How do people both account for and steer what they have done? Ethnography of non-financial reporting

Most studies on Non-Financial Reporting (NFR) have approached the accountability practice from an external perspective and studied CSR reports through legitimacy issues. This ethnographical study goes into the black box and questions the internal making of these accounts. Through Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of signs (Peirce, 1931, 1974), I question how people's position within the accountability relationship impacts the way of making accounts. This paper shows that the making of CSR accounts involves several mandates where agents and mandators have different purposes and perspectives on the representation of the activity. I analyze NFR through three mandates and show that, according to their position, purpose (steering or reporting) and the mandate in which they are involved, people conjure different "ghosts" (Lorino, 2018, p. 54) to make sense of what is going on. I argue that this difference between mandators and agents, characterized by a gap in terms of distance to experience, leads to an incompatibility between the reporting and steering functions of NFR. I show that NFR is rather used to set up a remote management control system promoting the symbolic dimension of signs at the expense of their iconic and indexical dimensions used for steering. The reporting function is so pervasive that it tends to annihilate the steering function of NFR. My results shed light on areas of tension that need to be considered in the quest for a more dialogic accounting.