The sustainability shift: The role of calculative practices in strategy implementation
Abstract
This paper investigates the role of calculative practices in the phase of implementing strategies for enhanced sustainability in a city organization. Sustainability as a concept is arguably difficult to handle at the organizational level, becoming a challenge for public organizations in practice. This paper builds on the notion of performativity and follows a strategy implementation process over time in a city, allowing us to see how the sustainability ambitions altered over the observed period. This led to the conclusion that when sustainability is to be implemented, there is a shift towards financial control and calculative practices assume various roles.
1 INTRODUCTION
Climate change, social tension, and segregation are challenges to sustainable development that cannot be exaggerated in light of current developments. De Matos and Clegg (2013) argued that there is no bigger challenge facing contemporary organizations than that of increasing sustainability. To address sustainability,1 local government organizations have been identified as key actors (Zeemering, 2018), yet research in different fields has shown that their actions are largely symbolic (Boiral, 2016; Dinica, 2018; Qian et al., 2018; Swann & Deslatte, 2019). This could be explained by the facts that resource allocation is rarely rational (Arnaboldi & Lapsley, 2010), and that financial and human resource capacities are seldom designed to realize public sustainability (Hawkins et al., 2016). Sustainability ambitions have therefore been criticized for being a “sustainability fix,” as rhetoric that does not lead to any “real” change (Lauermann, 2019; Long, 2016; Pepe et al., 2018).
What happens to a strategic intention, such as sustainability, when it is put into practice is the focus of this paper, which responds to claims that research into sustainability practices in public services has been neglected (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014; Guthrie et al., 2010; Mazzara et al., 2010), and more generally to claims that few studies address how pluralistic and ambiguous ambitions are addressed in public-sector strategic management (Bryson, Berry, et al., 2010; Johnsen, 2015). The difficulty of implementing strategies is not unique to sustainability but could be said to be general when it comes to abstract strategic ambitions (e.g., Mantere & Vaara, 2008; Pryor et al., 2007). To move away from traditional ways of looking at strategy implementation in which scholars have previously mainly emphasized factors that can function as either barriers to or catalysts of implementation (Elbanna et al., 2016; Merkus et al., 2019), and to enhance our understanding of strategic practices, this paper uses insights from performativity theory (Boedker et al., 2019; Cabantous et al., 2018; Callon, 1998, 2007; MacKenzie, 2006; Themsen & Skærbæk, 2018) that explains how certain abstract ideas such as sustainability become “reality.” This theory is grounded in the idea that entities are brought into being by material practices and tools (Boedker et al., 2019; Carton, 2020). The role of calculative practices is of specific interest here, as the difficulties of translating sustainability ambitions into calculative practices have been noted (Jørgensen & Messner, 2010; Lamberton, 2000; Marcuccio & Steccolini, 2005), with Gray (2010, p. 48) even claiming that “to assume that the notion of ‘sustainability’ has tangible meaning at the level of organization is to ignore all we know about sustainability.” However, others have argued that accounting and accountability could be central to advancing sustainability in public services (Ball & Bebbington, 2008). Although calculative practices have previously been claimed to play various roles in strategic processes (e.g., Hansen & Mouritsen, 2005), few studies have investigated how these roles change over time (Carton, 2020; Fırtın & Kastberg, 2020). Calculative practices are broadly understood as “techniques for calculating costs, identifying deviations from standards, producing budgets and comparing these with the actual results attained, calculating rates of return for investments, setting transfer prices for intra-firm transactions, and much else” (Miller, 2001, p. 380). The aim of the paper is thus to illustrate the roles of calculative practices in a strategy implementation process over time. In this process, it is of interest to further consider how calculative practices enable or hinder strategy implementation.
The paper builds on empirical data from an ethnographically inspired longitudinal study of strategy implementation in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. The collected data consist of 54 interviews and about 330 hours of observations of meetings and other events in which the implementation work played out. The unique access given to the researcher gave an opportunity to illustrate how calculative practices are used in strategy implementation over time. The paper is structured as follows: first the frame of reference is introduced, which is followed by an account of the methods used and how the data were collected. The findings are then presented in chronological order to illustrate how the sustainability ambitions changed over time. Finally, the analysis and concluding remarks are presented.
2 FRAME OF REFERENCE: STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND PERFORMATIVITY
Boyne and Walker (2010, p. 185) conceptualized strategy in the public sector as “a means by which organizations can improve their performance and provide better services.” Bryson (2010, p. 256) argued that strategic management is “the appropriate and reasonable integration of strategic planning and implementation across an organization (or other entities) in an ongoing way to enhance the fulfillment of its mission, meeting of mandates, continuous learning, and sustained creation of public value.” This definition asserts the importance of strategic management in the public sector and notes that it comprises various elements (Poister et al., 2010). Begkos et al. (2019) divided strategy into two parts: first, strategy formulation and second, the allocation of resources required for implementation. Successful implementation of strategic decisions is widely thought to be critical to the achievement of organizational objectives (Elbanna et al., 2016). However, studies show that the interpretation of strategy documents creates latitude for differences (Carter et al., 2010). Therefore, strategy implementation is here seen as performative (Cabantous et al., 2018; Gond et al., 2015; Kornberger, 2012; Merkus et al., 2019), meaning that a strategy is put into practice because people will act based on it and therefore shape the organization in certain ways (Cabantous, Gond, & Wright, 2018; Merkus et al., 2019). According to this perspective, strategies “do not mirror (or represent) a reality that pre-exists but co-constructs (or bring about) that reality through their performation” (Cabantous et al., 2018, p. 408). Strategies are thus not just outcomes that end a chain of decision making, but also “new beginnings” (Tekathen et al., 2019) that promise actions in the future (Mouritsen & Kreiner, 2016). Ligonie (2018) argued that the performativity perspective on strategy differs from traditional strategy implementation perspectives since it acknowledges the agency of concepts and that performativity “represents the opportunity for an in-depth enquiry into how strategic management concepts can make certain organizations and practices come to life” (p. 464). MacKenzie (2006) divided performativity into three phases: generic, effective, and Barnesian. Generic performativity simply means that a concept, theory, or model is used by practitioners or policymakers. Effective performativity refers to instances in which the use of the concept or model changes a result as an outcome of the use of that specific concept or model. In the strongest form or performativity, Barnesian performativity, a theory shapes reality to fit its premises, making “reality” become the theory; this form has been argued to be empirically rare (Cabantous et al., 2010). In addition, MacKenzie (2006) added the concept of counter-performativity, which occurs when the “practical use of an aspect of economics makes economic processes less like their depiction by economics” (MacKenzie, 2006, p. 18; see also Boedker et al., 2019; Fırtın & Kastberg, 2020) and stands in contrast to the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy (MacKenzie, 2006).
2.1 Calculative practices as performative
Studying strategy implementation in relation to calculative practices makes it possible to study how objects help shape the world they describe (Carter et al., 2010; Ligonie, 2018) since performativity theories are grounded in the idea that entities are brought into being by material practices (Carton, 2020). Boedker et al. (2019:3) explained the “accounting thesis” in the following way: “performativity requires tools, or calculative practices to work, many of which are best understood as being provided by the accounting function. Thus, accounting is not primarily interesting for its potential capacity to describe the world, but for its capacity to constitute the world.” Accounting practices have a persuasive nature (Lapsley & Miller, 2019), so some have questioned whether they are neutral “tools for measuring and allocating economic resources” (Quattrone, 2004, p. 674; cf. Steccolini et al., 2020). Whittle and Mueller (2010), for example, argued that the practice of accounting is central to the governance of contemporary organizations and is involved in power struggles, resulting in competition between calculations (Mouritsen et al., 2009). In studies of strategy implementation, calculative practices have been argued to play active, yet different roles (Busco & Quattrone, 2015; Hansen & Mouritsen, 2005; Previous research on the link between strategy and accounting has suggested that calculative devices are not adopted and adapted to fit the strategy; rather, the strategy is constituted by accounting devices (Briers & Chua, 2001; Skærbæk & Tryggestad, 2010). Research has also shown that calculative practices can enable organizational members to proceed with a strategic intention (Cuganesan et al., 2012; Denis et al., 2006; Jørgensen & Messner, 2010). In still other cases, accounting practices have become tools for mounting and sustaining resistance to strategy (Boedker et al., 2019). Begkos et al. (2019) showed how, in the case of English hospitals, accounting proved to be a means to avoid negotiations, contradicting those who argue that accounting promotes dialogue and resolves conflict (e.g., Ahrens & Chapman, 2007; Jørgensen & Messner, 2010). Numbers generally play an important role in strategizing, and Denis et al. (2006) argued that trust in numbers can deprive actors of agency. Also, Fauré and Rouleau (2011, p. 179) argued that strategizing is performed through the discussion of numbers, and that “talk is action,” with numbers being more powerful than words (Denis et al., 2006; Whittle & Mueller, 2010). Interestingly, Jørgensen and Messner (2010) illustrated how even when reliance on accounting numbers is absent, other forms of accountability are mobilized, such as a general understanding of the need to be profitable. According to Jørgensen and Messner (2010), accounting information had an indirect effect on organizational practices, and “it was not the case that different rationalities were translated into accounting; rather, accounting information was selectively enacted to amend the evaluation of these rationalities” (p. 202). Dumay and Rooney (2016), however, showed how the conflict between numbers and narratives need not necessarily be resolved but can co-exist in organizations over time. However, combining the narrative of sustainability with calculative practices is a well-known organizational challenge since long-term strategic objectives, such as sustainability, are claimed not to be aligned with new public management (NPM) ideas because NPM models often apply a short-sighted view based on efficiency and product orientation (Cuganesan et al., 2014; Moldavanova & Goerdel, 2018; Osborne et al., 2014,2015). In other words, sustainable development has long-term strategic ambitions, but the associated calculative practices enhanced by NPM are short term in nature (cf. Holmgren Caicedo et al., 2019).
3 METHOD AND MATERIAL
The case on which this paper is based is a longitudinal (2014–2020) case study of a strategy implementation process in the city of Gothenburg in western Sweden. Stafford et al. (2020) claimed that there is scant research combining accounting research and research into the city (for exceptions, see Brorström, 2018; Lapsley et al., 2010). In this paper, a city and its attempt to promote sustainability are the background of a strategy implementation story. The method is inspired by a process view in which longitudinal data are used to observe how a process unfolds over time (Langley et al., 2013). The data collection followed an ethnographically inspired approach, taking up the idea that to understand how strategic management works in the public sector, one must understand the people doing the strategy work (George, 2017).
The strategy document, which was adopted in 2012, is referred to as the RiverCity Vision. It articulates the vision “Gothenburg – Open for the world” and three strategies: “Connect the city,” “Strengthen the regional core,” and “Meet the water.” The strategies mirror the three dimensions of sustainability, and the document was intended to make the city more sustainable. In 2012, social sustainability and segregation problems were highlighted as the most important issues to address in the implementation phase. Other aims when implementing the vision and strategies were to question old ways of working in the city organization, enhance innovation, and better collaborate across boundaries. After adoption of the document by the city council, a collaborative organization was created to ensure implementation. This organization, the “RiverCity organization,” consists of a steering committee, a project management group, and seven subprojects, that are city districts to be developed based on the vision and strategies. These subprojects each have two project leaders who manage the implementation work in their specific project. Within the steering committee, city managers are linked across organizational boundaries, representing city departments (i.e., traffic, housing, planning, the park and landscape administration, and the city management office), a city district (i.e., Lundby), and two municipal corporations (i.e., Riverside Development AB and Business Region Gothenburg). The project management group comprises middle managers from the above organizations. Recently, in 2019, new actors have been recruited to the city to work in a “portfolio office” in the city management office with the task of controlling the implementation in relation to the vision and strategies.
The collected data consist of interviews, observations, and document studies (see Table 1). Over the six-year study period, actors at various organizational levels were interviewed: managers from the city's departments and municipal corporations in the steering committee, middle managers in the project management group, project leaders of the subprojects, newly recruited actors in the portfolio office, and others deemed informative concerning the strategy document implementation. In total, 54 interviews were conducted with 51 people; the interviews lasted one to three hours and were then transcribed. The interviews were carried out evenly over the study period and key persons, responsible for implementing the vision and strategies, were interviewed once at the beginning of the project period and then again after a few years. In addition, observations were made of steering committee meetings in which the overall direction of implementation was discussed and agreements were made. Observations were also conducted at the project management group's meetings and, more recently, at the meetings of the new portfolio office. In addition, tertial reporting meetings were observed, as were internal workshops, special events, and presentations for external stakeholders. In total, about 330 hours of observations were conducted evenly throughout the study period, in addition to all the informal settings to which the researcher, by now well known in the city organization, was invited: breakfasts, lunches, after-work drinks, coffee meetings, presentations, and various informal discussions. During the observations, field notes were made that were later read through and developed. Moreover, the researcher has access to the full range of official protocols and documents, as well as to internal documents such as budgets, evaluations, plans, and measurement systems. These various documents helped in creating time lines and analyzing how discussions in various settings were presented afterwards. The meaning, formulation, and content of these documents were also asked about in interviews.
| Interviewees by category | Number |
|---|---|
| City managersa | 18 |
| Project leaders | 10 |
| Middle managersa | 13 |
| Portfolio managers | 3 |
| Other | 5 |
| Total number of interviewsb | 54 |
| Observations by category | Hours |
| Steering committee meetings | 91 |
|
Project management group meetings |
116 |
| Portfolio group meetings | 18 |
| Otherc | 104 |
| Total number of observed hours | 329 |
- a Three of the city managers and two of the middle managers were interviewed twice during the study period, once at the beginning and then again at the end. They were interviewed twice because they had key roles.
- b The interviews were evenly distributed in time: 2014–2015, 14 interviews; 2016–2017, 19 interviews; and 2018–2020, 21 interviews.
- c Includes workshops, tertial reporting, internal planning days, external presentations, internal presentations of projects, and project meetings.
The empirical data were analyzed in three steps. First, the interview transcripts were read through and coded using open coding (Gioia et al., 2013) with the aim of creating a timeline of how the strategy implementation work was carried out. What came to the fore when doing this initial coding was that much of the work that the interviewees described concerned the development and use of calculative practices, such as measurement systems, budgets, road maps, and calculations. Calculative practices were then operationalized as the various tools and practices concerned with quantitatively managing the implementation work. The second phase of coding consisted of reading through the transcripts again with a focus on calculative practices in relation to sustainability and how these interacted over time. In the third phase, field notes from the observations were more thoroughly read through: observations pertinent to the phases were identified and discussions of calculative practices, often concerning financial control, were highlighted. The observation material was also used to elaborate on how certain episodes illustrated the use of calculative practices in relation to specific events. In this phase, the underlying literature informing this study was considered in relation to the field material. The unique access given to the researcher gave the researcher “interactional expertise,” that is, knowledge of how to engage in the setting, its technical content, and what was going on in it (Langley et al., 2013). However, the researcher had no official role in implementing the vision and strategies.
4 FINDINGS: FROM SUSTAINABILITY TO FINANCIAL CONTROL
4.1 Sustainability ambitions meet organizational systems: The role of adoption device
The vision and strategies adopted in October 2012 were to be implemented through a collaborative organization created for that purpose. This organization started its actual work at the beginning of 2014 after long and intense discussions about how to proceed with the adopted strategy. The chosen organizational model was described in interviews as a compromise between two points of view. One view was that implementation should be handled through a project organization with a clear mandate and budget, while the other view was that implementation should be handled by the line organization. The final model was a compromise in that it resembles a project organization in form but lacks organizational mandate and budget. This meant that members of the organization were to agree on how to act and then return to their home organizations to make the actual decisions, though how this was to work in practice was not decided.
In interviews conducted early in the implementation, in 2014 and 2015, most interviewees claimed that upholding the sustainability focus and aims—especially concerning social sustainability, often described in terms of everyone's right to the city and quality of life—was the overall task of the organization. City Manager 16 said that “It is one of the key issues for all larger cities to break down the segregation.” At this point, there were no numbers to rely on, so exactly what “breaking down the segregation” would entail was not clear to the managers. However, it was deemed important not to compromise the strategy document's ambitions during implementation, although respondents acknowledged the difficulties of capturing social values in a plan including a strict timeline and budget. A challenge that arose early was the internal collaborative work: a former project leader said that when drafting the vision and strategies, they had focused on external stakeholders, but that now they needed to get the internal organization onboard. In practice, this meant involving organizational actors in the RiverCity organization and translating the long-term sustainability ambitions into concrete actions. Therefore, in early 2014, work started on translating the vision and strategies into organizational systems, project directives, performance measures, project calculations, and budgets. There was initially a shared understanding that if the sustainability ambitions were to be realized, they needed to be translated into terms that the existing organizational system could accommodate; at the same time, the intention was to do something new that challenged the existing system, not just reproduce old habits.
In 2014, project leaders described how their work was greatly influenced by sustainability ambitions and that, in their bids, the construction companies and architect organizations emphasized sustainability more than before. The project leader (Project Leader 1) of one of the seven subprojects, the Freeport project, said in an interview in 2014:
The land allocation process feels like a victory since it was so clearly impacted by the vision. Housing for all [as articulated in the vision] has really made an impact.
The high sustainability ambitions of the Freeport project were also evident at an information meeting for construction companies and other stakeholders in early fall 2015. At this meeting, the manager of the city planning department called the Freeport work a milestone, and the manager of the housing department talked about the “wings of history.” At this stage, there was a lot of talk about sustainability in the organization, though the early-stage ambitions simultaneously made the leaders of the Freeport project uneasy, and they questioned whether they were realistic. Project Leader 1 said in a 2014 interview that this concern had been mentioned to the steering committee, noting that “not all ambitions can be realized in the Freeport project.”
Consequently, a focus on calculative practices was enforced as a means to steer the ongoing strategy implementation. The steering committee decided in 2015 that all subprojects should regularly present project calculations to them. These were basic budget calculations concerning the incomes and costs related to the areal of the involved city district and the planned amount of housing. For most project leaders, these calculations entailed considerable uncertainty, partly because the size of the city's investment would depend on negotiations with construction companies that were to occur far in the future. Another source of uncertainty was how much would be built, and to balance the calculations, the project leaders increased their ambitions as to how much housing to project. Since, in this early phase, there were not yet any concrete plans, these projections were essentially guesses. These uncertainties together created vagueness for the project leaders about what they were entitled to do based on the calculations. In 2015, Project Leader 3 explained:
Can we say the financial situation is not good: we need to make this park smaller so we can build more? The size of the park might be a decision that is important for other projects.
These uncertainties also led to resistance to the calculative practices; one interviewee said that it was difficult to persuade the project leaders to make calculations at all:
We had agreed that the project managers were to deliver calculations for all the subprojects, but suddenly one of the project leaders said it was impossible, for a lot of different reasons. (City Manager 3)
In interviews, it became clear that one reason for this unwillingness of the project leaders, who were mostly trained urban planners or architects, was that they did not want to put their “artistic” work into “financial frames.” The vision of a sustainable city could not easily be translated into numbers, and thinking in these terms was seen as disturbing: Wasn't the idea of the vision and strategies to problematize the old system in favor of innovative ideas and city qualities? Why must this “new” vision then be talked about using the terms of the “old” system? This created a tension in which the newly adopted vision and strategies needed to be adapted to the existing organizational system while simultaneously questioning it. This also created tensions between professions in the city, so in 2015, performance measures were consequently created where the vision and strategies were translated into measurable qualities that were to capture the ambitions and counterbalance the cost and revenue calculations for the projects. Middle Manager 1 explained how this would come about:
One example [from the vision] is to “bridge barriers.” Then a measurable goal might be how many meters a distance is shortened [in the new plan]. It could also be if safety is experienced as better after we have invested in an area.
Such measures were presented in a “spider diagram” in which the seven subprojects were illustrated, so it became possible to gain an overview of what qualities the projects entailed. However, the uncertainty about how to use and interpret the measures meant that they were insufficiently used; besides, project leaders expressed how the measures were narrowing their discussion of qualities. Project Leader 2 said:
We have not used these performance measures—we have a freer discussion of qualities. We thought it was too narrow to say this is four or a five on a scale.
However, the performance measures presented in the spider diagrams had another task, namely, conveying the sustainability ambitions to the politicians and other stakeholders, which it was hoped would induce the politicians to allocate money for the projects in the next budgeting process. If that did not happen, the process would be left with overly ambitious objectives but no money.
4.2 The newly adopted calculative practices create problems: The role of resisting the strategic intention
About two years into the implementation, in 2016, various support systems had been created: the collaborative organization with the seven subprojects, project directives, performance measures, and project calculations. Also, in the same year, a road map was decided on by the steering committee and later the city council. This document summarized all the plans and calculations for the seven projects and was to be a basis for the political budgeting process. The politicians agreed to the road map, yet did not appreciate its form. Middle Manager 1 said:
The city council was happy, but said “Do not come back with something like this again. We do not want to see a document of 60 pages. It has to be much sharper.”
The politicians requested prioritization, which was seen as a problem since the involved actors, with the road map as a tool, wanted to illustrate how much was happening and then get some directions from the politicians on how to prioritize, Middle Manager 1 said:
Should we build a dense city, where all financial guidelines are met? Or should we make sure we build all the schools and pre-schools we need? … The politicians think we could do both.
Neither the vision document nor the road map gave the managers much guidance. Yet the constructed systems and documents gave a sense of control to the involved parties, so at the beginning of 2016, there was a feeling of calm. Underneath, however, project leaders experienced increased pressure to keep the projects on time and on budget. Project Leader 7 commented: “A lot of people make great demands of themselves, and when there are issues, well, it leads to frustration.” Since the politicians did not give much guidance, there was also uncertainty about the role of the steering committee. In June 2016, at a workshop held at Vinga, an island in the Gothenburg Archipelago, the project management group identified the unclear role of the steering committee as a problem. One participant asked what would happen if they did not agree, and another participant answered that they had to agree since no one knew what would happen if they did not.
Despite all the work to create calculative practices to simultaneously ensure control over the projects and signal the sustainability ambitions, the politicians did not allocate funding in the following budget process for 2017. A paradox is evident here, as one leading idea of the implementation was that to realize the projects, they needed to be administered through the ordinary line organization, so there was no room for “special treatment.” This meant that the projects within the RiverCity organization had to compete with other city projects. To be accepted and for sustainability to be acted on, the implementation thus needed to go through the existing system, though this process allowed other actors to question the very premises of the sustainability ambitions. Still more issues were awaiting. While city managers and middle managers involved in the RiverCity organization were busy trying to foster understanding of the need for new ways of working, subprojects started facing problems due to the lack of financial control. One example was the previously mentioned Freeport project. As described above, the project was regarded as a flagship and much development based on high sustainability ambitions was to occur in the project up to 2021. In November 2016, the Freeport project even won a prize for its innovative planning process in which many stakeholders were involved. Nevertheless, about one year later, after the summer 2017 the project was stopped due to lack of financial resources and uncertainty as to the costs of preparing the land for housing. New calculations were presented, showing cost increases of SEK 2.8 billion over the previous two years. City Manager 2 blamed the problem on a lack of coordination between departments:
The planning department has too much power without being responsible for calculating. That was what happened in the Freeport project, and in implementing the plan, we realized that we couldn't afford it.
The above quotation illustrates how different professions were responsible for different parts of the implementation, and that when problems arose, the collaboration within the RiverCity organization was tested. At a steering committee meeting in August 2017, the Freeport project was discussed and the project leaders urged the steering committee to make decisions about revising the initial plan to have 1000 housing units and 1000 workplaces in the Freeport area by 2021.2 The work on how to revise the plan was initiated, and at a later meeting in December 2017, a new suggestion was proposed by the project leaders. They wanted to break down the plan to be able to realize at least some of the initial ideas. This suggestion created frustration, and City Manager 8 exclaimed that the financial situation had not been analyzed enough and that, unfortunately, the collaboration had ended for now. This dispute created a sense of crisis—the city must have better financial control over its projects. In a 2019 interview, a new employee in the portfolio office explained the problem in hindsight, saying that the issue was the lack of financial knowledge when planning and managing the projects:
It was architectural planning that maintained that the qualities talked about in the vision were very important. And they are, if we have the resources. It is not that it was not good, it was just impossible to go through with it. (Portfolio Manager 2)
The above quotation again illustrates the conflict between different professions, and the problems that the projects suffered from meant that other problems arose as well, and the criticism of the RiverCity organization was amplified. The existing monitoring systems had created an illusion of control, but in reality, too much uncertainty was embedded in the project plans.
4.3 Calculative practices as addressing lack of control and facilitating collaboration
After the problems faced in the Freeport project, there was a sense of urgency to the work in the RiverCity organization. One reason was that the politicians started to ask why the Freeport project had stopped, and their message was that the city needed better financial control. City Manager 5 clarified in an interview that they needed to get back on track or the RiverCity organization risked being “put down.” Even though, in interviews in 2017 and 2018, several of the city managers themselves criticized the organization and its implementation work, they did not want their work to be ended. They also argued that they had a task from the politicians, and that as long as they were not given other directives, they would continue. The solution was to put more effort into the “road map” and within this document to focus more on budgets and calculations, along with estimates concerning housing and construction work. The claim was that even though this document contained uncertainties, it could be improved and become something that the politicians could see as a compromise that would facilitate project management. This made drafting the new road map an activity that united the steering committee, causing their collaboration to start working better again. Given the recent history of the Freeport project, there was an increased emphasis on financial control, which had consequences for implementing the sustainability ambitions. At one steering committee meeting in November 2017, the news was that Geely, the Chinese owner of Volvo Cars, wanted to build an innovation center at the specific location where a school was being planned. For some members of the steering committee, this was something that the city could not turn down, and prioritizing Geely meant that other plans would have to wait. For the municipal landowning company, the finances of building the innovation center had to take precedence over building a school, and calculative devices were used to demonstrate that this was a good idea. Representatives of the city districts did not agree, claiming that this meant that they were planning areas where no one would want to live, which was not intended in the RiverCity vision.3
These events illustrate the different positions of the steering committee members and that there were issues that the RiverCity organization, despite its efforts, could not control. This was summed up in one last attempt to develop the RiverCity organization by recruiting new employees who were to establish a portfolio office. They were employed by the city management office but were to work across organizational boundaries on the task of monitoring and assisting the seven projects. These new recruits started their work at the beginning of 2018 and would work on creating financial objectives and control systems. One of these new recruits has the specific responsibility of developing calculative measures, such as financial objectives, for the projects, and of supporting project leaders regarding financial issues. The project leaders and others expect the new recruits to solve tricky problems. At a tertial reporting meeting in spring 2019, this became clear when one of the project leaders of a subproject said that finally she would get the support she had been asking for since she started working as a project leader several years earlier—there would now be control over the financial reporting and the financial situation. Her comment was met with smiles and the response that her expectations as to what the portfolio office employees could achieve might be excessive. In interviews in 2019, the recruits described their task as finding problems that needed to be addressed and identifying but not implementing solutions. The portfolio office employees thus have a responsibility for creating better control, yet lack an organizational mandate to make decisions.
Finally, when the vision was being drafted in 2011–2012, sustainability was not talked about in terms of who would pay for the suggestions made. If this discussion had occurred, the interviewees claimed that the vision would not have been approved since the politicians would not have made decisions ensuring financing of the implementation. Instead, the responsibility was given to an organization without a mandate or resources of its own. In hindsight, this can be seen as an impossible mission for the RiverCity organization. Perhaps too much was taken on too soon, as Project Leader 7 noted in hindsight: “It is as if Volvo suddenly decided to build twice as many cars next year, but in the same factory.” At the end of 2019, a tertial reporting event was held at which the seven projects were presented together with associated calculations and financial goals. At this event, the ongoing work on renewing the road map was presented. New for 2020 was that the paragraph about sustainability was removed; instead, there was a newly developed paragraph about climate change. At the beginning of 2020, the city council made a decision that implies that all city development plans must have balanced finances, further emphasizing the importance of financial control. Commenting on this, Middle Manager 13 questioned if a plan is ‘better’ just because it has balanced finances by asking; “Is it [an investment] expensive or is it just a lot of money?” This question, again, illustrates the conflict between the sustainability ambitions and financial control in the city organization.
5 DISCUSSION: A SUSTAINABILITY SHIFT?
The aim of this paper is to identify and illustrate what roles calculative practices played in a process of strategy implementation over time, and how these practices enabled or hindered the implementation work. In summary, calculative practices played several different roles in the studied process, emphasizing some practices over others, illustrating how performativity is sequential (Carton, 2020; MacKenzie, 2006; Martí & Gond, 2018). In the case presented here, it was not decided in advance how the implementation work was to take place, leading to different calculative practices being developed, as a means both of adapting the strategy to the existing organization (time plans and calculations) and of challenging the existing organizational system (the measurement system and roadmap). In other words, these practices were projecting both control and ambition, a duality that created problems over time. In the following, this process is analyzed in light of insights from the performativity framework.
Initially, organizational members talked about the new ambitions in terms of attempting to realize them, a narrative that spread to city development projects and external stakeholders, illustrating a phase of generic performativity (MacKenzie, 2006). This generic talk of the new ambitions promised action in the future (Mouritsen & Kreiner, 2016), putting pressure on the organization to establish practices that could accommodate the external expectations while controlling the internal work. Therefore, different calculative practices were rapidly developed. One reason why it was important to adapt the strategy implementation to the existing organization, and then to develop practices such as project calculations and time plans, was to be able to compete for resources with other projects in the city. Here an organizational “catch-22 of performativity” arose, whereby the process of implementing the strategy by establishing practices simultaneously made it possible to question the ambitions underlying the strategy, in terms of “Why is this more important than what we are already doing?” In other words, to be implemented, the strategy had to be adapted to existing calculative organizational practices, but this adaptation simultaneously robbed the strategy of its uniqueness. However, this was also a way of engaging people in the implementation work by assigning them responsibility through the existing organizational system (Boedker et al., 2019; Busco & Quattrone, 2015).
The developed calculative practices that were simultaneously to adapt to and question the existing organization over time also had clear effects on the organization and the people working in it during the phase of effective performativity (Ligonie, 2018; MacKenzie, 2006). This was evident through the project leaders, who even though they questioned the accuracy of the numbers presented in calculations and time plans, felt pressured to keep the projects on time and on budget. It was also evident through the managers, who used calculations to steer the projects, even as they were questioning the ability of calculations to steer anything. These examples illustrate how “talk is action,” that is, that talking about numbers makes them real (Fauré & Rouleau, 2011). It moreover illustrates the problem of “trust in numbers” (Jørgensen & Messner, 2010), whereby the managers and politicians acted based on the numbers presented, rather than questioning the practices used to produce them.
Moving forward, in the process of engaging with individuals and assigning responsibility to them, negotiations arose between professions (cf. Begkos et al., 2019). In this specific case, tension emerged between architects and planners versus accountants since the planning profession did not want to be limited by calculative practices and financial frames. This conflict stemmed from the duality of the strategy implementation work when developing calculative practices that need to project both ambition and control and could be seen throughout the studied period. From the perspective of planners and architects, their approach can be seen as an attempt to enable or uphold strategic ambitions, by trying to resist calculative practices (cf. Cuganesan et al., 2012; Denis et al., 2006). Initially this resistance led to a questioning of the calculations and their accuracy, and in response, performance measures with the role of counterbalancing existing practices were introduced, confirming how new phases of performativity need new assemblages (Carton, 2020). These measures, which were to signal sustainability ambitions, were, however, questioned for being overly blunt, confirming previous research into the difficulties of establishing performance measures capturing sustainability (Holmgren et al., 2019). The professional planners and architects furthermore thought that the performance measures produced were too narrow, not capturing what they thought of as qualities and were consequently not used. Hence, even though the performance measures were meant to question the focus on financial control (cf. Mouritsen, Hansen, & Hansen, 2009), the production of them was still believed to restrict professional freedom and ambitions. However, the production of the performance measures led to an overall increase of calculative practices in the city organization.
A few years into the implementation work, sustainability was still talked about in a generic way, but increasingly as secondary to the calculative practices established and to an articulated need to prioritize (cf. Dumay & Rooney, 2016). The abandonment of the performance measures instead bolstered the use of traditional calculative practices such as calculations, budgets, and time plans. However, there was still uncertainty among the project leaders about how to act based on the calculative practices, while they still signaled control and ambition to the external audience. When new numbers were presented, such as the increased costs of the Freeport project, this decoupling faltered. At this point, tensions were amplified between professions operating in different departments and having different responsibilities (cf. Whittle & Mueller, 2010). Though the steering committee's collaboration skills were blamed, they upheld the task given them by the politicians and continued the implementation work. This is interesting since it illustrates how a generic performativity dimension remained, giving some legitimacy to the organization's ongoing implementation of the sustainability ambitions, even though they were questioned (cf. Mackenzie, 2006). This exemplifies how both narratives and numbers can co-exist (Dumay & Rooney, 2016) and might imply that the sustainability ambitions, even though they were downplayed, could be voiced later in the implementation process. As an example, the conflict between ambition versus control were expressed through the rhetorical question: “Is it expensive or is it just a lot of money?”
What should be pointed out, and that might be regarded as paradoxical, is that calculations made by non-accountants (e.g., architects and planners), and proven to be unrealistic, did not prompt the questioning of the calculative practices that had failed to capture the ongoing implementation, but rather strengthened these practices. This arguably illustrates what others have called the persuasive role of calculative practices (Lapsley & Miller, 2019). Interestingly, calculative practices that were the very reason for tensions and conflicts became a device facilitating renewed collaboration among the managers since they eventually agreed on the need for better control (cf. Ahrens & Chapman, 2007; Bekgos et al., 2019). At this point in time, the importance of the road map was reaffirmed, as this document was intended to signal objectivity (Miller, 1992) and functioned as a collaborative device during a phase of crisis. The practices involved in establishing these control instruments made the managers work better together than they had in a long time; for example, it was easier to collaborate on formulating the road map than to collaborate on deciding where to build a school. This shows that stability is inherent in these practices and that calculative practices at the same time as creating conflict could be a means of resolving tensions and connecting people (Jørgensen & Messner, 2010; Ligoni, 2018).
Moreover, seven years after the adoption of the vision and strategies, the implementation problems resulted in the creation of a portfolio office. If it were not for the calculative practices that over time had gradually revealed the lack of control, this function with specific responsibility for strategic issues and financial control would probably not have been created. This function will ensure that overly ambitious plans will not be proposed in the future, though this may also result in a complete lack of project implementation. The implementation process, resulting in this strong focus on financial control, can be seen as an example of counter-performativity (Boedker et al., 2019; MacKenzie, 2006) in which, over time, the importance of adapting to the existing system in a generic and effective way entails strengthening the very system that was questioned. The story told here illustrates how difficult it is to uphold long-term goals and ambitions in modern public organizations since the organizational forms are not optimal for advancing sustainability (Osborne et al., 2014), and the changing roles of calculative practices over time illustrate how sustainability ambitions can gradually shift. Yet, as pointed out, the initial ambition is still voiced occasionally and might find new ways to be heard.
6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
Calculative practices in the case studied here displayed duality and flexibility in their roles over time, being tools both for adapting the new strategic intention to the existing organization and for questioning it. Calculative practices were also tools both for mounting and resisting the strategic change and for enhancing collaboration by avoiding conflicts in order to continue the implementation work (Begkos et al., 2019). Calculative practices were also tools both for engaging people (Busco & Quattrone, 2015) and for highlighting differences between professions. These conflicting roles illustrate the link between the performance of a strategy (Gond et al., 2015; Merkus et al., 2019) and the performativity of calculative practices (Callon, 2007; MacKenzie, 2006), since it is obvious that in a long process of strategy implementation, practices must be developed for managing and dealing with any challenges that arise, and it is here that calculative practices play various roles. In large public organizations, there are well-known existing routines and practices, and adhering to them might, instead of questioning their very premises, be the “easy” choice. The longitudinal perspective in the present case made it possible, over time, to capture the changes in the roles of calculative practices, illustrating how the sustainability focus was not so much a “fix” (Long, 2016) as a shift that eventually gave way to financial control. This means that although sustainability ambitions articulated in “glossy” documents (Lauermann, 2019; Zeemering, 2018) might be real intentions, they can be downplayed when interacting with real organizational systems. In other words, attempts to move away from an NPM model of short-term measurement through applying sustainability visions and strategies (Moldavanova & Goerdel, 2018; Osborne et al., 2014, 2015) proved short-lived since the focus on numbers, accounting, and calculations was gradually strengthened and emphasized in new ways. Paradoxically, this resulted in the sustainability ambitions giving way to a stronger focus on financial control than ever before, although the idea was initially to question such control, showing how calculative practices in this case led to counter-performativity (Boedker et al., 2019; MacKenzie, 2006).
This paper, by relying on performativity theory, gives insights into strategy practices (Cabantous et al., 2018) and helps open the “black box” (Elbanna et al., 2016; Merkus et al., 2019) of strategy implementation by demonstrating that calculative practices can play different roles in different stages of strategy implementation, initially being involved in negotiating values, but becoming a tool with which to avoid negotiations later in the process.
Second, the paper advances the discussion of strategic thinking in the public sector by showing how this thinking changes during the course of implementation (Bryson, et al., 2010; George, 2017; Johnsen, 2015), here through the use of tools of calculative practices that both enabled and hindered the implementation. In the studied case, sustainability gradually gave way to financial control, and ultimately to climate change as well, confirming the difficulty of implementing sustainability practices over time (Mazzara et al., 2010). One can question whether sustainability strategies need to be this abstract and broad to capture development that occurs over time, or whether this abstraction indicates a lack of clarity.
Third, the paper advances the debate on sustainability in public organizations by showing how difficult it is to enhance sustainability and long-term ambitions in organizations that advocate short-term goals based on efficiency considerations (Bebbington & Larringa, 2014; Cuganesan et al., 2014; Moldavanova & Goerdel, 2018; Osborne et al., 2015). The paper illustrates how the sustainability ambitions, through the need to adapt to existing organizational systems, gradually weakened. The insights presented here are based on a single case, so future research could further explore how strategy implementation relates to other specific organizational contexts, and how sustainability qualities can be enhanced in different organizational settings.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and the participants at the New Public Sector Seminar, Edinburgh 7-8 November 2019, especially the discussant Finia Kuhlmann, for comments on an early draft of this paper. The author would also like to thank the city of Gothenburg and Mistra Urban Futures for supporting this research.
