The shaping of public services through calculative practices: The roles of accountants, citizens, professionals, and politicians

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Ileana Steccolini,Peter Miller,Irvine Lapsley
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12270

Received: 15 September 2020 Accepted: 15 September 2020

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12270

FOREWORD

The shaping of public services through calculative

practices: The roles of accountants, citizens,

professionals, and politicians

Irvine Lapsley1Peter Miller2Ileana Steccolini3

1Edinburgh University Business School,

Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, UK

2Department of Accounting, LondonSchool of

Economics, London,UK

3EssexBusiness School, University of Essex,

WivenohePark, Colchester, UK

Correspondence

IleanaSteccolini, Essex Business School, Uni-

versityof Essex, Wivenohe Park, Colchester,

UK.

Email:ileana.steccolini@essex.ac.uk

Abstract

This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles

of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and

within public service organizations. The papers in the special

issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calcula-

tive practices intervene in public services, and thus come to

affect the experiencesof such actors, offering important per-

spectives on how the latter act to resist, reshape, redefine,

and change those very practices, or strategically and tacti-

cally use (or avoid the use of) accounting to impact the ways

in which services are defined and delivered.

KEYWORDS

calculative practices,public services, NPM, public sector accounting

1INTRODUCTION

Calculative practices haveassumed a marked significance in recent decades, coming to shape management practices,

organizational processes, and regulatory mechanisms in many organizational settings. There is substantial evidence

of the influence of accounting work in, for instance, central and local government, hospitals, and higher and further

education. Such influence within the sphere of the State continues despite debates over the status of professional

accounting expertise and critiques of the provenance,uniqueness, and usefulness of accounting.

This special issue seeks to expandour understandings of the roles of accounting p racticesin the context of reforms

to and within public service organizations, a research arena that may yield rich insights into the role of accountants

and calculative practicesin the shaping of social and economic life. The special issue includes a selection of papers that

were initially presented at the 2018 New Public Sector Seminar in Edinburgh. The primary focus of the workshop was

the role of accounting in framing and shaping everydayexperiences of citizens, managers, and policy makers in public

services delivery.

Financial Acc & Man. 2020;36:343–346. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 343wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/faam