Accounting, actorhood and actors: A comment on: Casting call: The expanding nature of actorhood in U.S. Firms, 1960-2010 by Patricia Bromley and Amanda Sharkey

The paper by Bromley & Sharkey (2017) brings to the fore the notion of actorhood as developed in the work of John Meyer and his colleagues, which has been only tangentially mobilised within accounting scholarship. This commentary proposes some reasons for this limited mobilisation and discusses the intellectual value of the concept of actorhood for accounting research and new institutionalism in organisation studies more broadly. In particular, it offers some reflections on how actorhood in new institutionalism, action in actor-network theory and subjectification in the Foucauldian tradition may be placed in a productive dialogue.