Account books

Using examples from Rome, the Renaissance, and modernity, this chapter takes an historical view on how accounts allow organizations to coalesce. This phenomenon is described as a process of composition where the visual and material spaces of accounts prompt their users to perform ordered classifications of arguments that make organizations tangible. Organizing is thus conceived as the regular encounter between people and artefacts. Such encounters support the coexistence of different interconnected organizings, resulting from multiple engagements with the signs and words in account books, as illustrated by the outcomes of budgetary discussions between engineers and traders in a hydroelectric company.PostprintPeer reviewe

Sustaining a Collegiate Environment: Colleagueship, Community and Choice at an Anonymous Business School

The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily located at the centre of the university. The choice and effort made across different collegiate pockets contribute to the department becoming an ‘island of collegiality’ within the increasingly centralised and bureaucratised university hierarchy. In this sense, the actions of the department leadership to establish supporting mechanisms, and the actions of the staff to, in turn, embrace and build interpersonal relationships and professional identities, are key to sustaining a collegiate environment

Redefining Corporate Accountability through Integrated reporting. What happens when values and value creations meet?

The landscape of corporate reporting is about to change considerably. The concepts, principles, and elements that characterize the way organizations report their annual performances are currently being questioned, debated, and redesigned throughout the world. This is happening as key elements such as capital employed, value creation, and accountability are redefined in practice. What are the types of capital that an organization uses and affects? In what ways is value created and distributed over time? To whom are organizations accountable? A possible answer to these critical questions is offered by Integrated Reporting (IR), a process that results in communicating— through an annual integrated report—value creation over time