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This paper explores budgetary practices in a Tanzanian university after decentralization.

Data were collected through interviews, document analysis, and observation. Moreover, Bourdieu's theory was used in open and axial coding procedures for data analysis.

The findings show that decentralized budgeting was a disillusionment. Administrators failed to transfer financial authority to resource recipients. Budgetary practices were shaped by the social structure/budget cycle (field), resources possessed by budgetary actors (capital) and the sincerity patterns of actors in budgetary practices (habitus). Most resource recipients had insincerity in budgeting habitus deploying subversive strategy, while the minority had sincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying submissive strategy. On the other hand, administrators had sincerity and insincerity in budgeting habitus, deploying conservative strategy.

In order to enhance effective decentralization, resource recipients should be provided with adequate financial resources and budgeting skills. Furthermore, they should be trusted and recognized. Moreover, in order to shape budgeting strategies and practices towards achieving organizational objectives, managements should identify and work on internal, external and technical budgetary constraints. In addition, they should promote sincerity in budgeting habitus as habitus can be created, altered, and reproduced through knowledge.

This is the first paper to investigate budgetary practices in a university setting, employing all Bourdieu's six theoretical concepts. It contributes to Bourdieu's theory by introducing a submissive strategy. In addition, it introduces “episteme” concept as the opposite of “doxa.” Moreover, the paper responds to the call by Deering and Sá (2018) to investigate what guides budgetary practices in a university setting. The paper has also demonstrated the role of approval organs and subordinates which were neglected in prior studies. It proposes a theory of budgetary practice in a University setting when budgeting is decentralized. It thus responds to the call to investigate and theorize the role of actors in calculative practices (such as budgeting) in a University setting (Argento et al., 2020; Aleksandrov, 2020; Grossi et al., 2020; Ozdil and Hoque, 2017).

Much of the budgeting literature has focused on the questions of “how” budgets are prepared and “how” budget decisions are made. Minimal attention has been directed to “how” budgets are executed. This paper focuses on this issue with special emphasis on state government budget execution processes. The paper provides an overview of the similarities and differences of state and federal budget execution follows by an assessment of how state balanced budget requirements place special responsibilities on state budget offices to monitor “within” budget execution year expenditures and revenues. Actions which may be taken to insure that state budgets are balanced are discussed. These actions are enumerated and analyzed in terms of legislative and executive branch authority and responsibility shifts.

Biennial budgeting and appropriations cycles have been a popular idea among many members of Congress for the past twenty years. Despite widespread bipartisan support for biennial budgeting in the 1980s, the first House vote on the subject, in 2000, resulted in a narrow defeat for biennial budgeting. This article analyzes the merits of biennial budgeting and the reasons for its defeat, arguing that during the 1990s biennial budgeting lost its sense of urgency because of the erasure of the federal deficit and became a more partisan issue than it previously had been.

This paper argues that the search for a theory of public budgeting has proceeded mainly on assumptions of the rationalist paradigm. This approach yielded mostly technical explanations for budgeting phenomena. These explanations fail to capture the complexities of public budgeting and yield incomplete theories. Without attempting to break new ground, the authors argue that budgeting theory should be guided by heuristic concepts borrowed from open systems theory. This offers greater potential for reconciling the rational and non-rational aspects of budgeting and permits constructive synthesis of insights from extant theories of budgeting without rejecting the rationalist paradigm. This approach views budgeting as only one of the complex functions governments perform to cope with their environment and to maintain stability.

This paper reports on how a group of secondary school teachers collaborated in a school‐based professional development called Learning Study to improve accounting students' performance on the drawing up of cash budgets.

In drawing up cash budgets – the object of learning – a power point presentation incorporating systematic variation was designed to reduce the overwhelming mass of (often irrelevant) data normally presented to students in textbooks and examiners' reports as part of the solutions to cash budget problems. In total, three lessons were designed focusing on how the object of learning could be handled. In each lesson the critical aspects corresponding to the object of learning were identified and a systematic pattern of variation was applied.

It was found that student learning improved progressively over the three lessons.

There is evidence to suggest that this Learning Study has made an impact, not only on student learning but also on teacher learning, and has contributed in some way to creating a learning culture in this school.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the processes of management accounting change (MAC) in the Jordanian Customs Organization (JCO) within its social context following public sector reforms. It focuses on the regulative way in which a new accounting system of government financial management information system (GFMIS) was implemented throughout three levels of an institutional framework.

The paper uses an interpretive case study in which the GFMIS was imposed by the government. It draws on a framework that comprises three institutional approaches: old institutional economics; new institutional sociology; and power mobilization.

In the JCO case, the GFMIS contributed effectively to the development of a comprehensive approach to the preparation of the budget while it works to facilitate the estimated process of expenditures and revenues. The study recognizes that the implementation of GFMIS may have emerged primarily as a response to external political and economic pressures. The MAC was carried out in the “from-top-to-bottom” level of institutional analysis, which confirms the “path-dependent” and evolutionary nature of the change. It concludes that the evolutionary MAC in the JCO case study was not only a decorative innovation in management accounting, but was also represented in the working practices. It has produced comprehensive and timely information about strategic planning, chart of accounts and classification of assets, liabilities, and revenues and expenses at all levels of management and programs. The study also confirms that management accounting is not a static phenomenon but one that changes over time to reflect new systems and practices.

The need for having an integrated GFMIS in the authors’ case arises from two key dimensions: increasing pressures from the International Monetary Fund to improve fiscal management and reporting, and the government needs to respond to the demand of better information disclosure. GFMIS has provided an integrated solution for public financial management through the automation of the entire life cycle of budget preparation, budget execution, and financial reporting. The system operates across all budget organizations to ensure transparency and accountability in all public resources transactions, including allocation, use, and monitoring. Hence, it has important implications for policy decision makers through linking all budget organizations, for the purposes of supporting the process of decision making in an informed manner. The study has important implications for the ways in which change dynamics can emerge, diffuse, and implement at three levels of institutional analysis. It also explains the interaction between the external origins and internal accounts, which identified that GFMIS is both shaped by, and is shaping, wider socio-economic and political processes.

This study fills a gap in the literature, as it explains the processes of MAC associated with the introduction of GFMIS in the JCO within its social context. It recognizes the institutional pressures that affected the emergence and diffusion of GFMIS and how they interacted through three levels of institutional analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on the determinant factors of government budget balance forecast errors for Eurozone countries based on four different database sources from 1998 to 2011.

Besides the analysis on quality and efficiency of government budget balance projections, panel data analysis is made from different methods taking into account economic, political, institutional and governance factors, and lagged forecast errors for estimations of budget balance forecast errors.

The results show that even with the concern and pressure due to the fiscal crisis in the Eurozone, the bias in fiscal forecasts remains.

One contribution of this paper, in comparison to other studies, is the use of longer time periods for the analysis of forecast errors as well as the employment of different data sources for detecting systematic patterns of errors, and the use of various estimation methods for the fiscal forecast error determinants, which gives insights into the reliability and robustness of results obtained in earlier studies. In particular, the introduction of variables such as fiscal council and fiscal rules allows one to check whether institutional behavior may change the effect from debt on fiscal forecast errors.

Most studies on activity‐based management (ABM) focus on applications in manufacturing environments. Instead, little attention has been given to the potentialities of ABM for support units, although these are widely considered to be one of the most relevant sources of inefficiencies, especially in large firms. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate how the ABM methodology can be applied to R&D activities, with particular regard to the product development process. As a matter of fact, when implementing an ABM system for R&D operations, some relevant theoretical problems arise, essentially due to the high percentage of non‐routine, hardly standardisable activities. However, if adequately adapted to the characteristics of this function, ABM can be of great help in a number of issues, such as: improvement of the efficiency of the activities that constitute the process; evaluation of the economic benefits that can be gained through a redesign of processes; improvement of the effectiveness of links between product development activities; evaluation of product life‐cycle costs and budgeting and control of product development activities.

This paper focuses on four areas, all of which affect a library’s bottom line in one way or another: fitting library materials expenditure into the parent organisation’s budget cycle, including suggestions for taking advantage of any unspent institutional allocation at the end of the financial year; budget control, including managing commitment and expenditure; internal budget allocation, where it argues in favour of a flexible formula, developed to suit the needs of the organisation; and audit and stocktake. It argues that success in these areas provides the basis for successful collections management.

The descriptions of performance budgeting, based on theory and practice, allow for the application of Dante’s allegory in The Divine Comedy. This allegory places performance budgeting into the spiritual domains of heaven, hell, and purgatory. These domains are used to frame the theoretical foundations of performance budgeting and to discuss a match with operational reality. Performance budgeting practices often fall between heaven, the optimal use of public revenues, and hell, the worst use of public revenues. It can be argued that most performance budgeting efforts tend to congregate in purgatory. Realizing purgatory allows for the recognition of principles that form the basis for performance budgeting to be classified as institutional myth. As institutional myth, the practice of performance budgeting is blocked from theoretical idealism.