This study examines how strategic planning and management control tools interact and evolve in a large public sector organization. Through a longitudinal case study of the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) from 2010 to 2024, it identifies three modes of strategic control – each introducing distinct ways of linking strategy to control. The study highlights how changes in control system design are not merely technical adjustments but reconfigurations of how strategy is enacted in practice. By conceptualizing these shifts as evolving modes of strategic control, the study contributes to research on strategy implementation, highlighting the dynamic interplay between planning, control, and technological change.

This paper discusses the significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Processing (LLP), in the context of management control. The key concern is the epistemological shift from traditional deductive approaches to an inductive approach brought about by AI technologies. The paper elaborates on shifts related to the forms, practices, and infrastructures of management control, discussing new avenues for research in social studies of accounting. The discussion outlines how the integration of AI in accounting not only changes accounting practice but also fuels the relevance of some of the prior insights about social aspects of calculative practices. On a final note, the paper also suggests that, given the speed and scope at which new calculative technology is being introduced in virtually all parts of society, accounting scholars may draw upon prior insights and contribute to wider debates about the social impact of AI in society.

^{Hur förklarar vi vad en organisation är och hur den fungerar i en tid präglad av digitalisering och AI? Är våra etablerade teorier för att förstå organisation och ledning fortfarande relevanta när chefer och medarbetare ersätts av algoritmer som styr ett alltmer robotiserat arbete? Dessa frågor kan knappast få särskilt välgrundade svar i dagsläget eftersom vi bara precis har börjat skönja konturerna av hur förutsättningarna för organisering håller på att förändras. Som studieobjekt betraktade är både ’organisation’ och ’samhälle’ just nu något mer förgängliga och utmanande att definiera än vad de har varit under de senaste decennierna. I en tid av förändring behövs både kartläggning av och kritisk reflektion kring nya organisationspraktiker och dess betydelse för samhällets utveckling. Med andra ord har vi som skapar kunskap om organisationer precis fått väldigt mycket att göra!}

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 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?”