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Since the introduction of balanced scorecard by Kaplan and Norton in 1992, it garnered considerable research and practice attention across disciplines. Using bibliometric analysis, this study examines trends in balanced scorecard research in last 20 years and identifies future areas of research.

The Web of Science database was used to extract research papers from the 2003 to 2023 period with “Balanced Scorecard” as topic. The final sample consisted of 445 articles. Trends and patterns were analyzed using bibliometric analysis through research profiling and thematic analysis.

The findings reveal that BSC, spanning across disciplines, including business and operations, has enriched the theory and practice of BSC research. Analytical and survey methods were more prevalent than primary studies. Scholars from the USA and the UK have made noteworthy contributions to balanced scorecard research. Emerging themes include integrating human resources, sustainability, subjectivity in performance evaluation and non-financial performance indicators in BSC for better strategic decision-making.

The study would inspire researchers to generate new research questions and hypotheses and help in identifying gaps in the current knowledge base and areas where further investigation is needed. Managers would gain useful insights into performance management by studying the BSC research evolution to find a fit for modern-day industry needs.

The authors’ contribution fills the void by providing useful account of extent research over last 20 years using bibliometric analysis and motivate future research directions.

This paper aims to advance recent literature on the performativity of accounting by examining how project accounting affects a project organization’s ability to deliver a relevant project outcome, such as a product or a building, for a receiving client organization.

The paper draws on a longitudinal case study of a 41.4-billion-kroner (5.5-billion-euro) Danish project of constructing 16 new public hospitals. Its objective was to reduce the average unit costs and improve the quality of patient care. Each hospital construction was managed by a separate project organization and handed over to a separate receiving hospital organization. The project organizations applied a common approach to project accounting. The paper relies on Michel Callon’s concepts of performativity and sociotechnical agencement – approaching project accounting as an arrangement of devices.

The paper shows that the project-accounting agencement simultaneously supported and undermined the project organizations’ ability to deliver hospitals relevant to the receiving hospital organizations. The agencement performed hospital designs, disciplined project actors and guided decision-making, thus supporting the overall work of the project organizations. It also, however, compelled the project organizations to compromise on hospital designs when unexpected events occurred. These compromises led to the delivery of hospitals, which largely prevented the receiving hospital organizations from achieving the project’s objective.

This paper advances our limited understanding of the dynamic and complex relationship between project accounting and the relevance of project outcomes. It introduces the concept of a “contronymity device” to capture the way project accounting simultaneously produces two opposing consequences, both supporting and undermining the enactment of a particular reality. The paper lastly enriches our understanding of how project-accounting devices impact hospital organizations’ operating cost structures and challenge patient care capabilities.

This paper examines the Australian and New Zealand government’s wellbeing budget reforms.

The paper describes the development of wellbeing budgeting in Australia and New Zealand based on an analysis of official websites, documents and media sources.

Both governments have experienced challenges identifying measures representing different areas of wellbeing and recognising the connections between the measures applied. They have found it difficult to access reliable data. The development of wellbeing budgeting also raises questions about participation, data reporting, and presentation, which can impact its efficacy.

The paper outlines practical challenges governments face in creating and using wellbeing budgets. It proposes a future research agenda to deepen our understanding of these issues and their social and economic implications. The scope of the study is limited to publicly available documents.

This is one of the few studies investigating wellbeing budgeting, which has evolved as an important tool for public governance. Therefore, the study’s findings may draw substantial interest and attention from practitioners, researchers and government policymakers wanting to integrate these reforms into their governance machinery.

This paper aims to explore how accounting is fostering neoliberal citizenship through the participants of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). More specifically, this paper aims to understand how accounting discourse and the management accounting technique of budgeting, when intertwined with automated administrative processes of the NDIS, are giving rise to a pastoral form of power that directs people’s behaviour toward certain ends.

Publicly available data has been crafted into an autoethnographic case study of one fictitious person’s experiences with the NDIS – Mina. Mina is an amalgam created from material submitted to the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on the NDIS. Mina’s experiences are then analysed through the lens of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explore how accounting has contributed to marketising and digitising public disability services.

Accounting rhetoric appears to be a central part of rationalising the decision to shift to individualised disability funding. Those receiving payments are treated as self-governable, financially responsible subjects and are therefore expected to have knowledge of management accounting techniques and budgeting. However, NDIS’s strong reliance on the accounting concepts of funds, budgets, cost and price is limiting people’s autonomy and subjecting them to intervention and control.

This paper addresses calls to explore the interplay between accounting and current disability policies. The analysis shows that incorporating accounting into the NDIS’s algorithms serves to conceal the underlying ideology of the programs, subtly driving behaviours towards neoliberal objectives. Further, this research extends the Foucauldian accounting literature by revealing the contribution of accounting to reinforcing the authority of digital pastors in contemporary times.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between financial inclusion and household expenditure behaviour among Ghanaian households, by taking into account both formal and informal financial inclusion channels.

Propensity score matching as well as instrumental variable techniques are applied to data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey to investigate the effect of financial inclusion on the share of total expenditure devoted to different categories, including food, health, education, housing, durables, temptation goods and other goods.

Informal financial inclusion seems to have no substantial effect on households’ consumption behaviour, whereas formal financial inclusion significantly affects it. The study finds that formal financial inclusion is inversely related to the budget share devoted to short-term expenditure (food, temptation goods and other goods such as transport and recreation). Conversely, financially included households spend more on long-term expenditure such as education, housing and consumer durables, thus, suggesting a diversion effect towards investment in long-term physical and human capital.

The investigation of the heterogeneous impact across households (male vs female headed, rural vs urban) has essential policy implications on how financial inclusion can be improved among the disadvantaged groups, and with what effects.

The study focuses on the importance of financial inclusion in Ghana, considering both formal and informal financial inclusion channels. Previous studies only examined the overall effects on household welfare, overlooking the impact on household expenditure composition and consumption shares. The analysis also considers the heterogeneous impact of financial inclusion on households based on the gender of the household head and the location where households reside (rural, urban).

As a response to challenges that globalization poses, governments often utilize an expansionary fiscal policy, a mix of increased compensation spending and capital tax cuts. To account for these policy measures that are consistent with neither the compensation nor the efficiency hypothesis, this study examines government fractionalization as the key conditional factor.

We test our hypothesis with a country-year data covering 24 OECD countries from 1980 to 2011. To examine how a single country juggles compensation spending and capital taxation policies jointly, we employ a research strategy that classifies governments into four categories based on their implementation of the two policies and examine the link between imports and fiscal policy choices conditioned on government fractionalization.

This study shows that highly fractionalized governments are more likely to implement an expansionary fiscal policy than marginally fractionalized governments as a policy response to economic globalization and import shock.

Our findings imply that fractionalized governments are likely to face budget deficits and debt crises, as the expansionary fiscal policy persists over time.

By examining government fractionalization as one of the critical factors that constrain the fiscal policy choice, this study enhances our understanding of the relationship between economic globalization and compensation or efficiency policies. The arguments and findings in this study explain why governments utilize the seeming incompatible policy preferences over increased compensation spending and reduced capital tax burdens as a response to globalization, potentially subsuming both hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of inflated energy prices on the capital structure of Indian manufacturing corporations and to investigate whether the capital structure of Indian firms is driven by demand shocks or supply shocks during the study period.

After conducting a thorough review of the capital structure and inflation-based research studies, panel data-based regression model and correlation matrix have been used as statistical tools for Indian manufacturing sector available with the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Prowess database.

The results suggest that variables like the presence of inflated energy prices had adversely influenced the capital structure of Indian corporations. Not only this, the study also highlights that factors pertaining to the demand shock had induced Indian corporations to have higher debt levels in the capital structure.

This study has laid some ground work to explore the influence of inflation on capital structure of Indian firms upon which a more detailed evaluation could be based.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first that explores the influence of inflated energy prices on the capital structure of manufacturing firms in India by using the most recent data.

This study explores the configurations of management control systems (MCSs) while taking into account entrepreneurial cognition styles (ECSs) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The objective is to understand the impact of ECS on deployment and identify the various modes of MCS configurations employed by SMEs. The authors draw on and synthesise two theoretical perspectives relating to cognition and management control packages to understand the associations between ECS and MCS employed by SMEs in managing their business. This study was conducted using a quantitative approach that utilises a questionnaire survey to collect cross-sectional data from 150 SMEs. The authors uncovered three cognitive styles: knowing (e.g. preciseness), planning (e.g. organising), and creativity (e.g. innovativeness). Furthermore, five configurations of MCS utilised by SMEs were identified: customer focus, performance monitoring, administrative focus, strategic focus, and development focus. By combining both analyses, the authors discovered three constellations of significant association between ECS and MCS characterised by Cluster 1’s cohesive integration approach, Cluster 2’s revealing strategic approach, and Cluster 3’s multifaceted exploration. The study is significant because it uncovers the complex relationship between ECS and MCS configurations, highlighting their interdependence within the institutional context. Using a cognitive view, the authors explore how the cognitive styles of entrepreneurs facilitated imprinting institutional context into MCS configurations. These insights enable us to envisage that ECS is not mutually exclusive but forms a continuum that provides more plausible explanations that relax the direct universal relationship between MCS configurations and contextual factors.

No Olympics in recent history have come in on or under budget, with past Olympics having overrun their budgets by an average of 172% (Flyvbjerg et al., 2021). Growing concerns among taxpayers about the expense have led many cities to drop out of the bidding process for the Olympics: for the 2024 Olympic Games, bids were withdrawn by Boston, Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome (Okada & Greyser, 2018). Sports infrastructure, including the main stadium, is a major cost category for the Olympic Games. Building or renovating venues to Olympic specifications can leave cities with heavy costs of long-term maintenance as well as the cost of initial construction (Baade & Matheson, 2016). In practice, cities tend to overestimate the size and suitability of existing venues, leading to underestimated costs and budget overruns (Preuß et al., 2019). The Brisbane 2032 Olympic bid says that Brisbane’s Olympics are confident of breaking even, and avoiding building stadiums that end up as white elephants. But does the choice of Olympic stadium make a difference to the final cost overrun? This study finds that cost overruns for past Olympics have been predicted using a few characteristics of the main stadium: its age, its distance from the city centre, and its seating capacity. This has important policy implications for selecting stadiums to be used at the Olympic Games and particularly for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games where a stadium has been earmarked for selection without data-driven evidence to support the decision.