Hybridising accounting and caring: A symmetrical study of how costs and needs are connecting in Danish child protection work

In this dissertation, I investigate a problem that is currently debated within both the popular, political and academic arenas: Namely, the potential demise of professionaldecisions, as we knew them before they were transformed by the calculative practices of management accounting. With the investigation of this problem, I take part in a quest for better professional decisions. However, rather than aiming to reveal a possible demise or point out what could be done to make decisions better, I aim to find out how it is even possible to reach decisions, when elements as different as a child’s needs and the costs of a service are to be connected in the process. How is it possible, for instance, to count costs and sense the needs of a child at the same time? To be both accurate and ambiguous? Moreover, how is it possible to make conclusions about costs, when a child’s life is at stake? The purpose of inquiring into such questions is to investigate the day-to-day work of ‘hybridising’ accounting and caring practices. I hope my investigation into the different and practical efforts of hybridising accounting and
caring will reveal that each decision is the result of a tremendously complex work of valuing, calculating, organising, ordering, connecting, separating, arranging, associating, timing and spacing all the heterogeneous elements that decisions are made of.