The shaping of public services through calculative practice: the roles of accountants, citizens, professionals, and politicians

This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and within public service organizations. The papers in the special issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calculative practices intervene in public services, and thus come to affect the experiences of such actors, offering important perspectives on how the latter act to resist, reshape, redefine, and change those very practices, or strategically and tactically use (or avoid the use of) accounting to impact the ways in which services are defined and delivered.