Emerging Accounting Practices in Platform Organsations: An Exploration of a DLT-based Platform for Circular Economy in the Transformation of Waste into Resources

This study aims to understand the ways in the conditions under which the evaluative infrastructure of digital platforms emerge and stabilises by investigation the design of a DLT-based platform to construct goods as being of value in the context of a Circular Economy. Building upon research into emerging accounting practices within digital platforms organisations and valuation work, we present our findings based on 30 months of participant observation with practitioners. The authors followed practitioners inthe-making of a digital platform based on a distributed ledger technology aimed at facilitating exchange of food by-products between businesses in order to enable a transition towards a circular economy. We find that in the design of the digital platform valuation work focuses on the evaluative infrastructure that enables the exchange of the good, rather than on the good itself. In particular, it is the new evaluative infrastructure which enables to value a good as a resource rather than as waste in the context of a Circular Economy. We find that actors engage in three different yet overlapping modes of valuation work: contextualising, modelling and stabilising. We find that each mode of valuation are informed by the use of different valuation devices, each reflecting the evaluative principles of their proposers, which produce effects on the form of the evaluative infrastructure and consistently to the way in which Circular Economy is understood and implemented.