Purpose – This paper presents a reflection in memory and tribute to the work and life of Professor Barbara Czarniawska (1948–2024).

Design/methodology/approach – We invited those colleagues whom we knew to be close to Barbara to submit reflections about her contributions to academia alongside their memories of her as a person. We present these reflections in the order we received them, and they have only been edited for minor grammatical and punctuation issues to preserve the voice of the contributing authors.

Findings – The reflections in this paper represent different translations of Barbara’s academic and theoretical contributions. However, she also contributed to people. While we can count the number of papers, books and book chapters she published, we must also count the number of co-authors, Ph.D. supervisions, visiting professorships and conference plenaries she touched. This (ac)counting tells the story of Barbara reaching out to work and interact with people, especially students and early career researchers. She touched their lives, and the publications are an artefact of a human being, not an academic stuck in an ivory tower.

Originality/value – A paper in Barbara Czarniawska’s honour where some of her closest colleagues can leave translations of her work through a narrative reflection, seems to be a fitting tribute.

This paper examines how digitalization transforms management control by reshaping the epistemic conditions under which relevance is made and sustained. Drawing on an in-depth case study of MediaCorp, a media conglomerate undergoing a data-driven transformation, we identify two co-existing epistemic cultures: a narrative-driven culture, where relevance emerges through storytelling and strategic framing, and a data-driven culture, where relevance is discovered through empirical rigor and standardized analytics. While the ambition to become data driven initially emerged as a narrative, we find that both cultures persist, creating ongoing tensions in decision-making processes.

To conceptualize how organizations actively manage these tensions, we introduce the notion of epistemic control—the organizational practice of aligning epistemic cultures with their associated epistemic machineries (empirical, technological, and social). Our findings suggest that management control does not merely structure decision making but also serves as an active mechanism for shaping how knowledge is produced, validated, and institutionalized. Through epistemic control, management control systems can reinforce, challenge, and recalibrate epistemic cultures, ensuring that relevance remains both contested and actionable in a digital environment.

This study contributes to management control research by highlighting the interdependence between the digital context and knowledge-making practices. We argue that management control in digitalized organizations involves more than implementing algorithmic and data-driven decision systems—it also requires the active mediation of competing epistemic cultures. Our findings extend existing literature by showing that epistemic control is an integral yet often overlooked dimension of management control, essential for maintaining organizational coherence amidst digital transformation.

Purpose: The purposes of this paper are to explore accounting talk events and to contribute to the literature by presenting a model of accounting talk genres. Design/methodology/approach: In the qualitative tradition, interviews were conducted with accountants in both private and public sector. The pandemic provided a natural experiment, as the implemented restrictions gave rise to a situation in which accountants had to prepare and communicate numbers while working remotely. Using sociolinguistics, the paper analyzes the interactions between accountants and other organizational members when remotely preparing and communicating reports. Findings: This study develops a conceptual model that illustrates the significant influence of accounting small talk on the production and presentation of financial information. The analysis reveals various genres of accounting talk in the everyday practice of management accountants. In so doing, the study makes three contributions. First, it provides a conceptual model of accounting talk. Second, it highlights the role of accounting small talk in creating a less risky environment for reflection, which facilitates the exchange of thoughts and ideas. Third, it offers an explanation of why even so-called bean counters can benefit from accounting small talk. It suggests that such informal communication can not only enhance efficiency by helping to ensure accurate accounts but also improve quality by aligning the numbers with more realistic forecasts. Research limitations/implications: We encourage future studies of accounting discourse in settings that are more similar to everyday work environments. Additional insights could also be gained by drawing upon other methods, such as conversation analysis and ethnographic studies. This paper may help controllers to be more aware of how they use talk in addition to numbers. The knowledge provided here is also important for the education of future controllers. Originality/value: The paper provides a conceptual model of how organizational members talk about accounting, which may enable a more detailed analysis of accounting talk. The study also highlights the importance of accounting small talk, which has been largely overlooked in accounting literature.

This chapter engages with the debate over the relationship between structure and judgement. In particular, the chapter is an effort to unpack different forms of structure in order to discuss the relationship between structure and judgement in a setting where digitalisation, processualisation, and regulatory juridification affect the ways in which auditing practice unfolds. The starting proposition for this discussion rests on the idea that increased structures in auditing practice may increase demands for judgement in the auditing profession.

The study introduces the notion of accounting proxemics to analyse the relationships between accounts, action, and distance. Earlier literature has emphasized that distance is a problem in accounting, relating not least to the issues of representational distance as well as the relationship between distance and control. While earlier research has convincingly shown that accounting and distance are interlinked, the ways in which various concerns with distance are addressed in practice have received less attention. In response, this paper develops the notion of accounting proxemics to analytically approach questions about how various concerns with distance are addressed in practice.Empirically, the paper recounts a narrative of how a board approached distance as a concern in its work with the design, communication, and consumption of accounts. The paper finds that the board mobilized accounting to process three concerns with distance: the long-distance, immediacy, and constitutive problems. The paper details the ways in which the board continuously ‘made up’ multiple users to simulate the ways in which the accounts may invoke possible problems of the long-distance, immediacy, or constitutive aspects of accounting representation. In effect, the design of reports is influenced by how ‘the other reader’ is imagined. This imagined ‘other’ reader is a central character who is invited into the discussion of how to achieve a comfortable distance, i.e., a distance that offers the possibility of (in)action. 

This paper draws attention to people’s pension savings and their responses to the increasing calls urging them to engage in practices of calculation about their future life as retirees. Recurring studies report that these calculation exercises have turned out to raise problems to people, provoking – at times – frustration or even indifference among pension savers. But why is that so? Why do people not engage in this kind of calculations?

Prior literature suggests that mechanic calculation presupposes a set of conditions. Individual knowledge-based capacity (Lusardi and Mitchell 2007) as well as commensurate translations that enables possibilities for comparisons between different kinds of choices (Espeland and Stevens 1998; Callon & Law, 2005) are but a few conditions that are suggested to be fulfilled in order to make rational calculation feasible. There are situations, however, when calculation is called for and expected to be attended to without controversy, but still turn out as moments where rational principles of calculation do not seem to apply (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Calculating one’s pension might be argued to represent one such situation. Based on our empirical observations, the basis for rational calculation seems to be challenged when pension savers are asked to imagine an existence taking place in a future several decades ahead from the life they lead today. Hence, in order to further explore the reasons to this experienced calculative dilemma, we ask: What role does future play in practicing pension calculations?

The aim of this paper is to extend our understanding of the conditions of calculation. The idea is to investigate situations in which calculation entail dilemmas of rationality. To frame the conditions of calculation, we draw on Jaspers’ idea of boundary situations (2010). A boundary situation is a moment in which a person is faced with discrepancies and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved by means of rational thinking. We suggest that people’s pension management offers such a moment, investigating how people read and understand pension accounts in the light of a future that involves different kinds of ‘deaths’: the termination of professional life; the consequences of physical decay, and the end of life itself.

The study demonstrates that practices of calculations inevitably links to imagining the future but also, and by consequence, how calculations become circumscribed when these future imaginations involve existential concerns that rule out rational reasoning. In such cases, calculations transforms into a practice that stretches beyond rationality, suggesting that when the future is unimaginable, calculation becomes nonsensical or even absurd. This, in turn, adds a time dimension to the conditions of calculation, an issue which to date has not explicitly been addressed in prior accounting literature.

This paper is concerned with the role of emotions in reading and interpreting financial accounts. Even though people’s capacity to understand accounting to a large extent has been taken as given in the accounting research field, some studies have shown that accounting information nor the ability to interpret it, seldom inhibit any universal meaning. Prior research demonstrates how accounting users tend to engage in various kinds of sense making activities, referred to as “accounting talk”, in which cognitive capacities are developed, helping people translating accounting information into local contextualized knowledge. Whereas previous studies of accounting talk have focused on how the individual’s cognitive resources are developed, this paper broadens the analytical scope to include the emotive resources for making sense of financial accounts. The paper provides a detailed close-up of how pension-savers interpret and react to financial accounts presented to them during individual pension advisory meetings. Informed by a sociological approach to emotions, the empirical results indicate that emotions play several but different roles in people’s interpretations of financial accounts, and should not necessarily be perceived as inhibiting people’s cognitive sense-making ability. In fact, the relation between rational reasoning and emotions in relation to accounts should be understood as a symbiotic interdependence.

This paper examines how auditors prepare for the annual general meeting (AGM) and how they report their work to the shareholders there. Prior literature has suggested—but not explicitly studied—that the endpoint of an audit is a state of comfort between the auditor and the management and audit committee members, but also is potentially fragile. The fragility can arise from a failure to relay trust to the investor community, which may initiate or increase doubts about the financial report and/or the auditor's independence. We build the case that an AGM is an event to study how the endpoint of an audit engagement is both a state of collective comfort and a fragile state. The analysis is based on ten interviews and three workshops with auditors as well as observations at 67 AGMs. To analyze the field material, the paper draws on Goffman's idea of face‐work, which requires backstage preparations, notably with management, and a front stage performance as an independent auditor to relay trust to the shareholders. The paper details how auditors at the AGM perform as independent verifiers of the management's financial report. Although we recorded that auditors were typically successful in preventing the backstage activities from becoming visible to the shareholders, we found incidents that challenged both the auditors' and the managements' face. In analyzing these incidents, we found that auditors reinforced their image as independent to regain both their own face and the management's face. The management did not take a similar collective responsibility for the auditor's face, which implies that auditors were asymmetrically committed to the management. As a take‐away, the paper discusses how governance mechanisms backstage are linked and can surface front stage at the AGM.

This paper reports from a study of four pension reforms in Sweden over the last century. The paper tests the dominant idea that pension systems as well as accounting technologies are a part of the neoliberal influenced financialization of the private sphere. Although corroborating the proposition about financialization, the paper suggests that programs such as financialization is temporal because they are challenged by obligatory points of controversy. These obligatory points of controversy recur over time as issues that pension systems need to handle with decisions and calculations. The study finds that the obligatory points of controversy, however, are never solved because they interact and are in flux. In Sweden, the three controversies that are repeated are the discussion of demography, finance and ideology. These three issues forces the decisionmaker to answer such issues as “what is it to be Swedish?”, “can we afford this?” and “what is our idea of involvement between of the state/the private sector?”