Séminaire de recherche de
l’École de comptabilité

Financial forecasting as illusio: how actors foster emotional trust in numbers

The literature has explored how actors develop trust in financial forecasts, highlighting how actors seek to reach consensus about the quality of information through more or better knowledge. Missing from this literature is an engagement with emotions, specially, how emotions  intervene in the development of trust in financial forecasts. In this study, we address this question.  Based on an ethnographic case study of a candidature for the Olympic Winter Games, we provide an account of how project managers configured and used financial forecasts for this megaproject, and how they established trust in forecasts vis-à-vis prevailing cost controversies. We mobilize the sociology of trust and Bourdieu’s concept of illusio to show how project managers were emotionally invested in the bidding process, which led them to develop emotional trust in their forecasts even though (or precisely because) the numbers remained soft and were considered futile by outsiders. Our findings suggests that trust in financial forecasts is not necessarily grounded in more and better information, as suggested by the literature, but instead in an emotional investment. Moreover, this emotional trust withstands cognitive reasoning because actors can trust information even when its quality fails to exceed a minimally accepted level.