This study adds to the literature on accounting incompleteness and instability an understanding of how accounting acts upon an object that is practised as a multiple. It explores how accounting, in the form of a sales and operations planning (SO this adds new accountings onto existing ones, all of which exist simultaneously.

One aim of this paper is to present a new version of the relationship between accounting and decision making going beyond the important but now classical answer, ammunition, learning and rationalisation machines. Another aim is to add to literature about the relationship between accounting and managerial work. This involves a temporal perspective. Decisions are endings which stop a process of decision making, but they are also promises which crate new beginnings. The paper discusses the decision as a promise; while the decision produces a prediction, a promise produces a hope. The decision has contemplated all information, and the promise knows that the future is uncertain. Therefore, the promissory economy is not primarily concerned with solidifying a decision; it is more concerned with the extra investments and adjustments that continually have to be developed. The contribution of the paper is to show that to promise is to change commitments when the situation requires this. Therefore promises require forgetfulness and forgiveness: forgetfulness because learning is possible and forgiveness because others are impacted. The role of accounting under this condition is to enable promising. The study of decision making and promises moves from causality to effectuation and from solutions to generation of alternatives.

This paper complements financial accounting research by a qualitative study of financial accounting practices. Its object is goodwill impairment tests (IAS 36) under the influence of International Financial Reporting Standards, which it uses to illustrate how financial accounting is produced. The aim is to investigate how accounting standards are translated into accounting practices, and to investigate how this is reliable. Drawing on actor network theory, the paper proposes calculative practices to be a networked and distributed affair. The study has two main contributions. Firstly, it shows that in the case of goodwill impairment tests, financial accounting is a process of finding, qualifying, stabilizing and calculating traces that often have to be found beyond the company infrastructure of sheets of accounts and the financial ledger. Secondly, it shows that these traces increase reliability when they are recognisable and impersonal. No single person is responsible for the financial calculation and the traces used assume that a firm cannot systematically outperform the broader economy or the history of the firm. It also helps to increase reliability if institutional roles such as auditors and valuation experts tolerate the calculation. Reliability increase when traces and supporting institutional actors that take part in the calculation are at a distance. Because of this production process, readers of financial statements face the following paradox: the things they see are less associated with specific entrepreneurial activities in the firm and more with normalised trends inside and outside the firm. Seeing the firm requires them to look at its past, at negotiated budgets, at its competitors, at industrial outlook, and at the statistical bureaus that compile information on the economic development of industries and countries; they may also have to listen to valuation experts and auditors. Seeing the value of a firm requires actors to look elsewhere.

Previous studies of the socialization of trainee accountants put emphasis on how disciplinary power mechanisms shape their professional identities. Literature on the ongoing growth and commercialization of the Big 4 Accounting Firms suggests that senior employees, and especially partners, have to be understood as entrepreneurially minded agents. These two bodies of knowledge provide the theoretical vantage point for our empirical analysis of the “missing link” between trainee and partner – the manager. Based on an ethnographic study of a Big 4 Firm (pseudonym Sky Accounting), we suggest understanding the career step of the manager as a rite of passage that has two effects: first, managers experience that their previous identity is destabilized; and second, our study shows how a set of new practices (performing, playing games and politicking) shape the identity of managers, enabling them to navigate the complex organizational network of a Big 4 Firm. We conclude our paper with a discussion of power effects of the rite of passage, how it shapes the identity of managers, and the practice of managerial work in a Big 4 Accounting Firm.