Strategizing innovative and sustainable projects: the role of accounting practices

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how accounting is implicated in strategizing innovative and sustainable projects which imply spatial reconfigurations. By combining organization and accounting studies on the interconnections between space, accounting, and strategizing, as well as drawing upon Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of space, we interpret the case of a knowledgeintensive organization. Our insights show that managers strategize spatial projects imbued with strategy ideas of open and social innovation for sustainability through three main accounting practices (i.e. “trusting numbers to objectify space”, “narrating numbers to remember the spark”, and “visualizing numbers to bridge to the future”). These practices act upon different dimensions of the spatial projects, thereby helping perform strategy within abstract spaces in which changing meanings of sustainable innovation overlap. In so doing, this paper contributes to accounting literature on accounting and strategizing as well as on accounting and space by showing that strategy ideas underlying spatial reconfigurations gain meaning through the spaces that accounting practices generate when acting upon the physical, social, and subjective dimensions of innovative and sustainable projects.