5. Conclusions
The requirement to account explicitly for research impact was, and is, a radical change to the operational logic of UK universities. Even though sub-disciplines and specific organizations may have historically oriented themselves primarily to a logic of use value, the 2014 REF in the UK has transformed this into a field-wide norm. At the centre of this transformation is the emergence of the ICS. This is an entirely new accounting device which has been used to explore the question of ‘how accounting begins’. It is clear, as genealogy teaches us, that there are multiple contingent beginnings of accounting systems and we should not expect ‘any general theory of crisis driven accounting change’ (Hopwood, 1987 p.231). Or, as institutionalists might put it: ‘the emergence of new practices results from spatially dispersed, heterogenous activity by actors with varying kinds and levels of resources’ (Lounsbury & Crumley, 2007: 993). Yet if there is no general theory of how accounting begins, forty years of scholarship in Accounting, Organizations and Society has nevertheless provided considerable insights into important elements of the dynamics of accounting origination, not least into how the alignment of arenas creates possibilities for agency and for innovation. This paper has created a dialogue between some of this work and the specific case of impact accounting in the UK.
