Accounting, Simultaneity and Relative Completeness: The Sales and Operations Planning Forecast and the Enactment of the ‘Demand Chain’

This study adds to the literature on accounting incompleteness and instability an understanding of how accounting acts upon an object that is practised as a multiple. It explores how accounting, in the form of a sales and operations planning (S&OP) forecast, helps discover the objections attached to the various enactments of an object multiple, namely a ‘demand chain’ - a lateral ordering of the firm's production and products from customers backward to suppliers - and translate these objections into decision mechanisms. The paper finds a process of accumulation of accountings that contributes to the enactment of the ‘demand chain’ multiple. In this process, accounting becomes both performative and provocative. As a source of performativity, accounting is relatively complete because it turns each emerging objection into a specific decision model, enacting the ‘demand chain’ in a certain way. As a force of provocation, accounting stimulates new objections to emerge against what accounting reveals about the ‘demand chain’; this adds new accountings onto existing ones, all of which exist simultaneously.