Calculative practices, social movements and the rise of collective identity: how #istayathome mobilised a nation

PurposeThe Italian government addressed the first wave of its COVID-19 outbreak with a series of social restrictions and calculative practices, all branded with the slogan #istayathome. The hashtag quickly went viral, becoming both a mandate and a mantra and, as the crisis played out, we witnessed the rise of the Italian social movement #istayathome. This study examines how the government's calculative practices led to #istayathome and the constituents that shaped this social movement.Design/methodology/approachThe authors embrace social movement theory and the collective identity perspective to examine #istayathome as a collective action and social movement. Using passive netnography, text mining and interpretative text analysis enhanced by machine learning, the authors analysed just over 350,000 tweets made during the period March to May 2020, each brandishing the hashtag #istayathome.FindingsThe #istayathome movement gained traction as a response to the Italian government's call for collective action. Thus, people became an active part of mobilising collective responsibility, enhancing the government's plans. A collective identity on the part of the Italian people sustained the mass mobilisation, driven by cohesion, solidarity and a deep cultural trauma from COVID-19's dramatic effects. Popular culture and Italy's long traditions also helped to form the collective identity of #istayathome. This study found that calculative practices acted as a persuasive technology in forming this collective identity and mobilising people's collective action. Numbers stimulated the cognitive, moral and emotional connections of the social ties shaping collective identity and responsibility. Thus, through collective identity, calculative practices indirectly influenced mass social behaviors and the social movement.Originality/valueThis study offers a novel theoretical perspective and empirical knowledge to explain how government power affects people's culture and everyday life. It unveils the sociological drivers that mobilise collective behaviors and enriches the accounting literature on the effects of calculative practices in managing emergencies. The study contributes to theory by providing an understanding of how calculative practices can influence collective behaviors and can be used to construct informal networks that go beyond the government's traditional formalities.

The accountancy of marketisation: Fictional markets in housing land supply

This article investigates the performative role of accountancy in embedding market mechanisms in public services. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, it argues that marketisation can be understood as a work of calculative modelling in which the fiction of a self-regulating market is propagated through the concealment of the social and political practices on which it depends. Exploring this thesis in the marketisation of housing land supply, the article provides a forensic study of an accountancy procedure called the Housing Delivery Test that modelled an ideal housing market in the English land-use planning system. The study points to the importance of Polanyi's analysis in theorising the performativity of calculative practices in the project of marketisation, not as creating the economy they describe but in fashioning a fictional market.

Knowledge exchange in the arts and humanities as creative economy policy assemblage

The creative economy is a complex assemblage of policy, practice and industrial activity, underpinned by apparently novel configurations of cultural and creative work. In recent years, it has become the focus of a number of schemes which have seen major shifts in how UK research councils fund universities. This paper reflects on the work of Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology (REACT), a major knowledge exchange programme aimed at stimulating growth in the creative sector through collaborations with universities in South West England and South Wales. In the first section, I unpack some of the underpinning logics of the ‘creative turn’ by which creativity has become a key currency in modern economies. I then consider how this shift has affected universities. I next ask how the various rationalities of an economy driven by creativity have moved into the knowledge exchange sphere. I approach this by formulating creative economy policy as a form of governmentality performed through assemblages that facilitate policy transfer. The paper turns to the empirical example of REACT, considering it as an assemblage through which reconfigurations of discourses, spatialities, temporalities, subjects and calculative practices have unfolded. The analysis shows how the multivalent, ad hoc and sometimes contradictory experience of producing an assemblage such as REACT means that policy transfer is never entirely complete nor stable, and that in this sense it is still possible for knowledge exchange programmes to imagine and generate alternative approaches to creativity that are not wholly reducible to a neoliberal or capitalist logic, although they remain implicated therein.

Strategising management accounting: liberal origins and neoliberal trends

PurposeThis paper draws on the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality to provide a sociological analysis of the strategic turn in management accounting.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual and review paper addresses four interrelated questions: How can the early history of management accounting be revisited from a biopolitical angle? How has strategising been linked to the neoliberal evolution of capitalism? How has this neoliberal connection transformed management accounting into its new form of strategising? What are the implications of this transformation for future research and pedagogical practices in management accounting?FindingsManagement accounting is strategised in four interrelated directions: by absorbing the jurisdictional and veridictional roles of the market into the calculative practices of management accounting; by transforming management accounting's centripetal hierarchical order of calculations to a centrifugal order the neoliberal governmentality demanded; by re-calculating the point of production as a site in which labour now takes the form of entrepreneurs of the self, performing not only material but also immaterial elements of managerial labour; and by rescoping management accounting to address issues the “fourth or the global age of security” brought, including the social and the environmental ones.Research limitations/implicationsThe research expands the existing frames of reference for exploring contemporary calculative practices in neoliberal governmentality.Social implicationsStrategic turn in management accounting implicates in issues of security, governance and ethics and offers “new opportunities” for expanding management accounting's relevance beyond economic enterprises to various civil society and political constituencies.Originality/valueThis paper makes a theoretical contribution to management accounting's contemporary developments by demonstrating how it moves into biopolitical circulation.

Accounting for (public) value(s): reconsidering publicness in accounting research and practice

PurposeThis paper aims to highlight the importance of (public) value(s) and publicness in accounting and accountability research. It pinpoints a range of issues that scholars need to contemplate when reconsidering publicness in accounting research and practice.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts an interdisciplinary literature review associated with a conceptual discussion of the actual and future challenges of public service accounting and accountability in considering public value(s).FindingsThe paper illustrates the centrality of (public) value(s) at the individual, organizational and societal levels in shaping and being shaped by calculative practices, and shows that looking at the interconnections between values and accounting is a fruitful research avenue. Moreover, it highlights the power of embracing interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate these interconnections and relate them to complex and current phenomena.Originality/valueThe paper’s originality lies in the reconsideration of (public) value(s) for public service accounting scholars, providing a critical reflection and setting new research avenues.

COVID-19 and the governmentality of emergency food in the City of Turin

PurposeThis paper shows the accounting, accountability and calculative practices associated with emergency food allocations by the City of Turin through a program to feed the vulnerable during COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThis is a single case study framed by Foucault's governmentality concept. The data was collected through interviews with key institutional actors and triangulated against decrees, circulars, ordinances and other publicly available documents.FindingsThe accounting tools of governmentality are always incomplete. Sometimes unique situations and crises help us to revise and improve the tools we have. Other times, they demand entirely new tools.Research limitations/implicationsAccounting needs both things to count and a context to count them. In the case of food assistance, what is counted is people. In Turin's case, many people had never been counted – either because there was no need or because they were unaccounted for by choice. Now, the government was accountable for the welfare of both. Thus, new classification systems emerged, as did organisational and accounting solutions.Originality/valueAlthough the accounting-for-disasters literature is diverse, studies too often favour the macro social, economic and political issues surrounding crises, neglecting the micro issues associated with governmentality and calculative practices.