This paper examines how the category of failure was economised and made calculable. It explores the preconditions for this shift in three stages. First, it explores how failure came to be ‘forgiven’ in both the U.S. and the U.K. across the nineteenth century, how it came to be defined as...

This essay addresses the implications of accounting and hybrids for the management of risk. It suggests that the management of organizations is rapidly being transformed into and formalized around the management of risk, while much of the real management of risks occurs elsewhere. We argue...

This paper examines the ‘modernising government' initiative in the UK, and the ‘flexibilities' – lead commissioning, integrated provision, and pooled budgets – introduced in the Health Act 1999. This policy reform, and the associated tools to operationalise it, placed ideas of...

This paper is about the making of an accounting entity. The entity is the hospital, and the context is the Finnish health care reforms of the early 1990s. These reforms, which sought to make private sector accounting principles central to this core field of the New Public Sector, had significant...