Accounting and slack – in between efficiency and waste

Purpose This paper aims to understand how slack resources, i.e. extra or surplus resources beyond what an organization typically needs for its normal operations, are created in the ongoing dynamics between efficient resource use and wasteful resource use – dynamics shaped by accounting. The ambition is to re-energize a discussion about slack – especially in relation to resilience – within the accounting literature, while showing its relevance to debates also in the management literature. Design/methodology/approach The study examines historically constructed boundaries between accounting, healthcare, and social care in Swedish elder care, and how these boundaries were challenged during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is based on interviews with 50 professionals across multiple occupational groups: managers, controllers, accountants, administrators, nurses, assistant nurses, and social workers in two municipalities. Findings Slack is produced and made utilizable in the contested space between efficiency and waste: when organizational actors strive to extend the purposefulness of resources, making slack part of the “normal”, casting it as resources that can contribute to organizational efficiency in everyday operations, accounting tends to work to delimit and eliminate slack resources, casting them as waste. It is within these dynamics that slack resources achieve their potential, become utilizable and multifunctional, and where a balance between resilience and wastefulness can be achieved. Originality/value The paper contributes by offering a new perspective on the relationship between accounting, slack, efficiency and waste. To do so, the paper uses rich qualitative empirical material to engage in a discussion between notions of slack based in both the accounting and management literatures. Future studies could adopt such a broader view of slack to better understand the balance between slack as a potential and multifunctionality, and slack as waste.