Jan Pfister is Associate Professor of Management Accounting at the Department of Accounting and Finance at Turku School of Economics. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at the House of Innovation (HOI) and the Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets (Misum) at Stockholm School of Economics.

Drawing on interpretive and critical methodologies, his research focuses on a range of topics related to performance measurement and management. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Performance management for a sustainable future”, which received funding of half a million Euro from the Academy of Finland for the years 2022-2026; and the Lead Investigator of an ethnographic study investigating poverty elevation in rural India in collaboration with the University of California at Berkeley. Jan serves on the editorial board of Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability Journal; is a member of the International Committee of the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the American Accounting Association (AAA); organizer of the Seminar in Interdisciplinary Accounting Research (SIAR), featuring scholars interested in accounting within its social and organizational context (link to seminar); and co-organizer of the Qualitative Management Accounting Research Group (QMARG), a forum for advanced management accounting researchers in the Nordics. He has been teaching at the bachelor, master, PhD, and executive levels, and supervising several PhD students.

Before joining the University of Turku, he had a permanent position at Lancaster University Management School and spent two years as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a Docentship from the University of Jyväskylä and a Doctorate from the University of Zurich. His dissertation was published as a book by Springer, entailed a paper that won a Best Paper Award at the Research Ethics Symposium of the American Accounting Association, and received recognition by Financial Executives International, that disseminated a summary as Issue Alert to its members (link to book).