Jan

Pfister

Jan Pfister is Associate Professor of Management Accounting at the Department of Accounting and Finance at Turku School of Economics and an affiliated researcher at the House of Sustainable Society at Stockholm School of Economics.

Drawing on interpretive qualitative methods and interdisciplinary perspectives, his research focuses on performance measurement and management, and more broadly on accounting as a social and organisational practice. His current research develops a new paradigm for performance management in research and practice, examining the conditions under which performance cultures in private and public organisations support not only economic outcomes but also psychological safety, well-being, sustainability, and resilience.

As part of this work, he is Principal Investigator of an international research programme supported by a half-million-euro grant from the Research Council of Finland. The agenda is set out in the paper Performance Management in the Prosocial Market Economy: A New Paradigm for Economic Performance and Sustainability and explained further in a recent commentary Rethinking Collective Performance: A New Economic Paradigm.

Jan serves on the editorial boards of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, and Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management. He is a member of the International Committee of the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association, the New Paradigm Coalition, and the Corporate Resilience Roundtable, and chairs the Seminar in Interdisciplinary Accounting Research.

At the Department of Accounting and Finance, Jan is responsible for postgraduate studies and for the management accounting field. He teaches and supervises at master’s, doctoral, and executive levels. He welcomes doctoral students interested in qualitative research and the field of management accounting.

A highlight of his academic career was the co-authored publication of the first interpretive qualitative field study to appear in The Accounting Review, a leading U.S. accounting journal traditionally associated with quantitative positivist research. Before joining the University of Turku, he held a permanent position at Lancaster University Management School and spent two years as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Switzerland, he earned his doctorate from the University of Zurich and holds a docentship from the University of Jyväskylä. His dissertation, later published as a book by Springer, included a paper that received the Best Paper by PhD Student Award at the Ethics Symposium of the American Accounting Association.