Pathways to accounting mediation: A case study on the role of checklists in risk management

Research on accounting mediation shows that the design of accounting tools can facilitate the way organizational actors reflexively mediate multiple, competing concerns. However, research has yet to fully account for how actors exercise discretion in process of accounting mediation. Motivated by insights from activity theory, this study examines how accounting mediation unfolds through actors’ discretionary engagement with tools, and the conditions that enable such discretion. Empirically, we conducted a case study of risk management in a public health surveillance agency in Brazil, focusing on how managers use inspection checklists to mediate institutional and local concerns. Our analysis shows that managers successfully navigate these different and sometimes competing concerns by switching between three distinct mediation pathways: anchoring assessments in standardized risk evaluations, complementing these evaluations with benefit-based considerations, and suspending risk metrics when competing assessments become incommensurable. Switching between these pathways allows managers to balance the credibility of a standardized risk system with the need for contextualized judgment. Based on these findings, we make three contributions. First, we theorize “switching” as a central mechanism of accounting mediation, highlighting the conditions under which actors exercise discretion and make reflexive choices about how and when to pursue different forms of mediation. Second, we add to prior research on the reflexive uses of accounting by showing how reflexivity emerges from continuous acts of combining tools to reconcile multiple accountings, rather than episodic acts of discretion spurred by individual sensibilities and material arrangements. Third, we foreground the checklist as a distinct accounting tool, showing how listed accounts of risk acquire mediating capacity through actors’ situated engagement with them.