This study examines the under-researched equity sales function and analyses how equity brokers use accounting to generate individualized, contrarian investment recommendations to serve fund manager clients in a highly competitive market for investment advice. This study reports on the brokers’ practices using an ethnographically inspired study of an equity sales desk and follows the lifecycle of a brokers’ investment case referred to herein as “Indumine” (pseudonym). The analysis shows how the brokers used accounting to develop the case together with fund manager clients and against the analyst consensus – a practice the brokers referred to as “reverse brokering”. Unlike previous analyses of how accounting influences investment decisions by being stable and objective, the brokers in our analysis continually added and abandoned accounting items in order to maintain a distance from consensus, remain subjective and interesting to clients, and achieve recognition. To make theoretical sense of such a use of accounting, this paper puts forth a consumption perspective of accounting. The argument is that the relevance of the accounting used for the brokers’ investment recommendations is consumed when the information becomes factual and impersonal, and no longer sustains the brokers’ contrarian view of the share; the challenge for the brokers is to sustain the economic potential of the case despite the temporary facticity of the accounting information. The paper proposes that this form of accounting consumption constitutes an elementary form of accounting use, operating in the shadow of more formal information infrastructure.

We study how a rankings network, comprised of people and things, crafted and recrafted a counter-competitive soft ranking: the Swedish Municipality Quality Public Ranking, between 2007 and 2020. Using actor-network theory as a sensitising framework, we focus on two key interrelated dimensions of rankings work: (1) actor enrolment and (2) calculative design. We highlight that these two dimensions could conflict, documenting three key inflexion points, when actor efforts to manage tensions transformed the operation of the ranking. We also show that a counter-competitive ranking can be built and used for decades; rankings need not be engines of competition. Rankings, as composite indices, have been further criticised as oversimplified, non-rigorous tools. We show that multiplicity may not be more efficacious. Here, ensuring multiplicity in enrolment (rapid increase in municipalities enrolled) and calculative design (no composite index, multiple rankings, secondary indicators, peer selection for comparison) created a ranking that was too complex and too ‘soft’. Over time, while quality controllers were engaged, other key stakeholder groups (politicians and functional managers) lost interest. We also note how the development of a soft ranking may enable the professionalisation of a new learning-oriented occupational group of quality controllers.