The Valuable Organisation A study of how activities are calculated, controlled and made valuable

Abstract: This thesis asks the question: how do organisational activities become valuable? This is one of the most central questions in organisational life. Members and students of organisations devote a great deal of time pondering what activities and strategies organisations should pursue. They tackle practical questions such as what performance measures and standards to use in the evaluation of people and activities, which products to bring to market, and how to define a valuable balance sheet. The thesis investigates how organisations deal with such questions, and how organisational activities become valuable in practice.The question of how organisational activities become valuable is addressed using a three-part longitudinal case study in a listed multinational manufacturing company. In particular, the study traces the multiple and changing valuations of three central organisational activities: corporate strategy, product development and production. Drawing on recent work within the technological turn in economic sociology, the analysis uses the concept of framing to explain how calculative agencies emerge and valuations change.It is argued that this conceptualisation of how organisational activities become valuable has implications for established theoretical understandings of the relationship between accounting, control and value in the social studies of accounting. The thesis argues for an alternative understanding of how economic calculations are performed and control is exercised in practice. In particular, it proposes an approach for how to make questions of value the focus of analysis in accounting research, without taking the vantage point of any implied centre.