In organisations, accounting—understood broadly as calculative practices—is claimed to serve as a critical vehicle when introducing forms of individual financial responsibility. Whereas most prior accounting research has been preoccupied with asserting this claim, this paper opens an opportunity to examine the limitations of accounting as a technology of responsibilisation. It does so by moving the empirical focus beyond the borders of people’s work settings and into the private sphere of everyday life, investigating governmental efforts to turn high school students into financially responsible citizens. The analysis, informed by framing theory, reveals that the efficiency of accounting is conditioned by people’s calculative understanding. Hence, in situations where individuals are expected to lack this basic calculative competency, accounting is presumed to be inappropriate as a means of introducing financial responsibility. This has implications for re-considering how the relation between accounting and responsibility is constituted.

This paper comments on the conceptualisation of financial literacy by investigating the way it is defined, problematised, and operationalised in efforts to overcome its perceived impediments. The backdrop of this study is the idea that the financial literacy movement goes hand in hand with the financialisation of society. By reporting from a study of practices of financial literacy, the aim is to problematise prior literature by disentangling the notion of financial literacy from the assumption of a singular capability that, when gained, automatically effects people’s financial practices. The paper draws on recent developments in literacy research, New Literacy Studies, and on its division between autonomous and ideological definitions of literacy. The empirical illustrations originate from efforts made to decrease financial illiteracy among Swedish adolescents and the demand for financial literacy in audit committees. Contrary to earlier studies, the paper demonstrates that financial literacy does not merely refer to an ostensive character that researchers may find lacking among marginalised actors in society. As such, financial literacy cannot be viewed as merely the ability to read and write finance and accounting. Instead, financial literacy is a concept that needs to be situated and studied in practice since what constitutes and applies to it varies with time and place.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the demands on a sufficient audit. Previous research has suggested that the production of comfort is not only about producing an audit according to ‘the manual’ but that professional aspects such as the appearance of the auditor also are of importance. In practice the relationship between, and the relative importance of, process and professional aspects of an audit are however unclear. In this paper this question is probed by analyzing the demands on a sufficient audit by an actor that in its jurisdiction is an obligatory point of passage for the framing of a sufficient audit: the Swedish supervisory board of public accountants (SSBPA). The material that is investigated is the disciplinary cases published by the SSBPA. The image of a sufficient audit that materializes from this investigation is of an audit that meets the demands of professional appearance.