Over the past two decades, policy and regulation in social and healthcare settings, as well as across public service delivery more broadly, have placed increasing emphasis on “user voice” and “user experience” in the commissioning and evaluation of services. Yet the formats and methods through which such accounts of user feedback should be produced often remain indeterminate. This paper examines the organizational processes involved in eliciting, assembling, and representing “user voice” within a large social care organization. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we investigate how the organization responds to diverse user feedback requests from external bodies, such as commissioners and regulators, as well as to internal demands for useable and appropriate accounts. Building on Hacking's concept of dynamic nominalism and his later engagement with Goffman, we analyse how user voice is “made up” through processes of tracing, framing, and connecting in the interstices between locally situated lived experiences of service users and top-down professional and regulatory discourses of care and service quality. Our analysis demonstrates the multiplicity, ambiguity and situational malleability of user voice, revealing how it both expands and escapes classification. Together, these dynamics highlight the lateral, transversal movements that occur in the interplay between top-down abstract classifications and bottom-up practices and situated concerns of the classified. The paper concludes by reflecting on both the organizational appeal and the potential dangers of demands for user voice.

This paper examines private meetings between company managers and institutional investors as part of the broader financial reporting environment. Using direct observations of 39 such meetings across four large, listed companies—complemented with the study of preparatory work and internal documents—the paper investigates how these meetings help build and maintain relationships between companies and investors. The analysis shows that the importance of these meetings lies not primarily in the exchange of new information but in the creation of familiarity, focused engagement, and exclusivity, which strengthen social ties and reinforce participants' positions in the capital market. Drawing on interaction ritual theory, the paper identifies three forms of ritual work through which these outcomes are produced: assembly work, conversational work, and bodily work. The study contributes to research on the social embeddedness of capital markets and suggests that private reporting meetings should be understood not only as informational events but also as relational mechanisms that shape access, trust, and network persistence.