Performativity, professions, and accounting

This project aims to understand accounting as a performative device within public sector organizations. The new public management reforms have brought about extensive calculative practices into public sector organizations. Based on case studies in different professional organizations (health care, schools, and social care), this project investigates the different practices of (performance) measurements within public sector. From an organizational perspective, these calculative practices are framed as accounting which has brought about performative consequences on the public sector professionals. This project aims to develop the performativity concept and to empirically illustrate the performativity of accounting.