This paper makes the case for bringing empirical analysis to the heart of conceptual work about health care practice. Drawing on ethnographic observations in intensive care units in the UK, it identifies and analyses a mismatch between the practice of a particular health care specialty and its...

This article is intended as a contribution to our understanding of what it means to gain and retain ‘social access’ in workplace ethnography, in particular examining the role of gossip. Several difficulties encountered in attempting to gain such access within a health care setting...

Purpose – The paper aims to examine how indigenous accounting practices are mobilised in the daily life of a subaltern community, and how and why the members of that community have managed to preserve such practices over time despite external pressures for change. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Buddhist and Hindu people in non-Western societies perceive rational accountability practices in religious organizations, through their respective religious “spirit” and “beliefs” and in combination with broader structural...

This paper examines the critical role the 'accounting language' plays in organisational change. Whilst researchers have studied 'business planning' as a pedagogic device aimed at controlling spending and at introducing accountability, the explicit role played by 'accounting language' in the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence on how and why a poor rural community is engaged in certain calculative practices, and how these are embedded in a “total institution” defined in terms of “relations of production” and “relations in production”....