HAL Id: hal-02276737
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02276737
Submitted on 3 Sep 2019
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entic research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.
L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diusion de documents
scientiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.
Evaluative infrastructures : Accounting for platform
organization
Kornberger Martin, Pueger Dane, Mouritsen Jan
To cite this version:
Kornberger Martin, Pueger Dane, Mouritsen Jan. Evaluative infrastructures : Accounting for plat-
form organization. Accounting organizations and society, 2017, 79-95 p. �hal-02276737�
Evaluative infrastructures: Accounting for platform organization
Martin Kornberger
a
,
*
,
1
, Dane Pflueger
b
, Jan Mouritsen
b
a
EM Lyon, France
b
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and HEC Paris, France
article info
Article history:
Received 15 March 2016
Received in revised form
30 May 2017
Accepted 31 May 2017
Available online 3 July 2017
Keywords:
Accounting
Hierarchical consciousness
Evaluation
Infrastructure
Platform organization
abstract
Platform organizations such as Uber, eBay and Airbnb represent a growing disruptive phenomenon in
contemporary capitalism, transforming economic organization, the nature of work, and the distribution
of wealth. This paper investigates the accounting practices that underpin this new form of organizing,
and in doing so confronts a significant challenge within the accounting literature: the need to escape
what Hopwood (1996) describes as its “hierarchical consciousness”. In order to do so, this paper develops
the concept of evaluative infrastructure which describes accounting practices that enable platform based
organization. They are evaluative because they deploy a plethora of interacting devices, including
rankings, ratings, reviews, and audits to establish orders of worth. They are infrastructures because they
provide the invisible yet essential mechan isms for the flow of economic activity and exchange on
platforms. Illustrating the concept of evaluative infrastructure with the example of eBay, the paper's
contribution is to (1) provide an analytical vocabulary to capture the accounting practices underpinning
platforms as new organizational forms, and in so doing (2) extend accounting scholars' analytical focus
from hierarchical settings towards heterarchies. Conceptually, this shift from management accounting to
evaluative infrastructures entails a focus on relationality (evaluative infrastructures do not represent or
reference but relate things, people and ideas with each other); generativity (evaluative infrastructures do
not territorialize objects but disclose new worlds); and new forms of control (evaluative infrastructures
are not centres of calculation; rather, control is radically distributed, whilst power remains centralized).
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
“I look at the scaffold for the king from the carpenter's
perspective: The structure of the scaffold is of more interest
than the actual execution.”
Jean Cocteau
1. Introduction
This paper is motivated by a growing and disruptive economic
phenomenon: the rise of platforms as new organizational form.
Platform organizations include accommodation providers such as
Airbnb, ride-sharing companies such as Uber, service and product
marketplaces such as Taskrabbit or eBay, and even relationship
services such as eHarmony; indeed, There's an Uber for Everything
Now as the Wall Street Journal commented in 2015.
2
Traveling
under many names including platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016),
sharing economy (Sundararajan, 2016), collaborative consumption
(Botsman & Rogers, 2010), gig economy (Mulcahy, 2016), mesh
(Gansky, 2010), multi-sided markets (Evans & Schmalensee, 2016)
or commons-based peer production (Benkler, 2011), the phenom-
enon of platforms can be defined by distributed and often switch-
role producers (sellers) and consumers (buyers) interacting with
each other, digitally mediated by a third party, the platform owner.
Platforms organize distributed production (Benkler, 2002) and
collaborative consumption (Botsman & Rogers, 2010) without
direct control over the value creation process. Rather, platform
organizations' value-add is to provide an interface for interaction
and controlling mechanism for transactions between tens of
thousands, sometimes even millions of buyers and sellers who
might never meet in person. Platform owners' business models rest
on their ability to ensure trust between these buyers and sellers.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: kornberger@em-lyon.com (M. Kornberger).
1
Professor at EM Lyon, France, and visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh
Business School, UK and the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business,
Austria.
2
http://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-an-uber-for-everything-now-1430845789.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2017.05.002
0361-3682/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 60 (2017) 79e95
Through reputation systems that account for people's actions and
behaviours, platforms turn what could easily become “markets for
lemons” (Akerlof, 1970) into thriving exchanges. What allows them
to do so is a specific accounting regime e a regime that this paper
sets out to describe as evaluative infrastructure.
Taken the economic significance of platform organizations, this
seems a timely task. Digital technology and the move towards access
rather than ownership (Rifkin, 2001), among other factors, are fuel-
ling the rapid growth of platforms. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2014;
2016) estimates the transaction value facilitated by collaborative
econom y platforms in Eur ope to be V28 billion, tripling since 2013,
and the global revenue to be $335 billion by 2025. Platform organi-
zations have an extraordinary scale: as of 2014 eBay had 165 million
active users,
3
Uber was hosting over 1 million rides per day,
4
and
Airbnb was facilitating 155 million guest stays annually, surpassing
the Hilton Worldwide by 22 percent (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 20 14,
p.14). The valuations of theserelatively young organizations (many of
them “unicorns”) further indicate the economic significance of the
phenomenon. Eight years after its founding and with less than 8000
employees the ride-sharing platform Uber is valued at close to $70
billion d more than General Motors, which employs over 200,000
people and manufactures annually close to 10 million cars.
5
Eight
years after its founding and with only 1600 employees, Airbnb simi-
larly is valued at $30 billion dmore than Hilton Worldwide.
6
These
optimistic valuations are met with critical scrutiny of various re-
searchers, who argue that the “Uberification” of the economy is
resulting in a deterioration of labour standards amounting to the
marketization and financialization of everyday life (Davis, 2016;
Scholz, 2016). The contested political economy of platform capital-
ism (Martin, 2016) highlights the importance of better understanding
its inner workings, which are enabled in large measure by its novel
accounting regime. Toward this end we ask: What is the role of ac-
counting practices in platform organization and through which
mechanisms do they work? In other words, what is at stake is
whether and how accounting scholarship can contribute critically to
better our understanding of platforms as a disruptive organizational
form.
Turning from business to the bookshelf, two bodies of literature
in accounting prove helpful in articulating our research question.
On the one hand, the growing strand of literature attending to
supply chains and supply networks highlights the changing and
contested role of accounting concepts and practices in the forma-
tion and control of alliances, joint ventures, strategic partnerships,
outsourcing, and cooperative between independent units
(Håkansson & Lind, 2004; Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006; Caglio &
Ditillo, 2008). On the other hand, studies of accounting as a po-
wer/knowledge apparatus (see Miller & Power, 2013 for an over-
view), and more recently explorations of non-traditional forms of
accounting such as rankings, ratings and other classification re-
gimes (Kornberger & Carter, 2010; Jeacle & Carter, 2011; Pollock &
D'Adderio, 2012; Fourcade & Healy, 2013; Power, 2015) explore
processes of accounting which extend beyond organizational
boundaries.
These strands of literature offer a foundation for an investigation
of platform organization. However, as we elaborate below, much of
this literature remains beholden to what Hopwood (1996, p. 589)
criticised as the persistence of “accounting's hierarchical
consciousness”. Extending their unit of analysis from firms to
supply chains and networks, the first body of literature investigates
how firms, like “islands of conscious power in this ocean of un-
conscious co-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of
buttermilk” (to paraphrase the economist Dennis Holme Robertson,
quoted in Coase, 1937, p. 386), coordinate action; but in so doing
this literature remains wedded to notions of hierarchy and the
visible hand searching for efficiencies in closed supply chains.
Whilst thinking accounting as an apparatus of governmentality, the
second, more critical, strand of literature remains tied to a centralist
notion of power e the buttermilk is studied to understand the
formation of lumps of butter, to stretch the metaphor. Both litera-
ture represent points of departure for our own contribution.
The contribution of this paper is to propose and specify evalu-
ative infrastructure as an analytical concept with which to attend to
the accounting practices that help to structure platform organiza-
tion and in doing so extend accounting beyond its hierarchical
consciousness. The concept of evaluative infrastructure includes a
focus on relationality, generativity and on an evolving apparatus of
control that we describe as protocol. With the concept of rela-
tionality we propose that evaluate infrastructures do not represent
or reference pre-existing objects, but relate and recombine people,
ideas, and things so as to construct new economic subjects and
objects. With the concept of generativity, we propose that evalua-
tive infrastructures do not territorialize from a centre, but instead
disclose new worlds. And with the concept of protocol we propose
that control in evaluative infrastructures is radically distributed
whilst power remains centralized alluding to the interplay between
hierarchical and heterachical power relations.
These three concepts provide part and parcel of a vocabulary
with which to describe production in, and control of, platform or-
ganization. Put metaphorically: if we look at Manhattan today we
marvel at the skyscrapers from the early 20th century; yet in order
to understand their designs we have to study the race between
several intertwined infrastructures, most notably plumbing, lift
technology and finance (Koolhaas, 1978). This paper makes a ho-
mologous argument: in order to understand platform organization
(and by extension other, non-hierarchical, forms of economic ac-
tivity) we need to look at the invisible infrastructures that coordi-
nate and control platform activities. It is this paper's contention
that the focus on these evaluative infrastructures helps to equip
accounting scholars with critical instruments to study a set of
emerging phenomena that are related to platforms as new orga-
nizational form, including distributed innovation, crowd sourcing,
big data and other burgeoning phenomena.
This paper is structured as follows: in the next section we review
the literature that marks the point of departure for our argument.
We then develop the concept of evaluative infrastructures. This
conceptual work implies mobilizing a variety of different literature
that have discussed infrastructures in depth. In order to illustrate
the mechanisms and effects of evaluative infrastructures we pro-
vide the extended example of eBay as prototypical platform orga-
nization that is based, at least in large part, on such a novel
accounting regime. This calls for a caveat: eBay and related exam-
ples are not intended to provide closure but, to paraphrase Thomas
Schelling (1978), to spark curiosity for further investigation. The
paper concludes with a discussion of implications for research and
reflections for practice.
2. Accounting beyond its hierarchical consciousness?
2.1. Empirical context: the disruptive phenomenon of platform
organization
Our paper uses the phenomenon of platform organization as a
3
https://www.statista.com/topics/2181/ebay/.
4
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/12/17/uber-says-its-doing-1-
million-rides-per-day-140-million-in-last-year/#19515df97a68.
5
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-valuation-breakingviews-
idUSKBN14B23A.
6
http://qz.com/719157/airbnb-is-raising-money-at-a-30-billion-valuation/.
M. Kornberger et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 60 (2017) 79e9580
“tool for thinking” (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979): attending to
platforms that organize economic activity of third parties without
directly controlling them will facilitate the development of the
concept of evaluative infrastructure. While management account-
ing systems typically control production inside hierarchies, plat-
forms require evaluative infrastructures as accounting systems to
organize the economic activity they host. How can we describe this
new organizational phenomenon, and how does it differ from
networks, markets and hierarchies? The following observation
might be a good place to start looking for an answer:
The world's largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no cars. The world's
most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content. The
world's most valuable retailer, Alibaba, carries no stock. And the
world's largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no
property. Something interesting is happening.
7
That “something” refers to a disruptive organizational phe-
nomenon e platform organization.
8
Mediated by digital interfaces,
platform organizations are defined as “matchmakers” between
producers who offer excess capacity and other assets for consumers
to use, buy or simply enjoy (Evans & Schmalensee, 2016). Platform
organizations are a “new type of firm”, which provide “the [digital]
infrastructure to intermediate between different groups” (Srnicek,
2016, p. 12). Their strategic position between different user
groups makes them the “ground upon which their [users'] activities
occur, thereby giving it privileged access to record them” (Srnicek,
2016, p. 12). There are at least two main reasons for the rise of this
new organizational phenomenon. These include, first, the emer-
gence of knowledge, creativity, and human ingenuity as the key
resource in economic production over the past decades (Benkler,
2002). Know-how as resource is distributed across many actors,
sticky and tacit (von Hippel, 1978). Hence, echoing Hayek (1945),
models of distributed innovation such as open source have become
increasingly popular as they harness “the wisdom of the crowd”
(Surowiecki, 2005). A second reason is technology: the Internet
reduces search and other transaction costs facilitating the effective
coordination of distributed economic activity (D'Adderio & Pollock,
2014). Platforms are the organizational form that incorporate these
two fundamental changes into their structures and channel their
powers through their specific designs (Kornberger, 2016).
Platform organizations are distinct from hierarchies, markets
and networks and challenge their status as opposing and exclusive
forms of organization (Powell, 1990). Their owners hold limited
fixed assets, hire only few employees, and externalize the value
creation process; hence platform organizations question not only
extant organizational designs but also, quite fundamentally, the
idea of the firm (Coase, 1937), assumptions of the resource-based
perspective (Pernrose, 1959), and our understanding of value cre-
ation processes (Porter, 1985). Platform organizations also chal-
lenge network designs. According to Powell (1990) networks
consist of a finite number of organizations that form an alliance in
pursuit of mutually beneficial goals. Examples include learning
networks in the bio-tech industry where a network is de
fined as set
of inter-organizational relationships (see Powell, Koput, & Smith-
Doerr, 1996) as well as modular production networks arranged
around common design rules (Sanchez & Mahoney, 1996;
D'Adderio & Pollock, 2014). In contrast with such networks, plat-
form organizations are more market-based as they invite literally
millions of hitherto unknown producers and consumers to transact
with each other; the difference is quantitative but also qualitative:
they do not extend or enlarge a set of relations, but populate a place
with the possibilities for relations to form. At the same time, plat-
form organizations also retain hierarchical features as they control
the proprietary evaluative infrastructure making the organizational
form possible.
Different disciplines have studied platform organizations
including product development, technology strategy and industrial
economics (Baldwin & Woodard, 2008). Early scholarship focused
on the relationship between innovation and platforms (Kim &
Kogut, 1996) and especially digital innovation (Yoo, Boland,
Lyytinen, & Majchrzak, 2012). Work on platform leadership
(Gawer & Cusumano, 2002) and governance inquired into trade-
offs between adoption and appropriability (West, 2003) and be-
tween diversity and control (Boudreau, 2012). Platform economics
investigated the dynamics of platform evolution, with a focus on
network effects and other (positive) externalities (Lerner & Tirole,
2002). From an organizational design perspective, platforms were
characterized by a common set of design rules. As Baldwin and
Woodard (2008: 3) argue:
the fundamental architecture behind all platforms is essentially
the same: namely, the system is partitioned into a set of “core”
components with low variety and a complementary set of “pe-
ripheral” components with high variety (Tushman & Murmann,
1998). The low-variety components constitute the platform.
They are the long-lived elements of the system and thus
implicitly or explicitly establish the system's interfaces, the rules
governing interactions among the different parts.
Here the platform represents a stable interface for organizing
communication, collaboration and control for distributed produc-
tion (Kornberger, 2016). Accounting devices constitute the low-
variety ‘core’ components of the platform. Indeed, platform in-
terfaces consist of an ecology of accounting devices in the form of
rankings, lists, classifications, stars and other symbols (‘likes, ‘links’,
tags, and other traces left through clicks) which relate buyers,
sellers, and objects. These devices provide the “format and furni-
ture” (Pollock & D'Adderio, 2012) for judgment, search and selec-
tion to be undertaken, and for matching, interaction, and relations
among diverse users to be achieved in distinctive and consequen-
tial ways (Fourcade & Healy, 2013). More generally, accounting
devices provide much of the “trust infrastructures” (Sundararajan,
2016, p. 60) necessary to prevent platforms from degenerating
into markets for lemons (Akerlof, 1970), in particular when it comes
to “high-stakes transactions” (Sundararajan, 2016, p. 98) such as
renting fully furnished private apartments on AirBnB, which may
test their limits.
Therein lies the puzzle that sparked our curiosity and motivated
us to look into the accounting regime underpinning platforms:
since value creation is externalized and occurs on the platform
without the platform owner being able to control it hierarchically,
we need to think of accounting practices as horizontally distributed
as well. It is important to note that this proposition which we will
explore in this paper does not suggest heterarchical accounting
regimes would replace more traditional hierarchical forms of ac-
counting. Indeed, internally platform organizations may resemble
hierarchically organized firms. Airbnb for instance employs around
1600 staff and uses presumably more or less traditional accounting
practices to control and direct their behaviour. However, the focus
of this paper is on how Airbnb (to stay with the example) organizes
7
Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media,
quoted in Hamish McRae, The Independent, Tuesday May 5 2015.
8
A note on terminology: we use to term platforms to refer to the digital interfaces
that organize platform production. We specify the platform owners as the firms that
legally own the interfaces, and we use to term platform organizations to refer to the
units or organizational forms within which production occurs, often specified by
the name of the platform owners, as well as (in the singular form) the phenomenon
and effects of this mode of production.
M. Kornberger et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 60 (2017) 79e95 81
value creation e i.e. the 155 million guest stays annually which are
provided by users Airbnb has virtually no control over. Because
value creation itself is accomplished by hundreds of thousands of
people outside hierarchical relationships we need to investigate the
specificity of the accounting regime that underpins such decen-
tralized production. As first attempt to solve our puzzle we turned
towards the accounting literature that have challenged, if not
overcome, accounting's hierarchal consciousness.
2.2. Theoretical context: accounting for platforms
Much of the “hierarchical consciousness” which Hopwood and
others lament had and continues to have much to do with the
“prevalent patterns of organizational change” (Hopwood, 1996,p.
589) e namely the development and proliferation of the traditional
firm. Management accounting, consequently, has been centrally
concerned with coordination and control within, and from the
perspective of, the hierarchical firm. As Håkansson and Lind (2004,
p. 52) noted aptly “accounting and the classical market-hierarchy
dichotomy are well adjusted to each other”.
However, over the past decades two specific strands of ac-
counting literature have challenged this hierarchical orientation
and explored accounting in non-hierarchical settings. On the one
hand, a number of empirically driven studies have analysed lateral
accounting regimes of and in buyer-supplier relations, extended
supply chains and network organizations (Håkansson & Lind, 2004;
Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006). On the other hand, a variety of critical
investigations have been undertaken into accounting as apparatus
and regime of governmentality, extending within but also between
and beyond the organization as such (Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood,
1985; Miller & Power, 2013). We will now turn to these two liter-
ature as they provide the conceptual points of departure for our
investigation.
2.3. Point of departure # 1: accounting in inter-organizational
networks
An important strand of accounting literature attending to supply
chains and supply networks has highlighted tensions in the re-
lationships between coordination, operation and appropriation in
alliances, joint ventures, strategic partnerships, outsourcing, and
cooperation between independent units (Caglio & Ditillo, 2008;
Dekker, 2004, 2008; Håkansson & Lind, 2004; Lind & Thrane,
2010). As argued by Håkansson and Lind (2004: 52), the chal-
lenges which accounting confronts as strong distinctions between
hierarchies and markets are complicated by network configura-
tions of various kinds:
Relationship coordination may cause a problem from an ac-
counting point of view as contemporary accounting depends on
defined, limited entities. This new form of coordination blurs
the clearly de
fined boundaries which accounting presupposes
and requires.
The effect of the blurring of boundaries resides in the problem
that such firms share production function but not objective func-
tion since they are autonomous firms that rely in their activities on
complements added by others (Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006).
Therefore, supply chain and network accounting are lateral in
principle, but often, as research shows, in practice such accounting
is concerned with the formation of relative hierarchies between a
powerful and a less powerful (set of) firms (Frances & Garnsey,
1996; Kraus & Str
€
omsten, 2016; Seal, Berry, & Cullen, 2004), e.g.
through open book accounting (Agndal & Nilsson, 2010; Alenius,
Lind, & Str
€
omsten, 2015; Kajüter & Kulmala, 2005; Windolph &
Moeller, 2012), or of the dynamic development of relations be-
tween the involved parties as they are mediated by accounting
(Chua & Mahama, 2007; Coad & Cullen, 2006; Mouritsen, Hansen,
& Hansen, 2001; Thrane & Hald, 2006).
This research raises the issue of whether it is possible to un-
derstand a supply chain or a network as a governed entity. Ac-
counting here tends to change random interactions into firm-like
relationships in an attempt at coordinating already known and
existing firms by accounting mechanisms that extend well beyond
the firm (Håkansson & Lind, 2004). The concern is to assign roles
and responsibilities that can be contracted or at least mediated by
accounting across the supply chain. Therefore, current accounting
research focuses on how (or not) accounting helps to create ‘meta-
organization’ resembling a hierarchy de-facto if not de-jure.
In this literature on networks and inter-firm relations, therefore,
production is distributed among firms in a perhaps ever-growing
supply chain but the focal firm still remains a key conceptual
parameter. In supply chains and networks, production is decen-
tralized but still attributable; the boundary of the firm is extended,
but only to include a finite number of other firms. Conceptually
therefore the
firm still seeks, as in the classical hierarchical model,
to establish control and coordination among its various uni-
tsdthese units just exist down the supply chain and beyond the
legal limits of the organization (Håkansson & Lind, 20 04; Van der
Meer-Kooistra & Scapens, 2008). Hence our first point of depar-
ture: to capture radically distributed organizational forms such as
eBay, Uber or Airbnb we need to originate our conceptual thinking
from somewhere other than a focal firm which distributes and ar-
ranges production and relations that were originally performed in-
house.
2.4. Point of departure # 2: territorializing from the centre?
The second, perhaps more critical strand of literature in-
vestigates accounting in its social and institutional context
(Hopwood, 1983). This body of work that has explicitly sought to
capture the nature of accounting as an “ensemble” (Miller & Napier,
1993), “constellation” (Burchell et al., 1985), “complex” (Miller &
Power, 2013; Miller & Rose, 1990)or“assemblage” (Miller, 1998).
Such work, exemplified in Miller and O'Leary's (1994) now classic
account of the transformation of American manufacturing, sees
accounting as a series of relations, relays, and linkages between
heterogeneous elements which unfold in a variety of different lo-
cations. Understood in this way, accounting “links up different ac-
tors with a common narrative and may constitute a network of
relations within and beyond the boundaries of the enterprise” (Miller
& Power, 2013, p. 581; emphasis added).
However, much of the vocabulary and theorization about space,
representation, and power that this literature employs in order to
conceptualize these assemblages, remains wedded to hierarchy.
The accounting complex that has been investigated and described
is one that is deeply programmatic and attentive to control (e.g.
Graham, 2010; Townley, 1995). As such, researchers have been
primarily concerned with the localization of power: the creation of
“obligatory passage points” or “centres of calculation” (Latour,
1986) that allow for “government at a distance
” (Miller & Rose,
1990) and “long distance control” through accounting (Jones,
2010; Robson, 1992). The topography of space upon which ac-
counting has been shown to be assembled is one with a distinctive
centre and periphery, exemplified in the notion of territorialization
which accounting complexes are often seen to be part and product.
As Miller and Power (2013: 579-80) explain: “Territorialization is
achieved by linking ideas of the market with instruments of ac-
counting so as to allow households, hospitals, schools, retired
persons, or whatever to be constituted as accounting subjects
M. Kornberger et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 60 (2017) 79e9582
