Bringing Back Charlie Chaplin: Accounting as Catalyst in the Creation of an Authentic Product of Popular Culture

This paper examines the role of calculative practices in the creation of the Charlie Chaplin museum, a multiparty cultural project with the mission to ‘bring back’ the great entertainer in an ‘authentic’ and commercially viable way. As with many other cultural organizations, there are multiple parties with competing and even conflicting objectives, leading to disagreement not only about the final objectives but also about the evaluative...