Thus, a challenge for researchers is how to make these
seemingly silent and passive non-human actants talk. The
solution, we suggest is to investigate what non-human actants
make actors do and how they bend the actions of actors.
As such, we focused on the many accounting
templates used by the corporate headquarters to monitor
the performance of the 51 subsidiaries worldwide. These
included business plans, strategy memos, accounting templates
(e.g. budgets, forecasts, ‘Accounting Cascades’, Balanced
Scorecards), performance surveys and measures,
and slide presentations. News articles were also collected.
We looked at how local actors in Australia were reading
and using the templates; how they populated and filled
in empty fields and the controversies this created. The
aim was to learn how the templates framed and conditioned
the interests, emotions and actions of local actors.