Knowledge that Transforms

This article examines the long-term dynamics among a best-practice risk management framework, risk management technologies and the translation of uncertainties into risks by using a longitudinal case study of a large mega-project. We show that the framework and technologies through the visual power of inscriptions and the purifying work of risk consultants as experts establish the boundaries of the forms of uncertainties that are accepted and included as risks. We term the accepted and included risks ‘pure risks’ and the risks excluded after disagreement ‘impure risks’. We also show that the construction of impure risks challenges the predictions of the framework causing a false sense of security for the project objectives, and that the continuous readjustment of technologies, in particular, is necessary to ensure the long-term realisation of these predictions. Finally, this article contributes to the literature on performativity by showing how technologies serve as buffers to shield failing economic frameworks against criticism.

Recent work has called for more research to be carried out exploring how professional projects develop in conjunction with wider processes of institutional change. We respond to these calls here by analysing the way in which tax professionals have responded to a major disruption at the field level. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's action plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting has proposed far reaching reforms in an attempt to bring corporate tax practice into line with changing moral boundaries in society. Through a combination of documentary analysis, participant observation and qualitative interviews, this paper shows how tax professionals negotiate changing moral imperatives. In doing so, the paper enhances our understanding of tax practice and contributes to extant literature on professionalization and institutional change in three principal ways. Firstly, we show how exogenous field-level changes afford professional groups opportunities for strategic repositioning. Secondly, we illustrate how different professional factions are differentially affected by processes of institutional change, distinguishing between in-house tax professionals and those working in public practice. Thirdly, we demonstrate how this strategic repositioning is made possible by the skillful deployment of the technical-cognitive resources of professional groups.

Management-issued linguistic tone is, on average, positively associated with future earnings and incrementally priced by the market. However, prior capital markets research also shows that linguistic tone is difficult to process, while lab-based findings establish that less sophisticated investors are more susceptible to the use of heuristics in their interpretation of tone. Taken together, these findings motivate us to examine whether investors disagree on the valuation implications of linguistic tone and whether small investors are subject to differential, and notably less efficient, trading in response to the linguistic tone in these corporate announcements. We measure “residual tone” (i.e., that portion of linguistic tone that is not associated with contemporaneous economic news or current valuation fundamentals) for a sample of publicly-released management forecasts. We find that abnormal trading volume is increasing in the residual tone of management forecasts after controlling for the price reaction to forecasts, suggesting that there is significant investor disagreement over the implication of this tone for firm value. Further tests show that the net buying behavior of small investors is positively associated with residual tone, while larger investors tend to sell on this signal. The negative relation between residual tone and future stock returns found in prior work on earnings announcements holds in our sample of management forecasts as well, implying that this differential buying behavior involves an economically significant wealth transfer from small to large investors. We show in an extended analysis that any success that might accrue to small investors from trading positions taken during the event period is decreasing in residual tone.