When numbers perform : The performativity of calculative practices in shaping eco-innovation

This thesis investigates the interplay between calculative practices and eco-innovation, examining both how calculative practices adapt to emerging eco-innovations and how they, in turn, enable or constrain their development. Eco-innovation involves creating solutions that deliver value while reducing environmental impacts across their lifecycle, thereby challenging conventional understandings of value creation and assessment. Developing such innovations requires the reshaping of calculative practices so that new forms of value, cost, and impact can be defined, measured, and made visible. By selecting, quantifying, and valuing particular dimensions of eco-innovation, calculative practices do more than represent these innovations—they actively participate in shaping them. Drawing on performativity theory, this thesis analyses the active role of calculative practices in constituting eco-innovation. The thesis is based on four papers: a literature review, two papers drawing on action case studies, and one based on an interview study. The findings suggest that calculative practices adapt to eco-innovation by integrating the shifts in value creation it introduces. This implies embracing a value-based approach, accounting for solution-level cost impacts, adopting life-cycle costing from suppliers’ and customers’ perspectives, accounting for hidden costs that make sustainable value visible, and incorporating environmental costs and externalities. The results further suggest that calculative practices for managing eco-innovation adapt by taking an outside-in approach, including the use of target costing to reduce uncertainties and enhance customer value creation. While adapting calculative practices is necessary for making eco-innovation outcomes visible, their performative influence relies on existing conditions. The thesis develops a dual process indicating that the performative effects of calculative practices depend on the dynamics between supporting and hindering conditions. When supporting conditions prevail, calculative practices enable eco-innovation. These include collaboration with stakeholders, availability of guidelines, education, strategic commitment, and regulatory pressure. However, when hindering conditions dominate, calculative practices constrain eco-innovation. Such conditions include short-term logic, uncertainties about long-term value, and measurement challenges. The thesis contributes to management accounting and innovation management by explaining how calculative practices perform to make eco-innovation visible and offers a framework illustrating mechanisms through which calculative practices enable or constrain eco-innovation.