Accounting for profitable prevention—The case of social investments

• Author: Cristian Lagström,Emma Ek Österberg
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12230
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020

Received: 31 January 2019 Revised: 16 September 2019 Accepted: 22 October 2019

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12230

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Accounting for profitable prevention—The case of

social investments

Cristian Lagström Emma Ek Österberg

School of Public Administration, Gothenburg

University, Gothenburg, Sweden

Correspondence

CristianLagström, School of Public Adminis-

tration,Gothenburg University, Gothenburg,

Sweden.

Email:cristian.lagstrom@spa.gu.se

Abstract

Contemporary developments in public administration imply an

increasingly multifaceted and intangible context for public service

delivery. Yet, there is a continued emphasis on calculative devices

in this changing public landscape which urge for a broadened per-

spective, beyondthat of New Public Management (NPM), on the role

and consequences of accounting in the attainment of public goals, in

particular,in relation till wicked problems. This article reports an in-

depth study of social investments, a governing model which aims to

makevisible the value of long-term effects of preventive social work.

The article focuses on microleveldynamics and activities undertaken

by key actors during the implementation process, using an institu-

tional work perspective, in particular,the concepts of political, tech-

nical, and cultural work. The analysis shows that the ambition to cal-

culate the profit of preventive social work was largely underpinned

and facilitated by a problematization of NPM features. This supports

recent calls for further research on public sector accounting that

explores, rather than presumes, the logics and rationales to which

accounting techniques are connected. The study also complements

literature on wicked problems by linking the use and perceiveduse-

fulness of calculative practices with the attempts of attaining com-

plex goals in the public arena.

KEYWORDS

calculative practices, economization, new public management, pub-

licness, social investments, wickedissues

1INTRODUCTION

Today’s societies face increasing challenges in dealing with wickedproblems. Social exclusion is one of them, which

in addition to presuming work across organizational boundaries, requires interventions that are long term in charac-

ter and (if successful) focused on preventing future problems rather than solving existing ones. Policymakers contin-

uously struggle to find ways to tackle the complexity, uncertainty, and intractability that constitutes the essence of

Financial Acc & Man. 2020;36:117–133. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/faam c

2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 117

118 LAGSTRÖM ANDEKÖSTERBERG

wickedness(Head, 2019; Head & Alford, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973) not least in relation to social sustainability. This

article reports a study of one such attempt to meet and prevent future social problems in a Swedish county region: the

implementation of social investments (SI), a governing frameworkwhich aims to make visible, through calculations, the

value of long-term effects of preventivesocial work—conceptualized within the model as profit gained. The ambition is

to operationalize the (supposedly) true but vague conceptions that “prevention pays,”concretize for whom, when and

how, as well as provide decision makers with evidence-based comparisons between various interventions. How this

idea, and the related calculative devices and organizational configurations, wasintroduced and turned into practice in

the operations of the county region, is the empirical focus of this article.

In reviewing public sector accounting research, it has been shown that accounting, during the last three decades,

largely has been described as the technical tool and language of New Public Management (NPM) (e.g., Anessi-Pessina,

Barbera, Sicilia, & Steccolini, 2016; Broadbent & Guthrie, 1992; Lapsley,1999; Liguori & Steccolini, 2014). As pointed

out, an ever-growing list of calculative techniques and practices has emerged with the aspiration of improving trans-

parency,accountability, and efficiency (Arnaboldi, Lapsley, & Steccolini, 2015; Lapsley,2009). However, contemporary

developments in public administration imply an increasingly multifaceted and intangible context for public service

delivery,where wickedness, hybridity,cocreation, and fragmentation are common features (Denis, Ferlie, & Van Gestel,

2015; Jacobs & Cuganesan, 2014; Kastberg & Lagström, 2019). This applies regardless of whether the position is that

NPM is replaced by some post-NPM paradigm, or that NPM is still alive and increasingly sedimented or layered with

other reform logics (see Christensen & Laegreid, 2011; Hyndman & Lapsley,2016; Hyndman & Liguori, 2016; Mahoney

& Thelen, 2010; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011). Yet,there is a continued emphasis on calculative devices in this changing

public landscape, which urges for a broadened perspective on the role and consequences of accounting in the attain-

ment of public goals.

The concept of “publicness” (building on Bozeman, 1987, 2013) has recently been suggested as one such perspec-

tive, which is able to capture the diverse features of today´s public contextswhile at the same time facilitate theoriza-

tion and strengthen policy relevance (see Bracci, Saliterer,Sicilia, & Steccolini, 2019; Steccolini, 2019). As pointed out,

the concept shifts focus from the public sector (or public organizations) as merely a contextof research, to dimensions

of publicness which manifest themselves in the public (or private) arena and which is shown to be of analytical impor-

tance. The case analyzed in this article contains many of the ingredients that have been identified as keyin contempo-

rary developments in public administration,and to which the concept of publicness has been described as particularly

fruitful. The high degree of wickednessin the task at hand (i.e., prevent social exclusion) is one such feature, which has a

natural link to a setting of “diffusedpublicness” (Steccolini, 2019, p. 262). By focusing how a calculative idea and device

was brought to use, acknowledging these context-specific characteristics, the article responds to recent calls for fur-

ther interdisciplinary research on the role of accounting in the public arena which does not take NPM as a self-evident

driving force or starting point (Bracci et al., 2019; Steccolini, 2019; see also Modell, 2019).

At the center of the analysis is the process by which the idea and associated calculative devices of social invest-

ments were introduced as a means of handling the wickednessof the problem of social exclusion, and turned into prac-

tice. Following three research questions guided the empirical study: (1) what problematizations underpinned the idea

of social investments? (2) what did key actors do in order to anchor SI as a new calculativepractice within the county

region? and (3) what are the implications for theory and practice as regards the role and use of calculative devices in

dealing with wicked problems? Building on the institutional work perspective (Lawrence & Suddaby,2006; Lawrence,

Suddaby,& Leca, 2011), we identify and describe key political, cultural, and technical work (Lawrence & Suddaby,2006;

Perkman & Spicer,2008): political work sets the stage for social investments, technical work enables the construction

of the calculative tools and devices, and cultural work connects them to the professional value that prevention pays.

The findings of the article reveal the multifaceted character of economization, which in our case was drivenlargely by

help of a clear questioning of and distancing to techniques often regarded in the literature as central to processes of

economization. Hence, the economizing devices (calculative devices) were not only introduced as a response to prob-

lems and deficits typically related to NPM, but also facilitated, during the implementation process, by this problema-

tization. The findings also show that social investments, despite (or perhaps because of) calculationsbeing incomplete