Purpose: to analyse the ability and skill of the one enforcing accountability.

Design/methodology/approach: Knowing how to hold to account is viewed from a perspective of knowing as situated accomplished action. The empirical case consists of Nordic investors who seek to hold companies accountable for their social and environmental performance.

Findings: The study finds that holding to account consists of distributed knowing and delegated activities. To coordinate the activities accountability relationships within the holding to account practice develops. Apart from internal relationships and the relationship to the accountable, knowing how to hold to account consists of demonstrating authority and successful practice in situations with important others, such as organizational colleagues, competitors and media. When face-to-face with the accountable, the appropriation of a customised and generalizable vocabulary helps the actors distance discussions from the expertise of the accountable, and facilitates the reorganization of business contexts so that their experiences are ‘transferable’ across these contexts.

Research implications: A depiction of accountability relationships as involving solely the accountable and the one holding to account is too simplistic. As in the present case, the practice of holding to account may include coordinated, multiple actors, even from separate organizations. Rather than focusing on individuals, the study promotes a focus on situations and the actors found therein as the circumstances of the situations will affect any outcome.

Originality/value: The study focuses on the practice of enforcing accountability, a know how that is often taken for granted, although earlier studies have indicated that such practice is not always successful.

The present study analyses how accounts become identified as information. Using the empirical case of investor analysts and social and environmental issues, it finds that models’ categories structure the detection of accounts and form what becomes information. The availability of accounts as input to the models in turn limits how elaborate the models can be. Information- together with investor attributes and interpretative models- affects the outcome of any analysis, but should not be viewed as independent of its users or their models. Thereby when we fail to take information into consideration, when not reflecting on what is viewed or not viewed as information, we miss an important factor in explaining the outcome of an analysis or the popularity of certain models. 

The present study analyses how the composition of calculative technologies is affected by the social setting in which the technologies are situated. Previous studies tend to explain technology’s adoption and abandonment by its functionality and its ability to conceive the object under study. Studying the corporate social and environmental performance analysis conducted by institutional investor analysts and their service providers, the present study instead finds that calculative technologies in themselves have a product quality and are located at an intersection of markets. The resulting pressure from different forms of competition affects the composition of the technology. As a result, the technologies are as a result not particularly stable, which prevents the epistemic object, corporate social and environmental performance, from becoming a technological taken-for-granted object. The technology’s functionality is, rather than inherent and stable, attributed to the technology and continuously negotiated.

Instead of focusing on ‘new’ modes of governance and their technologies, the present work argues that we should as well study what existed before on a market for governance. In this vein, the present study focuses on the pre-existing, challenged, mode of governance and on how the actors react to competition. It studies the reaction of an existing prominent mode of governance when a new form targeting the same subject- companies- and goal- improved social performance- gains territory. In the encounter with CSR and its corporate policies and reporting, the governance technology coupled with the trade unions - Global Framing Agreements- becomes the point of difference and competition. The concept of qualification (Callon, Méadel, & Rabeharisoa, 2002) is here used to conceive of the actions and steps taken by the pre-existing governance actors, the trade unions. The study finds that in a situation of recognised competition from a mode of governance where the technologies are viewed as the main difference, the pre-existing actors react by qualifying their technology and thereby provide the companies with a basis for preference. The qualifying efforts, however, as well change the technology and what the Global Framing Agreement is.