounting, capital
market structures and investment cultures.
Accounting research has not produced much insight
into the calculative practices of ?nancial analysts
and investors, and their uses of accounting concepts
and ?gures in the production of corporate valua-
tions. Nor has it come up with sustained investiga-
tions exploring in depth the junctions, disparities,
commonalities and interrelations between theories
and models of accounting and ?nance, the enact-
ment of those relations, and their formation and ref-
ormation, in diverse settings and cultures of
calculation.
At least to some extent, the production of such
blind spots has been furthered by the preoccupation
of sociologically oriented accounting research with
contexts and practices of organizational control
and management. But what triggered this preoccu-
pation? In part, it may be seen as an (unintended)
outcome of processes of inner-disciplinary special-
ization and di?erentiation. Over the years, in
accounting research and practice, a division of
labour has taken shape between management
accounting scholars, concerned with the roles of
accounting in the management of organizations,
on the one hand, and ?nancial accounting scholars,
concerned with markets, particularly stock market
oriented ?nancial reporting, analysis and valuation,
on the other. Most sociologically oriented account-
ing research has been carried out in the ?eld of man-
agement accounting. Financial accounting research
and investigations of the roles of accounting in
?nancial markets, with a few notable exceptions
(see e.g. Macintosh, Shearer, Thornton, & Welker,
2000; Roberts, Sanderson, Barker, & Hendry,
2006; Young, 2006), have mainly been the terrain
of ?nancial accounting specialists and economics-
based scholarship. In addition, accounting and
?nance represent two historically much related,
but institutionally increasingly segregated academic
?elds of investigation, with separate academic asso-
ciations, research centres and publication outlets. In
recent years, accounting and ?nance scholars have
been seemingly busier with the development and
partitioning of their own research ?elds and identi-
ties, than with seeking collaboration across the
?elds. Of course, exceptions exist, especially in
?nancial accounting research, but generally
researchers have been careful not to infringe too
much upon each others’ territory.
The papers presented in this special section may
o?er starting points for altering this situation by
illustrating opportunities to explore intersections
and points of connection between SSF and account-
ing research. But in what ways exactly can a dia-
logue with SSF enrich interdisciplinary accounting
research? Where can it contribute to the further
development of its research agendas, analytical
frameworks and methodological tools? And what,
in turn, can SSF learn from social studies of
accounting? Where and how can the two strands
of research fruitfully complement and enrich each
other?
Collaboration between the two ?elds could prove
to be fruitful and bene?cial in at least three di?erent
respects. (1) A closer engagement with SSF could
contribute to the transcending of current divisions
of labour existing between accounting and ?nance,
management accounting and ?nancial accounting
research. It could encourage sociologically oriented
accounting scholars to explore more the relevance
of accounting in and for ?nance, and it could moti-
vate them to take a closer look at actual practices of
?nancial accounting, an area which, as already men-
tioned above, so far, has largely remained neglected
by social and institutional accounting research (see
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 627
e.g. Hopwood, 2000). SSF view calculation and the
construction of calculability as a cooperative, prac-
tical achievement. They study the day-to-day pro-
duction of ?nancial knowledge in processes of
observation, classi?cation, computation and coop-
eration. Calculative practice is seen as a socially
and technically embedded activity. As was men-
tioned earlier, a research framework is employed
that places emphasis on close up, in situ observa-
tions. Such a framework o?ers to both accountants
and ?nance specialists a useful platform for self-
re?ection. As Hopwood has put it, SSF o?er ‘‘the
possibility that ?nance, like most other knowledges,
can be confronted by analyses of itself” (Hopwood,
2007). They make us focus on the intricate socio-
technical mechanisms and processes by which ?nan-
cial knowledge is produced. And they show that
similar research frameworks can be used for both
the study of accounting and the study of ?nance.
In this context, a closer engagement with SSF
could also have the e?ect that more attention will
be given to processes of calculative ‘‘hybridisation”
(Miller, Kurunma¨ki & O’Leary, 2007) and the con-
nections, commonalities and variations existing
between di?erent forms of calculative expertise.
More collaboration between SSF and accounting
can sensitize both ?elds for the embedding of calcu-
lative practices in competing or intersecting institu-
tional and professional realms of expertise with
di?erent groups of participants. It can help both
?elds to develop a more di?erentiated understand-
ing of the motivations and mechanisms underlying
the academic ‘‘disciplining” of calculative expertise,
as well as the reproduction of professional status
groups. It can contribute to the further investigation
of the entanglement of calculative activities in di?er-
ent, but at times hybridising knowledges and their
respective carrier groups (e.g. in economics and
?nance, accounting and medicine, accounting and
engineering).
(2) Increased exposure to SSF is likely to induce
accounting research to move the study of account-
ing beyond the context of organizations and pay,
instead, closer attention to how accounting becomes
incorporated into knowledges and infrastructures of
markets. In return, a closer engagement with
accounting research could enhance SSF’s under-
standing of the relevance of processes of organiza-
tion for market creation and involved modes of
power and governing styles. Mutually, awareness
can be raised for the interrelations and dynamics
existing between processes of ‘‘?nancialization”,
the capture of business by ?nance and ?nancial mar-
kets (e.g. Fligstein, 1990; Vollmer, 2003, p. 366), on
the one hand, and processes of ‘‘accountingization”,
the proliferation of accounting, audit, risk and per-
formance measurement into private and public sec-
tor organizations (e.g. Kurunma¨ki, Lapsley, &
Melia, 2003; Power, 1999, 2007), on the other. More
space for joint research programmes could be
opened up looking into both the organization of
markets and the marketization of organizations.
Important ?rst steps in this direction have, for
example, already been undertaken by Miller &
O’Leary (2007) in their paper on ‘‘Mediating Instru-
ments”, which looks at investment as an inter-?rm
and inter-agency process. Miller and O’Leary exam-
ine how certain instruments, like technology roadm-
aps and graphical presentations of statistical
predictions, act on capital budgeting decisions,
thereby, mediating between organizations and mar-
kets. Zorn, Dobbin, Dierkes, and Kwok (2005) and
Davis and Robbins (2005) have explored the social
processes through which ?nancial markets a?ect
the structure and organizing principles of corpora-
tions. Such research agendas are only emerging. In
order to gain a fuller picture about interrelations
between processes of ?nancial intermediation, orga-
nizing and market making, more investigations are
called for.
(3) More collaboration and intellectual exchange
between SSF and accounting can help re?ne our
interdisciplinary understanding of calculative prac-
tices and cultures. It can help establish research
agendas focussing in more generic terms on condi-
tions and consequences of economic calculation
and ?nancial numbers – across accounting and
?nance, organizations, markets and cultures, mod-
els and realities. It can stimulate the establishment
of common analytical ground and, thereby, help
advance our understanding of general patterns of
the use of numbers in social situations. More dia-
logue between the two ?elds is likely to further the
conduct of more systematic analyses and compara-
tive research into the various ways and mechanisms
by which ?nancial models, accounting numbers and
practices of computation and calculation become
involved in the creation, preservation or subversion
of social order across di?erent settings.
Such dialogue might then motivate researchers to
more persistently address the speci?city of di?erent
types of calculation. In his recent appeal ‘‘not to
treat practices of economic calculation in a some-
what undi?erentiated manner” (Miller (2008, pp.
628 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
52–53)) for example, calls for a more re?ned under-
standing of such relatively vague and universalistic
notions as ‘‘calculative device” or ‘‘calculative
practice”. More exchange between SSF and social
studies of accounting could stimulate the articula-
tion of research agendas that would devote more
attention to exploring di?erent taxonomies of calcu-
lation, comparing and contrasting speci?c proper-
ties of di?erent calculative instruments, like
?nancial models, pro?t computations, performance
ratios, budgets, etc., or, as Power (2004) has sug-
gested, distinguish between di?erent classes of activ-
ities, e.g. counting, control and calculation, when
analyzing attempts aimed at ‘‘governing by num-
bers” (Rose & Miller, 1992). The pool of compara-
tive material may be widened (see e.g. Mennicken &
Vollmer, 2007) to include not only di?erent forms of
economic calculation, but also forms of statistical
reasoning (e.g. Desrosie`res, 2002; Hacking, 1984;
MacKenzie 1978; Porter, 1986), mathematical
(Heintz, 2003; MacKenzie, 1999) and everyday
(Lave 1988) calculative practices. On the basis of a
comparative and di?erentiated understanding of
calculative practices, researchers in social studies
of ?nance and accounting may readdress their com-
mon concern with what is special about calculating
?nancially after all.
Fielding research in ?nancial numbers: towards social
studies of ?nance and accounting?
We would like to conclude this introductory
essay with some speculation about what a common
?eld for research in ?nancial numbers – across
accounting and SSF – might look like, what might
constitute its unifying empirical and theoretical
themes and how its academic discourse could be
more fully developed. Just like the preceding sec-
tions, this will re?ect the individual orientations of
the contributing authors, and should be taken as
an invitation to consider opportunities for locating
research activities in a somewhat broadened ?eld
of interdisciplinary research, not as a summary of
a ?nite or clearly de?ned set of directions for future
research. The following considerations thus try to
stretch rather than hold back the imagination of
readers interested in crossing the boundaries on a
more sustained basis.
Beyond some apparent di?erences, our brief tour
has identi?ed distinctive analytical assets SSF and
social research in accounting might place in research
projects across their present boundaries. As far as
SSF are concerned, a good deal of such assets
derives from deconstructing and reconstructing the
concept of ?nancial information, its embedding in
webs of mundane cognitive activities, in set-ups of
participants, technologies, models and discourses
lumping together interest groups, calculative prac-
tices, technologies, formal and informal framing
devices. The extraordinary scope in mobilizing
resources from di?erent scienti?c disciplines that
have come to be associated with accounting profes-
sionally or academically is perhaps the biggest asset
accounting research has been producing. Compara-
tively, its mobilization of approaches from organi-
zational research might somewhat stand out, and
it might supplement respective weaknesses in SSF.
1
Besides mutual and complementary analytical
interests and theoretical inspirations (science and
technology studies, actor-network theory etc.), a
couple of more speci?c analytical equivalences could
be identi?ed across the ?elds: take, for example, the
notion of an accounting assemblage (Miller &
O’Leary, 1996, pp. 125–126) which might adequately
(substituting ?nance for accounting) characterize the
heterogeneous infrastructural supports and net-
works of ?nancial cognition; or take studies of per-
formativity in SSF which might shed some light on
earlier debates about reality construction (e.g.
Hines, 1991; Neu, 1992), or more recently, about
hyperreality (Macintosh et al., 2000) in accounting.
Extending such correspondences, one might imagine
a series of exemplary mutual engagements, of empir-
ical and theoretical issues particularly serviceable for
coalescing prior research agendas across SSF and
accounting. These exemplary engagements might
range from dynamics of organization and marketiza-
tion within ?nancial cultures, accumulative micro-
studies of di?erent calculative practices, to
analyzing the pervasive signi?cance of status groups
and, ?nally, towards exploring the ?nancialization
of social life in more general terms.
1
For studies in the broader SSF ancestry, the works of
Fligstein (1987, 1990) are an evident exception, but preceding the
emergence of SSF as a distinct ?eld of research they do not
correspond easily with SSF’s more distinctive concerns with
?nancial cognition, performativity, or most generally: ?nancial
markets. Knorr Cetina and Preda (2005, pp. 3–5) set up the latter
as historically struggling to articulate itself against the pre-
eminence of organizational issues in traditional economic soci-
ology. Still, it should be noted that many empirical studies within
SSF (e.g. Abola?a, 2005; Kaltho?, 2005) explore social settings
that are formally organized, though without investigating much
the formal organization of calculative practice.
H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637 629
Exploring how ?nancial cultures are subject to
processes of organizing and marketizing might pro-
duce opportunities for combining various SSF top-
ics with accounting scholars’ expertise in the
organization of calculative practices, and, recipro-
cally, of making accounting scholarship correspond
with SSF research in exploring the construction of
markets. As performativity studies have been clos-
ing in on links between calculative practices (rules,
models, formulas, technical agencies, etc.) and
group di?erences (status groups, strati?cation),
organizations and markets might be seen as settings
in with such links are forged or separated: institu-
tionalized by organizing access (to information,
insider knowledge, expertise, technology) to partici-
pants with membership status and denying it to oth-
ers, marketized by putting groups of participants
into competing, structurally equivalent, or tradeable
network positions. Formal structures provide
shielded spaces, cubicles or ceremonial covers for
more informal calculative practices within and
across organizations. Market structures appear for-
mally more accessible, but, alongside the workings
of price mechanisms, they also erect technological
and cognitive boundaries of their own making and
allow status groups to establish and gradually
expand lateral control over strips of market activity.
Most generally, organizations and markets may
be seen as supplementary mechanisms for the collec-
tive assignment of value. If valuations are arrived at
by organizational decision-making or by reiterating
transactions on markets, neither need the respective
processes preclude one another, nor need they draw
on fundamentally di?erent institutional or technical
supports. Accounting systems institutionalized
within organizations, and market participants
adopting economic models may both be seen as
endowing formal models (accounting equations,
pricing formulas, etc.) with performative qualities
– both across markets and within formal organiza-
tions. Considering the similarities of the respective
accounting and ?nance assemblages embroiling par-
ticipants, discourses, institutions and technologies,
the association of formal organization with just
those parts of organized social settings that are
explicitly claimed to be subject to organizing (stan-
dard-setting, governance structures, etc.) might then
be just as inadequate as seeing markets as perennial
antagonists of bureaucratization. Analyzing the
production and transformation of ?nancial cultures,
one might instead more generally want to ask to
what extent organizing and marketizing processes,
which are both always piecemeal and vulnerable
to partisan exploitation, transform the ways in
which participants handle and circulate ?nancial
numbers (prices, costs, indicators, etc.) within and
across settings. Tracking this circulation with an
analytical attitude sensitive to the construction of
both markets and organizations within organiza-
tions and markets should put social studies of
accounting and ?nance in a unique position for
observing how social life is ordered and transformed
through the use of ?nancial numbers.
Tackling such questions will require sustained
engagements with the microstructures of calculative
practice. In both SSF and accounting, considerable
de-puri?cations have occurred in how calculation
and the use of numbers tend to be understood. In
SSF, basic scepticism towards the trust invested in
numbers has been inherited from science and tech-
nology studies backgrounds, in accounting research
it has been part and parcel of locating and analyzing
accounting in its social context of operation. The
impression of experts in control of circulating
inscriptions, ‘‘acting at a distance” (Latour, 1987)
on some subject matter, is as persuasive when think-
ing about scientists and engineers as when observing
managers and politicians trying to implement their
respective programmes of government, but perhaps
the latter has made more apparent than the former
the pervasive experience of failure at the heart of
governing by numbers (Rose & Miller, 1992, pp.
190–191). Somewhat surprisingly, macro-diagnoses
of governing by numbers being propelled into ever
more elaborate attempts by virtue of perpetually
mis?ring have yet to be systematically correlated
with microstudies of how numbers are produced
for circulation (e.g. Pentland, 1993). Has the e?ec-
tive combination of science and technology studies
(e.g. actor-network theory) with the Foucauldian
framework in understanding how social life is
brought under the spell of constant measurements,
inspections and evaluations gradually discouraged
investigations into the ways in which situated micro-
practices undermine or redirect e?orts at acting at a
distance?
2
In fact, the traditional (Mertonian)
2
Of course, this is not to unilaterally blame the Foucauldian
associates within this discursive alliance. The criticism of actor-
network theory by Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007), for example,
criticizes it for smuggling in mechanistic assumptions, neglecting
basic contingencies in the production of social order, and too
hastily subscribing to the ?ction of homo oeconomicus (albeit on
the basis of social constructivism).
630 H. Vollmer et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 619–637
examples of performativity have tended to highlight
destructive e?ects of micropractices (Guala, 2007, p.
136), and stock market crashes may point to poten-
tial counterperformativities of calculation (Mac-
Kenzie, 2007, p. 76). Thus, there is a lot to go
wrong with producing order through disseminating
calculative practices, and if participants in markets
and organizations tend to know about this – will
they not try to exploit the openings?
Even governance structures with a surface e?ec-
tiveness may be host to processes of creative compli-
ance in which the circulation of numbers, its very
standardization, inspection and ‘‘transparency”
equips participants with e?ective means of playing
at the interests of regulators or co-inmates (Vollmer,
2007, pp. 589–592). If the sociology of ?nance
attempts to be a sociology of valuation (Beunza &
Stark, 2005, pp. 98–99), it will need to microstudy
both ‘‘actual calculative practices of actors at work”
(Beunza & Stark, 2005, p. 99), and how participants
try to second-guess, outperform, hoodwink or abet
one another in putting ?nancial numbers on display.
Whether calculative practices in this broader sense
conform more to a notion of homo oeconomicus
or to one of homo ludens (Huizinga, 1949), is per-
haps a question of secondary signi?cance. One
way or the other, studying the full spectrum of
how ?nancial numbers are used in social life may
help to microtranslate (in the sense
doc_875574254.pdf