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We utilise the actor-network theory (ANT) – based especially on Latour (2005) – to examine how management accounting tools affect physicians’ representations and new managerial practices in French public hospitals currently undergoing reform.

We conducted a longitudinal case study – based on interviews and observations – in a large French public hospital in which dashboards are diffused to physicians and nurses dealing with both medical and managerial activities.

The case shows that head physicians and nurses are implicated in their new managerial tasks and spend time analysing dashboards. Management accounting tools thus play a role, as mediators, in organising new managerial practices, and dashboards are a means of materialising and giving structure to new managerial practices and enabling discussions and exchanges to take place between actors who were previously separated.

The case shows that management accounting tools are not necessarily useful because they help in decision-making or control – as in the dominant paradigm; rather, they are beneficial because they may help in changing representations and building a new collective organisation. Future research should therefore expand on the organisational and social roles of management accounting tools, especially in the healthcare field.

Most ANT-inspired studies in management accounting focus on explaining changes in accounting practices, which are perceived as a consequence of an ANT process. This chapter, however, analyses the practices by which management accounting tools act as a vehicle to organisational change.

Securing the managerial and executive talent that organizations need is a hot topic in the contemporary business community, but it is also an old challenge with a long and varied history. Contemporary observers are typically surprised to discover first how much the practices from the 1920s look like those that are dominate in the more innovative industries a century later and second how much more sophisticated the plans and systems for managing talent in corporations were in the 1950s than now. The research community interested in human resources often sees the 1950s practices as something like a dominant paradigm; they have in fact already been in sharp decline for almost a generation. For researchers and instructors interested in the practices of “talent management” at the managerial and executive level considered broadly – including subtopics like management development, career planning, succession planning, etc. – it is important to see the roots of contemporary practices and how they have and are changing over time as doing so reinforces the basic notion from contingency theory: practices respond to changes in context. The important aspects of context that drove changes in the design and execution of managerial careers over time has to do with the structure of corporations and how they responded to their competitive environment. The fact that changing business needs led to different corporate structures, business models, and, in turn, different approaches for managing the leaders of corporations also gives us perhaps the best guidance as to where practices in these areas will be in the future. For researchers, starting with this historical perspective is also the best way to develop a macro perspective on the more micro practices and outcomes associated with these talent management questions.

From an anthropological point of view there are four fundamental ways of living on earth, which can be related to “four basic cultural types: hunting and gathering, herding livestock, village farming, and modern civilization (…). Culture can be defined as the relationship of a society to the primordial nature or law of the earth” (Lawlor, 1991, p. 142).

One of the emerging roles of management accountants in organizations is the design and operation of their organization's knowledge management system (KMS) that ensures the strategic utilization and management of its knowledge resources. Knowledge-based organizations face identifiable general risks but those whose primary product is knowledge, knowledge-products organizations (KPOs), additionally face unique risks. The management accountants’ role in the management of knowledge is even more critical in such organizations. We review the literature and survey a small convenient sample of knowledge-products organizations to identify the general risks knowledge-based organizations face and the additional risks unique to KPOs. The general risks of managing knowledge include inappropriate corporate information policies, employee turnover, and lack of data transferability. Additional risks unique to KPOs include the short life span (shelf-life) of knowledge products, the challenging nature of knowledge experts, and the vulnerability of intellectual property. The paper includes recommendations for management accountants in KPOs to develop and maintain competitive advantage through their KMS. These include developing enterprise-wide knowledge policies, fostering collaboration and documentation, addressing knowledge security, and evaluating the effectiveness of the KMS.

This chapter explores the adoption and implementation of a conflict management system (CMS) in a hospital setting. In particular, it uncovers the different motivations and challenges associated with a CMS across various stakeholders within the organization.

The chapter is based on qualitative research conducted in a large American hospital that adopted and implemented a CMS over the course of 15 months. The author conducted extensive interviews with stakeholders across the organization, including top management, union leaders, middle managers, clinicians, and frontline staff. Findings are also based on an array of observations, including stakeholder meetings and conflict management sessions.

The case study demonstrates the centrality of underexplored, generalizable, and industry-specific pressures that may lead organizations to reconsider their use of traditional dispute resolution practices and to institute a CMS. It also highlights the inherent organizational ambivalence toward the design and adoption, initiation and implementation, and routine use of a CMS and it documents the different types of outcomes delivered to various stakeholders.

The chapter provides a nuanced portrait of the antecedents to and consequences of the transformation of conflict management within one organization. It contributes to the existing body of research exploring the 30-year rise of alternative dispute resolution and CMSs in a growing proportion of firms in the United States. The use of an in-depth case-study method to examine this CMS experience offers a number of important insights, particularly regarding different stakeholder motivations and outcomes.

The study here examines how business actors adapt to changes in networks by analyzing their perceptions or their network pictures. The study is exploratory or iterative in the sense that revisions occur to the research question, method, theory, and context as an integral part of the research process.

Changes within networks receive less research attention, although considerable research exists on explaining business network structures in different research traditions. This study analyzes changes in networks in terms of the industrial network approach. This approach sees networks as connected relationships between actors, where interdependent companies interact based on their sensemaking of their relevant network environment. The study develops a concept of network change as well as an operationalization for comparing perceptions of change, where the study introduces a template model of dottograms to systematically analyze differences in perceptions. The study then applies the model to analyze findings from a case study of Norwegian/Japanese seafood distribution, and the chapter provides a rich description of a complex system facing considerable pressure to change. In-depth personal interviews and cognitive mapping techniques are the main research tools applied, in addition to tracer studies and personal observation.

The dottogram method represents a valuable contribution to case study research as it enables systematic within-case and across-case analyses. A further theoretical contribution of the study is the suggestion that network change is about actors seeking to change their network position to gain access to resources. Thereby, the study also implies a close relationship between the concepts network position and the network change that has not been discussed within the network approach in great detail.

Another major contribution of the study is the analysis of the role that network pictures play in actors' efforts to change their network position. The study develops seven propositions in an attempt to describe the role of network pictures in network change. So far, the relevant literature discusses network pictures mainly as a theoretical concept. Finally, the chapter concludes with important implications for management practice.