بودجه زیبایی شناسی: نقش تمرین محاسباتی در تولید فرهنگ مردمی

The processes used in the production of popular culture have received little attention in the management accounting literature. While the broader organizational literature has highlighted paradoxical nature of managing in the cultural industries given the combined imperatives of art and commerce, there are few accounts of how creative labour is managed. Many cultural products are produced in temporary organizations where project members are challenged to deliver something new by a deadline. Keeping these large scale projects ‘on budget’ is no trivial accomplishment, but the role of calculative practice in this process has yet to be understood. This paper draws insights from an 82-day ethnography study of a dramatic television series production as it unfolded in real-time to show how the micro-processes of calculative practice are interwoven into the diverse disciplines that constitute the project team. The main contribution of this study is a grounded process model that highlights how the budget is implicated in different forms of calculation that work in combination to bring together the creative aspirations of the scripts and the financial parameters of the project. Further, the evaluative aspects of calculative practice play a vital role in the creation of these singular goods.