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Accounting, simultaneity and relative completeness: The sales and operations planning forecast and the enactment of the ‘demand chain’

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  • Yu, Lichen
  • Mouritsen, Jan

Abstract

This study adds to the literature on accounting incompleteness and instability an understanding of how accounting acts upon an object that is practised as a multiple. It explores how accounting, in the form of a sales and operations planning (S&OP) forecast, helps discover the objections attached to the various enactments of an object multiple, namely a ‘demand chain’ - a lateral ordering of the firm’s production and products from customers backward to suppliers - and translate these objections into decision mechanisms. The paper finds a process of accumulation of accountings that contributes to the enactment of the ‘demand chain’ multiple. In this process, accounting becomes both performative and provocative. As a source of performativity, accounting is relatively complete because it turns each emerging objection into a specific decision model, enacting the ‘demand chain’ in a certain way. As a force of provocation, accounting stimulates new objections to emerge against what accounting reveals about the ‘demand chain’; this adds new accountings onto existing ones, all of which exist simultaneously.

Suggested Citation

  • Yu, Lichen & Mouritsen, Jan, 2020. "Accounting, simultaneity and relative completeness: The sales and operations planning forecast and the enactment of the ‘demand chain’," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:84:y:2020:i:c:s0361368220300222
    DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2020.101129
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