Christner, Carl Henning

Carl Henning Christner joined the Department of Accounting as Assistant Professor in January 2020. Before that he was a Jan Wallander post-doc researcher, after completing his PhD at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2015. His PhD thesis, called the Valuable Organisation - a study of how organisational activities are calculated, controlled and made valuable, has received multiple awards, including the prestigious Oskar Silléns Pris for best PhD thesis in Business Administration in Sweden.

Dr. Christner’s research explores accounting as a social and organisational practice. His research interest focuses on two interrelated theoretical issues. The first issue relates to the question of how things are valued and made valuable in organisations and society. The second issue relates to the question of how control is exercised in contemporary organisational settings. Accounting, in all its varied forms, is central to both these issues. What is valuable is typically closely correlated to the calculative practices through which things are measured and evaluated. These calculative practices are implicated in attempts of controlling organisational behaviour, rather than just being neutral representations. Working together with various colleagues, Dr. Christner’s research has explored these issues in various empirical settings, such as product development, industrial production, venture capital driven innovation and capital market actors’ investment practices. Theoretically, his research is grounded in a post-structuralist research tradition.

Dr. Christner has an extensive teaching experience covering a broad range of topics within the areas of management accounting, management control and financial analysis.