This article examines the language of numbers as it is used in talk within a contemporary organization to provide a better understanding of the ways speech acts, performed during the construction of accounts, contribute to the process of organizing. Based on an in-depth case study of the site budgetary control process in a French construction firm, it shows that the business of doing calculations through talk generates respective obligations and, in turn, plays a central role in the constitution of the organization. Hence, this article shows how accounting, in all of its manifestations, produces the organization and does not simply occur within it.
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