| Summary: | This paper stresses the importance of materiality in accounting and organization studies. Accounting and organization studies have overlooked the ways in which accounting and organizing is bound up with the material forms and spaces through which humans act and interact. To incorporate the materiality concept in accounting and organization research, an agential realism research approach is proposed in this paper (Barad 2007). The paper concludes that agential realism can at least make three contributions to the literature. First, Baradian studies can contribute by illustrating the importance of material relations in the constitution of accounting and management practices. By interrogating the rich variety of materialities involved in the practices of measurement or making of innovation, Baradian studies expand the methodological choices available to practice-theoretic accounts of accounting or innovation work. It is the entanglement of many types of matter that perform and affect (sometimes in a disruptive way) the making of accounting measures or innovation. Second, Baradian studies can contribute by reframing the causal relations from which accounting measurements and innovations are made. Baradian studies can illustrate the intra-dependencies that exist between the things represented and constituted, and the representations made. Finally, Baradian studies can contribute by illustrating the ways in which properties of abstract concepts and ideals (e.g. liabilities, innovation) are the consequence, not of human-based practice, but of socio-material re-configurings.
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