Abstract
This thesis examines the role of accounting in the construction of markets. This study is motivated by the complexities and opportunities that markets present, as well as the limited understanding as to how accounting performs in the construction of markets. Two research questions are raised. First, how does accounting perform in market making? And, second, how do markets and other types of measurement and contexts, perform in the making of accounting? This thesis examines these research questions by means of two articles that interrogate the making of Australia’s first nation-wide carbon market. The first of these articles follows actors involved in the making of the market in a longitudinal analysis of archival documents spanning 15 years. The second article utilises interview and archival data to examine the calculative practices and technologies by which greenhouse gas emissions are quantified by engineers, so that they can be valued by accounting. Combined, these two articles contribute to the accounting literature on performativity as follows. (i) Article 1 reveals that accounting technologies afford compromises that legitimise controversy. (ii) Article 1 concludes that accounting technologies can enable markets in ways that economics alone cannot. (iii) Article 2 illustrates how market signals in the form of a carbon price, as well as other types of measurement, can cause emissions and therefore the accounting entity to vary. (iv) Article 2 challenges therefore an uncritical acceptance of that which constitutes accounting measurement. Together, these two articles encompass the calculative foundations from which accounting made the Australian market work.