Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

The Role of Predictive Analytics in Making Organizational Futures

• In Event: Qualitative Research in Management Accounting

Abstract

Abstract
This study investigates the role of predictive technologies in financial forecasting practices. Based on a qualitative case study and by drawing on prior work on the performative capacity of algorithms, this paper sets out to explore the dynamics between forecasting experts and algorithms. Seeing predictive analytics as an “instrument of imagination,” the paper analyses the socio-technical dynamics that stabilize algorithm-based accounting information as undisputed facts. Despite the recent data imperative, our analysis reveals how the work of translating uncertain futures into one manageable present is constituted by a constant interplay of forecaster-algorithms interactions and forecaster-forecaster interactions. In this way, we show how forecasting experts draw on interaction networks and modes of foretalk to bring to light local narratives and novel imaginaries about organizational futures, which escape from easy integration in calculative models.
Keywords: forecasting, predictive analytics, algorithms, imagined futures

Authors

• Lukas Löhlein, WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management

• Utz Schaeffer, WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management

• Leona Wiegmann, Monash University