Search results

This study aims to explore the calculations and valuations that unfold in everyday practices within social care settings. Specifically, the paper concerns the role of accounting in dealing with multiple calculable and non-calculable spaces within the case management process. The study sheds light on the multiplicity produced in constructing the client as an object through the calculations and valuations embedded in the costing and caring practices in social work.

This is a qualitative case study in a Swedish social care organisation, with a specific focus on the calculations and valuations within the case management process. The data have been gathered from 20 interviews with social workers, team leaders, managers and a management accountant, along with more than 36 h of on-site observations and internal organisational documents, including policy documents, guidelines and procedural lists.

The case management process involves interconnected practices in constructing the client as an object. While monetary calculations and those associated with worth are embedded in costing and caring practices, they interact and proliferate in various ways. Three elements are found: transforming service units into centres of calculation, constructing the accounts of calculation and establishing the cost-value calculations. Calculations and valuations are actuated in these elements in describing the need, matching the case with the unit and caseworker and deciding on the measure. The objectification of the client entails the construction of accounts, for example, ongoing qualifications, categorisations and groupings of units, juridical frameworks, case types, needs and measures. As an object multiple, the client becomes different objects at different stages, challenging the establishment accounts, and thus producing a range of calculations and valuations. Such diversity in calculations concomitantly produces more calculations to represent the present and absent multiple facets of the client, resulting in a multiplicity of costing and caring.

The study might flag up for practitioners the possible risks and unintended consequences of depending too much on fixed guidelines and (performance) indicators since social work involves object multiples, which are always in diversity and changeable in situ. Considering the multiple dimensions within the specific contexts could thus be helpful to mitigate such risks in the evaluation of social care processes and the design of (performance) metrics.

This study contributes to the literature on accountingisation by extending the concept as a part of ongoing organisational practices, materialised within the calculations of money and worth in everyday social care. Besides demonstrating their reconsolidation, this study shows a multiplicity of costing and caring practices depending on the way the client is constructed, resulting in the proliferation of accounting(s) and ultimately accountingisation of social work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the organizational construction of profit at the responsibility-centre level, how underlying cost calculations are challenged, and the role of accountants therein.

This paper analyses profit calculation in a public social housing organization that experienced New Public Management (NPM). Participant observations, archives and interviews inform the study over three years, enabling access to day-to-day practices.

This study examines a trial of strength that revisited long-existing profitability and cost calculations. Accountants held competing views of how to treat labour costs. Some were anti-programme during a trial of incompatibility, while others were programme defenders. The authors also provide evidence of the stability of an established network and its resistance to the claims of an adversary spokesperson in a trial of strength. The concept of trial of incompatibility proved helpful in showing how the actor networks within OMEGA played out the tension between profit orientation and the social mission of offering affordable dwellings.

The paper provides rare qualitative data on the significant and complex role of calculative costing choices in determining intra-organizational profitability and its interference with the inherent social mission of the organization.

The authors suggest that profitability calculations are influenced not only by economic context but also by different views of organizational actors regarding how to calculate profit. These calculations would benefit from a more detailed and explicit documentation of reasons for choices made, given the potential for different and, in principle, equally valid approaches. The authors provide further evidence of the complexity of the public social housing sector.

This research points to a departure from the mission of public social housing in the face of NPM reforms and further questions the compatibility of a profit orientation with the provision of affordable dwellings.

The findings show intra-accounting variation regarding a specific element of profit calculation (labour costs) relating to the organization’s wider mission and status.

The purpose of this paper is to show how in a converged network, all services are provided over the same network infrastructure. This obfuscates the costs of the different services in an overall sunk cost. When deploying a new service over the network it is important to know the price that will cover the costs incurred by this service. This paper aims to investigate different approaches to calculate this price, to propose an optimal calculation approach and to estimate the sensitivity of this approach to changes in the inputs or when the inputs will recursively depend on the price set for the service.

The paper uses existing cost allocation schemes to this particular problem and within simulations, it investigates their outcome on the bottom price margin. Additionally dedicated Monte‐Carlo simulations give information on general sensitivity and iterative simulations are used for detecting the impact of this recursive influence of price on its inputs.

The optimal calculation approach uses a combination of incremental allocation and full allocation which places a bottom margin on the price which is both sustainable and competitive in the long run. Simulations show large differences of up to 50 percent with other approaches. Additionally the simulations indicate the importance of the length of the calculation horizon as a too small calculation horizon could also lead to differences of up to 50 percent. Sensitivity results indicated a low impact of changes on the bottom margin obtained using this optimal calculation approach and a much higher impact on the non‐optimal margins. Finally iterative calculations showed the importance of highly detailed market research as a 10 percent mismatch between market‐research implicit price and calculated price margin will lead to at least 10 percent difference and might lead to up to 25 percent difference.

The paper links the research field of cost allocation and bottom up cost calculation to the pricing margins calculated in a typical business case evaluation phase. It also links the pricing recursively to adoption and completes the calculations in an iterative manner. Finally the research is completed with sensitivity analysis of the results to changes in the input adoption.

Cost transparency is of central importance to reach a consensus between supply chain partners. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the instrument of cost analysis which supports the link between buyers and suppliers.

Based on a detailed literature review in the area of cost analysis and purchasing, intelligent decision support systems for cost estimation are identified. Subsequently, expert interviews are conducted to determine the application possibilities for managers. The application potential is derived from the synthesis of motivation, identified applications and challenges in the industry. Management recommendations are to be derived by bringing together scientific and practical approaches in the industry.

On the one hand, the results of this study show that machine learning (ML) is a complex technology that poses many challenges for cost and purchasing managers. On the other hand, ML methods, especially in combination with expert knowledge and other analytical methods, offer immense added value for cost analysis in purchasing.

Digital transformation allows to facilitate the cost calculation process in purchasing decisions. In this context, the application of ML approaches has gained increased attention. While such approaches can lead to high cost reductions on the side of both suppliers and buyers, an intelligent cost analysis is very demanding.

For many years, universities have been confronted with the rise of a managerial logic, in line with the new public management movement. They have been encouraged to implement new accounting tools such as cost calculations. Literature shows mixed results regarding the institutionalization of such tools, and the logic they try to support. In most studies, the agency of actors is examined to explain the institutionalization of accounting tools and only few studies consider the specific characteristics of these accounting tools to understand this process. To enrich the literature on institutionalization, this article examines how the affordances of costing tools affect the institutionalization of these tools and the institutionalization of new logics in pluralistic organizations such as universities.

The data were collected at a French university which is considered as an example of successful institutionalization of the tool and is cited as a model to follow. The data include a four-month participant observation and 18 interviews. Access to internal and external documents was also available. The analysis of the data is based on a framework proposed by Jarzabkowski and Kaplan (2015), which draws on the concept of affordance of tools, to investigate how the possibilities and constraints of costing tools shape the selection, application and outcomes of cost calculations.

The results show that the affordances of cost calculations facilitate the institutionalization of a new logic and its coexistence with previous logics. Technical affordances are mobilized by actors aiming to bring in a new logic without directly confronting the old ones. Role affordances also play a major role in the institutionalization by facilitating the adhesion of the actors through multiple applications of the tool. Finally, value-based affordances reinforce the institutionalization of a managerial logic by emphasizing the values shared with the other logics and thus facilitating the coexistence of the three logics at stake in the university.

This research provides three main contributions. First, it contributes to the literature on the institutionalization of accounting tools. It shows the relevance of the concept of affordance (Leonardi and Vaast, 2017) to unpack the characteristics of accounting tools (including the constraints and the possibilities they offer) and to achieve a better understanding of the institutionalization of accounting tools. Second, this paper contributes to the literature dealing with the role of accounting tools in the institutionalization of logics. The results suggest that the institutionalization of tools and the institutionalization of logics are two different phenomena that move at different speeds. However, these phenomena interact: the institutionalization of accounting tools can facilitate the coexistence of different logics in pluralistic organizations. Third, this paper contributes to the literature on affordances. The data reveal several types of affordances for accounting tools: technical affordances that refer to the technical possibilities to shape and tweak the tool; role affordances that refer to the various roles and purposes that the tool can fulfill and value-based affordances that refer to the plasticity of the values and beliefs that the tool can convey. The study shows that each type of affordance is prevalent at a different time of the process of institutionalization and that the combination of these affordances contributes to the institutionalization of the tool and of new logics.

Despite the great impact of complaint handling on customer retention and the beneficial usage of complaint information for quality improvements, most companies have great difficulty calculating the profitability of their complaint management. As a consequence of this knowledge deficit, complaint management is often not regarded as a profit centre but as a cost centre, which makes it a probable victim for cost reductions by cutting back its activities. Hence, there is a huge challenge to develop methods and to address this issue. This work contributes to this. It is shown how complaint management profitability (CMP) can be conceptualized and several types of benefits and costs are presented. On this basis several propositions about the current practice of CMP calculation are developed. To test these propositions a comprehensive empirical study was conducted among complaint managers of major German companies in the business‐to‐consumer market. The collected information shows that the assumed CMP knowledge deficit is even higher than expected. To reduce this deficit this article provides an approach to calculate CMP on basis of the repurchase benefit.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the result of an optimisation via life cycle costs (LCC) depends on the assumptions made throughout the process of calculating LCC.

A framework is used to structure the assumptions made in the process of calculating LCC. These include the following three pairs: technical versus economic life‐span, static versus dynamic calculation method or costs only versus income minus costs. In a broader sense, these LCC are referred to as the life cycle economy (LCE). Two case studies form the basis for the LCC calculations. Using different assumptions, the LCC of virtual design variations of these buildings are compared to each other.

The rankings drawn from the calculations differ according to the chosen calculation method, i.e. the chosen variation for the optimisation of a building is not consistent.

This is essentially an exploratory study and the prognosis of future cash flow in relation to certain design variations requires further research.

The credibility of life cycle costing should improve with a greater transparency of assumptions in the context of the outlined framework.

All players in facilities management who support their decisions with LCC will benefit from this quantification of the impact of different calculation methods. The extension of LCC to LCE will help planners, investors and owners of real estate in evaluating building options with respect to quality, image, flexibility or comfort.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the key outage‐cost‐influencing applications (fault location and network restoration, fault reporting, field crew management, and reconfiguration) of the distribution management system (DMS) and analyzes the benefits provided by them. The objective of the study is an evaluation of their influence on outage costs deriving from the adoption of automatic equipment in managing distribution systems.

Cost and benefit calculations in this paper are made for a typical North European rural medium‐voltage network. The benefits are calculated in terms of outage costs for each of the above‐presented applications and compared with the investment cost, including the annual cost of maintenance, of the DMS. The empirical results and validation of the theoretical calculations are performed by an electric utility, where the DMS benefit evaluation is taking place.

By capitalizing the applications of the DMS, it is possible to acquire considerable benefits in outage costs. It is shown that the greatest cost‐based benefits are obtained from the fault location and field crew management applications. The case study further shows that the DMS can reduce the operation costs of utilities.

The calculations are based on network expert assumptions about System Average Interruption Duration (SAIDI), carried out for a specific overhead‐line network operating in a specific European rural medium‐voltage environment. Sharing of utilities' de facto SAIDI results as a basis for calculations would decrease the need for subjective expert assumptions in the future analyses.

Application of the proposed framework for decision making and lessons learned can support electric utilities when planning for unbundling and strategic target‐setting in the unbundled business model.

There are few reports available on similar actual DMS‐application‐based cost benefits due to the nature of private utility information that is preferably not disclosed.

This article will examine the role of selected aspects of management accounting in a company that is changing from command to market economy. By applying the institutional theory to a Hungarian, previously government‐owned and production‐oriented transition company, calculation practice and cash flow management are analysed as technologies that represent recognisable and non‐recognisable rationales and logics in the transition process. It is concluded that calculation practice is not new in terms of technology, it is the application of the practice that is new. However, cash flow management is a completely new discipline that is not so easy to handle. Indeed, the new “everyday reality” has fundamentally changed the purpose of management accounting and related expectations about (re‐) constitution of rationales and practices. But the changes in management accounting are based on a historical cargo of experiences and rationality that cannot be dismissed just like that.

Sustainable building design suffers from a lack of reliable life cycle data. The purpose of this paper is to compare life cycle costs of sustainable building projects, examine the magnitude of various cost drivers and discuss the implications of an emerging shift in cost drivers.

This paper is based on data from 21 office buildings certified in Denmark according to the sustainable certification scheme DGNB.

The paper supports previous findings that construction costs and running costs each roughly make up half of the life cycle costs over a 50-year period. More surprising is the finding that the life cycle costs for cleaning are approximately twice as high as the supply costs for energy and water.

The data set is based on actual construction costs of office buildings constructed in 2013-2017. Although all running costs are calculated rather than measured, they are based on a more detailed, specific and industry-supported set of calculation assumptions than is usual for life cycle costing studies because of extensive collaborative work in a number of concomitant national research and development projects.

Authorities, clients and building professionals heavily emphasise energy-saving measures in new Danish buildings. The paper suggests redirecting this effort towards other more prominent cost drivers like cleaning and technical installations.

This paper provides a notable contribution to the academic understanding of the significance of different cost drivers as well as the practical implementation of life cycle costing.