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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.

The ability of accounting to produce effects has been widely acknowledged in accounting literature. This paper argues however that in order for accounting to have an impact on people, its numbers need to be interpretable by its intended users. But what happens in situations where people are considered as inhibited in reading and interpreting numbers? This paper investigates how accounting numbers are presented to individuals believed to be impaired in their ability to make sense of numerical figures. It does so by moving the empirical focus beyond the borders of the professional organisation and into the private sphere of everyday life, examining how a televised financial makeover show re-presents accounting information in order to turn its participants into financially responsible citizens. The paper’s empirical findings give reasons for problematising the conditions under which accounting is able to affect people, concluding that, without taking people’s ability to interpret numbers into account, the possibilities of the numbers having an impact on their users risk falling short.

The issue of how to comply with various needs for financial information is said to have low priority within the financial reporting field. Prior research has demonstrated that rather than aiming at including all sorts of potential users, standard setters for example tend to ignore and exclude everyone but the sophisticated ones. This paper, however, investigates the preparation of financial information intended to be used by different kinds of private investors, sophisticated as well as unsophisticated. Informed by categorisation theory, the paper examines the means whereby a pension insurance company determines how numbers and financial accounts need to be presented so as to come across as useful to different pension saver characters. The paper demonstrates how this inclusion dilemma is connected to practices of relevance building, and that relevance is assumed to be a question of individual sense-making and contextualisation. The paper’s findings problematise the influential power of accounting by implying that a direct impact of financial accounts cannot be taken for granted. Rather, in order for an account to have effects on its intended users, it is assumed that the account needs to be made relevant by means of re-moulding it in accordance with the specifics of its user.

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.