Biography
I was awarded my PhD in Accounting from the University of Edinburgh Business School in 2016 where I was trained to analyse and explore the social, political and institutional effects of accounting as it unfolds in practice.
My research explores the workings of calculative practices in 'un-traditional' settings where decision making is not primarily driven by profit, such as employee-owned partnerships, B-Corps, platform-, network-organisations or even in our personal lives. Instead, within these settings multiple and often competing values must be held together productively and continuously and this multiplicity fundamentally affects the relationship between calculation and action: the way collective action is managed and organised. It is this interface between calculation, organisation and action within settings of multiplicity that I am centrally interested in. The aim of my research is to enhance our understanding of how these settings impact both the effects accounting has as well as how (successfully) these effects are brought about. This aim matters, firstly, on a practical level, since this untraditional approach to organising multiplicity is gaining popularity: through the prevalence of different forms of organisational structures; the increasing demand for CSR reporting; increasing prevalence of purpose-driven organisations and is also reflected in our personal lives, through the popularity of engaging with ’10,000 steps’, ‘KOMs’ or other calculative measurements of our personal activities. Second, this aim has theoretical relevance both for our understanding of how to productively manage differences within organisations, as well as for our understanding of the (existing and potential) roles and impacts of accounting in both hierarchical and non-hierarchical arrangements.