This study reports on an attempt to remove management accounting's calculative practices at the operational level of a Swedish Public Agency. Using a Habermasian perspective, the study shows how the agency has attempted to replace the previous accounting practice, which involved target setting, performance management and measurement with a new leadership philosophy, and accounting practices that aim at generalizing the individual's private interest toward organizational interests. The result is interpreted as an attempt to make the individual responsible for the welfare of the collective in which, in its absence, the kind of validity that accounting's calculative practices enable is very much present as a longing to soothe the anxiety and uncertainty brought about by the responsibility to lead oneself.

All kinds of new technologies have challenged people’s boundaries between work and private life throughout the last 35 years. Social media is no exception. Its ubiquitous nature is ratherexacerbating the struggle. Two factors contribute to a renegotiation of people’s boundaries in particular. Firstly, the boundaries between the organisation and the outside become increasingly more permeable. Changing economic circumstances have fundamentally altered how people are supposed to feel about their paid employment. Increasing economic pressure and the not so subtle expectations that one should be committed to and even love one’s work, encourages people to give more of themselves to their employer. The expectations placed on the individual are increasing which is partly expressed in demands for greater availability and more commitment. This includes and is partly expressed in bringing more of one’s identity to work, which helps to transcend the boundaries between the individual and the organisation. Secondly, social media is particularly conducive to renegotiation of boundaries because they are by nature a tool to create, shape, maintain and express one or multiple identities. With their specific affordances of visibility, persistence, association and editability, they do not just give room for a sophisticated expression of an individual’s identity(ies) but they also allow organisations to profit from that expression through association. This potential tight coupling between the individual and the organisation can of course backfire as the case of Justine Sacco’s Tweet gone wrong illustrates. In this particular example, Justine Sacco, former PR consultant, tweeted a racist Tweet (even though inadvertently) before getting on a plane to Africa and by the time she landed, she had lost her job over the Tweet. Overall though, organisations could gain significantly by encouraging/ letting their employees use their personal channels for different aspects of work. As with leaders that try to influence their employees in terms of healthy eating and exercise, a leader’s influence goes beyond the occasional pep talk and employee of the month medal. The practices of leaders can influence their followers’ behaviour and social media might just be another outlet for this influence. For the present study we followed the Twitter behaviour of a director general of a Swedish governmental agency for a period of 10 months (March 2016 to January 2017) and complemented our observation with multiple interviews as well as documents and guiding principles on social media presence for public sector employees. Studying a governmental agency is particularly interesting because the public sector is supposed to exhibit a certain set of values. Secondly, the public sector is guided in all matters pertaining to the digitalisation of services by the work of a state commission. In this work it is clearly outlined that public organisations have to be very careful in showing who is communicating – the organisation or the private person. In the present study, particular interest is paid to how a director general uses different identity facets to foster the agenda of the organisation and how far the affordances of social media enable or constrain such pursuits. The results show that the association between the director general’s tweets and the agency has multiple consequences. Firstly, the organisation gains a “personal side” through the director general’s sharing of personal aspects of life alongside promoting the organisation’s activities. Especially for organisations with image problems, a potential increase in trust and likability may be a beneficial side effect of the close association with their employees on social media. The organisation is no longer just associated with rules regarding its public function but also with a leader who e.g. watches popular programs on television. Watching and commenting on popular matters humanizes the organisation and thus enriches the public image of a bureaucratic institution with rules and regulations by associating humour, weaknesses and opinions about trivial interests among other things. Secondly, the general director sets a standard of what might be expected from other employees or other leaders. This moves us away from the idea of a good leader being someone who is good at their job to someone who gives everything for their job and their organisation. We can see parallels to passionate, healthy leaders trying to influence their employees in terms of eating and exercise. Finally, leaders as role models are not restricted to eating, exercising and exhibiting (im)moral behaviour anymore but also to people’s practices on social media. Social media has moreover the potential to increase the reach of the neo-liberal panopticon beyond the local to the global, insofar as it affords visibility, and in extension intensifies of control and scrutiny. It is not anymore executed just by one’s employer but now the whole world can judge and criticise. Through social media, the public eye becomes thus simultaneously a wider marketing target but also an intensified and controlling panopticon. In the case of governmental agencies this involves not only employees but also the media, citizens and corporations.

This papers concerns strategic management accounting (SMA) in public sector agencies. The paper focuses on the challenges of strategy formation in the public sector through an analysis of the strategizing effects of the management accounting techniques in relation to the public-sector context. The paper answers calls for studies on the strategizing effects of costing practices in the public sector in relation to other public-sector goals. The paper broadens the scope beyond cost and efficiency aspects and includes other management accounting aspects that include the role of the government and mass media in the strategy formation of a public-sector organization. The paper suggests that to understand SMA in the public sector, involves a contextual understanding of the governance system in which SMA is situated. This context includes formal governance bodies such as the government as well as other external actors such as mass media. These actors are important to bring into the analysis because their actions toward public sector agencies in many ways influence the choice of management accounting tools whose strategizing effects constitute of strategy.

Interest in management control of intangibles has grown remarkably during the last decades and now includes managing employee health. Research in this field is so far in the early stages: few empirical studies have been undertaken and fewer studies take into consideration the implications of such systems. In this paper we wish to contribute to the field with a qualitative study of instances of management control of health in ten Swedish organizations.

Many good intentions lie behind the idea of making health and ill-health a subject for management control and the expected results are very positive—lower sick-leave rates, reduction of costs and human suffering. Such intentions stand for an intension, i.e. the ideas, properties or state of affairs that are connoted by a word or symbol, in this case what can be connoted by the concept of management control of health, its conceptual position. An intension, however, is not given insofar as a word or concept may be associated to more than one. Thus we set out to interpret management control of health in terms of two conceptual positions, modernism and postmodernism, in order to bring forth two very different intensions of management control of health: one where the practice is seen as an investment with a purpose to visualize ill-health and increase efficiency by putting in place measures to increase employee health; the other where the practice is seen as a means to make the individual accountable in order to be able to intensify control and colonize leisure.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the case for taking employee health and wellbeing into account in some way and to consider a range of objections that might be raised against such exercises. Design/methodology/approach – The paper identifies the existence of a persistent sickness absence as a cause for concern for a range of stakeholders and how it might be accounted for in the light of recent developments within the intellectual capital field. Attention then turns to some of the difficulties such well meaning interventions might encounter, and briefly considers how a self-accounting approach might in some part overcome these.

Findings – The paper finds that a programme of empirical research within the field of employee health and wellbeing is now required to ensure that employee health and wellbeing into account. Practical implications – While predominantly a discursive contribution to the literature, the paper incorporates some discussion of innovative accounting interventions.

Originality/value – In contrast to viewing sickness absence from a cost perspective, the paper encourages stakeholders to embrace a wider spectrum of ways of seeing to better understand employee health and wellbeing issues in the work place.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how the idea of health statements is constructed and on what assumptions it rests. Design/methodology/approach – Published health statements from the Swedish municipality of Umea ̊ are analysed in terms of the rhetoric of the arguments that are presented. This is done in order to identify the assumptions the arguments rest on.

Findings – Although no empirical proof is provided, the arguments presented in the health statements of Umea ̊ municipality follow a logic that goes from success factors to good results via employee health and satisfaction as a proxy of internal quality of work that in turn is assumed to create good quality of service. The construction of that logic is concomitantly the production and reproduction of a moral system of values that rest on the ambiguousness and implicitness. Originality/value – A discussion about the assumptions expressed in Umea ̊ municipality’s health statements, how they are constructed to make the management accounting of employee health work and the construction of morals that is implicit in that system.