Dashboarding a pandemic: Creating a system of meaning.

Event Date: 27 October 2021

Speaker: Dr Muhammad Al Mohameed, Copenhagen Business School

Time: 2pm via Zoom - please contact donna.irving@strath.ac.uk for sign up information

Introduction:

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been traced and tracked around the world in governmental dashboards. These display predefined COVID-19 indicators, meters, graphs and benchmarks, which are updated on regular bases. Such dashboards can been seen as bundles of contingent and relational processes aimed at shaping constitution and operation while produce a frame of meaning for actors and set of actors, capable of shaping their cognition and their actions. This fits within the Accounting debate that has raged for several academic generations over how accounting data and information are produced, whilst inevitably looking at how protocols, processes, measures, standards and principals are designed, negotiated and debated. The different school of thoughts in this debate meets in suggesting that how accounting process and its outcomes are ontologically defined and delimited is not a neutral nor technical process, but rather multifaceted normative, political, and ethical process, which therefore influences the subsequent analysis, interpretation and action. My starting point in this paper is to build on the above debate and expand our understanding of the role that accounting plays in a world of health and social crises while explore the new visibilities that can be forthcoming from it.

Published: 21 October 2021