Sustaining innovation and the search for value creation: Accounting, inscriptions and the mediation of ‘in-tensions’

This paper combines insights from the literature on accounting inscriptions with studies on rhetoric to explore why and how accounting sustains processes of innovation and value creation. In doing so, we build on previous studies that have explored the transformative capacities of accounting in action to further investigate the fine line between the enabling power of accounting and the incompleteness of its representations. To achieve this objective, we draw on the case of Monnalisa, a medium-sized Italian enterprise operating in the fashion industry. The case provides material for reflection on how the ongoing search for the ‘magic formula to square the circle’, which combines both creativity and efficiency, is mediated through accounting inscriptions – such as the Provisional Budget, cost cards and the Balanced Scorecard – as they participate in the continuous re-definition and questioning into what counts as innovation and value creation. The evidence we provide shows how value becomes sustainable particularly because this sustainability is never fully defined and captured within a ‘perfect garment’, but, rather, is constantly searched for within recurrent processes – such as the collection in Monnalisa – by a number of heterogeneous participants motivated by different purposes, interests and concerns which are always ‘in-tensions’, i.e. never fully defined. We, therefore, contribute to the existing literature regarding ‘accounting in action’ by unveiling how the interplay between accounting’s ability, which keeps users engaged and enables organizational action in practice, and its incomplete representational capability is sustained by a structure of “hope and belief” in the unfulfilled possibility of producing the ‘perfect garment’ within a collective and ritualized journey in search for innovation and value creation.