The heart and soil of value-based business: emerging circular business network and vernacular accountings

The way individual actors in organisations are involved in local social orders and handle knowledge to manage everyday tasks may take various forms not sanctioned by formal organisational hierarchy, yet with the potential to affect a company’s managerial work and guide the development of formal practices. This qualitative case study deploys the concept of vernacular accountings (Kilfoyle et al., 2013) to an organisation building a business in a circular economy (CE) context. The case illustrates locally self-generated accountings as an inherent part of an organisation’s management system’s development and as tools individuals apply to manage their occupational tasks to cope with a diversity of beliefs and traditions within CE networks. The case organisation is an intermediary of industrial side streams circulation in the agricultural sector, allowing for examination of the role human–nature relationships and local understandings play in developing organisational processes and accounting practices. Moreover, the study illustrates how vernacular accountings may reveal deficiencies in formal officially sanctioned systems and thus contribute to developing management accounting and control practices. In this view, the way individuals interact, participate in vernacular information economies and produce information to justify their decisions may play a key role in understanding management accounting and control in a nonconventional business environment. The study also emphasises the importance of understanding various orientations towards sustainability and nature embraced by participants in CE business networks, suggesting that vernacular accountings may hold the potential to capture this diversity.