Research

Abstract: While the world was on lock down, human beings started craving for green spaces. As they walked amidst the trees, trees began to talk to them. The surprising truth then emerged: There were actually secrets to be shared by the forest. This essay reflects on the teachings offered by nature(s) during the pandemic. Based on a personal encounter with a river, it caresses the relationships that have connected humans to non-humans over time and that have led to make this confinement both a unique and universal experience. It suggests embracing relational accounting, the expression of our relationships with each other and our ecosystems, as a way to collectively celebrate life and mourn death, thus honoring the generations that came before us and welcoming those who will we come after us. In doing so, the essay hopes to contribute to the field of accounting by offering an instantiation of what a poetic and Indigenous account of our world could look like.

Abstract: This paper explores the role of institutional objects in the constitution of institutional logics. Institutional objects depend for their objectivity on the goods produced through those objects, such as economic models, passports or sacred texts. We theorize institutional logics as grammars of valuation that institutionalize goods through institutional objects. We identify four value moments through which goods are objectified: institution, the instituting of a good, a belief and an imagination of its objective goodness; production, how the good is produced, what practices are productive of the good; evaluation, how good is the good, the practices and objects through which worth in terms of that good is determined, and territorialization, the domain of reference of the good, to what objects and practices a good can and does refer in its instantiations. We assess the adequacy of our model through an institutional object based on the good of “market value” - i.e. an options pricing model. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional logical theory and the sociology of valuation.