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This study seeks to explore the powerful role(s) of institutionalised performance measurement systems or metrics in smart city governance in a politically and militarily sensitive developing country.

This study extends the application and contribution of a multi-level institutional framework to previous management accounting literature on the potential relationship between performance measurement and smart city governance. The value of utilising a multi-level framework is to broaden and deepen theoretical analyses about this relationship to include the effect of political pressure from the military regime at the macro level on the institutionalisation of a performance measurement system at the micro-organisational level. Taking the New Cairo city council smart electricity networks project (Egypt) as an interpretive qualitative single-case study, data collection methods included semi-structured interviews, direct observations and documentary readings.

Performance measurement systems or metrics, especially in politically and militarily sensitive smart cities, constitutes a process of cascading (macro-micro) institutionalisation that is closely linked to sustainable developments taking place in the wider arena of urban policies. Going a step further, accounting-based performance metrics, arising from political and military pressures towards public-private collaborations, contribute to smart city management and accountability (governance). Institutionalised measurement systems or performance metrics play a powerful accounting role(s) in shaping and reshaping political decisions and military actions in the city council.

Theoretically, this study goes beyond the cascading institutionalisation process by arguing for the powerful role(s) of institutionalised accounting and performance measurement systems in smart city decision-making and governance. Empirically, it enriches previous literature with a case study of a developing Arab Spring country, characterised by an emerging economy, political sensitivity and military engagement, rather than developed and more stable countries that have been thoroughly investigated. It is also among the first politically engaged accounting case studies to highlight public-private collaborations as a recent reform in public sector governance and accountability.

This paper aims to investigate funding and performance monitoring practices in Zambia’s health sector from an institutional and stratified ontology perspective. Such an approach was deemed appropriate in view of pluralistic institutional environments characterising most African economies that are also considered to be highly stratified.

Blended with insights from stratified ontology, the paper draws on institutional pluralism as a theoretical lens to understand the institutional structures, mechanisms, events and experiences encountered by actors operating at different levels of Zambia’s health sector. The study adopted an interpretive approach that helped to investigate the multifaceted and subjective nature of social phenomena and practices being studied. Data were collected from both archival sources and interviews with key stakeholders operating within Zambia’s health sector.

The study’s findings indicate the high levels of stratification within Zambia’s health sector as evidenced by the three sector levels that possessed different characteristics in terms of actor responses to donor influence. This study equally demonstrates the capacity of agents operating under highly fragmented institutional environments to engage in enabling and constraining responses depending on the understanding of their empirical world.

Through blending insights from stratified ontology with institutional pluralism, the study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the enabling and constraining reflexive capacity of agents to exercise choices under highly fragmented institutional environments while responding to multiple demands and expectations to sustain the co-existence of diverse stakeholders. Accordingly, the study advances thinking on the application of institutional theory to critical accounting research in line with recent ontological and epistemological shifts in institutional theory.

This study aims to explore the influence of field-level funding pressure and resource dependency on conflicting institutional logics in implementing a new performance measurement system (PMS) within a privatised social enterprise (SE) in a developing country. It answers the research question: how accounting-based key performance indicators (KPIs) were chosen within a privatised SE to maintain co-existence between two different institutional logics, the social and commercial logics, to gain legitimacy in the government funding scheme.

This study expands the application and contribution of the Besharov and Smith’s (2014) logics multiplicity framework to previous management accounting literature on PMS and institutional logics. It adds a new dimension to previous literature to theorise the cognitive dynamics of institutional logics at three distinct but interrelated institutional levels, namely, field, organisational and individual. Data come from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SE, involved in implementing a social project (drinking water refining) in rural communities.

PMS acts as a political tool through which the privatised case company has gained societal acceptance and legitimacy in the government funding scheme. Its non-political KPIs have turned into political tools to meet the institutional demands of the funding scheme. This government involvement represents field-level institutional logics, which influenced the organisational-level interplay of commercial and social logics and then the individual-level choice of internal KPIs. This contributes to the fact that institutional logics and their interplay between these three levels are “in a state of flux” within SEs’ internal PMS.

This study deals with a real-life practical case that proves the prevalence of one institutional logic over another at both the organisational and individual levels may be occasioned by organisational field pressures and opportunities rather than by other intra-organisational conflicts as discussed in most previous literature on PMS and institutional logics.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on analysing how foreign entry by a multinational enterprise (MNE) can act as a catalyst for change in field-level institutional logics in a transition economy context.

The paper presents an empirical single-case study on the effects of an MNE’s entry on a particular industry in an emerging market’s context. The empirical study follows abductive reasoning; based on the interplay of previous literature and empirical observations, it identifies mechanism through which MNEs can catalyse change in field-level institutional logics.

The study shows that in addition to general market transition influenced by state-level policies, individual companies’ strategies, actions and market behaviour also significantly contribute to the development of a host industry’s field-level institutional logics. More precisely, a case study of a Finnish MNE’s entry into the Russian bakery market identifies the mechanisms and various change pathways through which the entry of a single MNE into a transition economy can significantly alter the institutional logics of a particular industry.

The study employs a novel perspective that incorporates the ideas, concepts and insights of an institutional logics perspective to MNE entry research for empirical analysis and theory building.

This study aims to explore the complex, multi-level institutional dynamics of smart city reforms and projects and their potential sustainability pressures on the implementation of a management accounting system in an Egyptian state-owned enterprise (SOE), which has a politically sensitive institutional character.

This study adds to institutional management accounting research using a multi-level perspective of institutional dynamics in the smart city context. Data were collected from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SOE that was under socio-political sustainability pressures to implement a smart electricity network project in New Minya city.

Smart city projects have formed social and political sustainability pressures, which introduced the enterprise resource planning (ERP) network as a new management accounting system. A new (complex and multi-level) management accounting system was invented to reinvent the sustainable city as an “accounting city” (which appeared rhetorically as a “smart city”). “Smart” being the visibility and measurability of the sustainability performance of the collective body, which calls the city and its connectivity to different institutional levels brought out in a city network project for the ERP-enabled electricity distribution.

This study examines a single case study from a single smart city and identifies the accounting community’s need for multiple and comparative case studies to further analyse the potential impact of smart city reforms and projects on the sustainable implementation of management accounting systems.

City policymakers and managers may benefit from the practical findings of this interpretive field-based case study in planning, implementing and monitoring smart city projects and objectives.

Individual and collective well-being may be enhanced through new management accounting forms of multi-level local governance and increased political, field and organisational sustainability.

This study provides important insights into the sustainability dynamics of management accounting in achieving smart city reforms. The achievement of sustainability management accounting systems has connected to multiple ERP roles at different institutional levels, which resulted in accommodating the socio-political objectives of smart city projects.

This study aims to investigate the effects of institutional qualities on corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement from a global perspective.

The authors examine CSR engagement across 83 developed and developing economies focusing on four potential institutional drivers: the rule of law, economic financial development, human capital formation and exposure to international trade.

The authors find that the level of human capital formation and financial development is positively associated with CSR engagement in both developing and developed economies. However, the rule of law was only associated with CSR engagement in developing economies whereas the level of international trade was found having no association with CSR engagement across both developed economies and developing economies.

The effect of macroinstitutional qualities on aggregate CSR engagement practices across 83 developed and developing economies was examined; however, the analysis did not attempt to identify the relevance of these institutional factors at the micro or mezzo level and how they interplay with firm-level factors.

The empirical findings in this study offer some important insights into the theoretical constructs of institutional qualities and institutional logics that impact CSR engagement from both developing and developed economy contexts. Not only will these findings encourage regulators and stakeholders to call for enhanced CSR engagement, it will also benefit the accounting and assurance profession’s efforts to evaluate organizational risk and mitigate corporate opportunistic use of CSR disclosure. The finding that strengthening a country’s rule of law enhances CSR engagement in developing economies is further evidence for the current debate in the accounting literature regarding mandating firm CSR disclosure.

The authors conclude that improving the level of human capital formation and encouraging financial development is important for the overall social well-being of all economies, whereas developing economies can further encourage CSR engagement by enhancing their rule of law.

In this study, we develop further understanding of how institutional change is created within a mature and local industry. In this pursuit, we examine how a collaborative large project governance model was institutionalized at an industrial sector-level through both industry-level activities and “institutional projects”.

This study builds on the foundations of institutional fields and institutional change, suggesting that projects are not only shaped by their contexts but also produce institutional change themselves. We conducted extensive fieldwork on the institutionalization of a collaborative project governance model in Finland.

The findings illustrate how institutional change in governance of large and complex inter-organizational projects is created at the institutional field level. The institutionalized collaborative project governance model includes aspects of both relational and contractual governance. The change was facilitated by temporal links between the institutional projects as well as vertical links between the institutional projects and the field-level development programs.

This is one of the first studies to address how a collaborative large project governance model becomes the norm at the institutional field level beyond the boundaries of an individual project or organization.

The growing interest in the microfoundations of institutions is a significant, yet surprising development given that the theoretical tradition’s original insight was to account for macro, institutional influences on lower-level units. The call for microfoundations has gone on without really clarifying what institutionalists mean by microfoundations. Some reflections on the usefulness or purpose of establishing the microfoundations of institutional theory are in order. The authors advocate for treating the micro as part of pluralistic and multi-level accounts of institutional processes. Central is the conceptualization of actors as more or less institutionalized identities and roles.

This paper aims to evaluate the progress made in understanding the impact of multi-level institutions on entrepreneurship.

Based on scientific articles published between 1992 and 2017, the authors take a unique focus on both institutional theory applied and research topics of this area. Bibliometric method and systematic literature review method are used.

The results demonstrate that although institutional theory is well prepared for entrepreneurship context operating at different levels, the major knowledge foundation used predominantly focuses on macro and meso level. When it comes to research topics, entrepreneurship is often simplified as the founding of new venture, and the unique venture founding process has rarely been explored.

This paper is the first to provide a full picture of the multi-level institutions and their consequences on different kinds of entrepreneurial activities. The authors’evaluation of this research area also points out directions for future study.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the relationship between college and university faculty collegiality, conceptualized as a set of prosocial behaviors, and job satisfaction.

A multi-level structural equation model was developed to examine the relationship between faculty collegiality and job satisfaction at the individual and institutional levels, the effects of gender and race/ethnicity, the effect of institutional type (i.e. research universities vs non-research universities), and whether institutional-level perceptions of faculty collegiality and job satisfaction influence perceptions of faculty collegiality and job satisfaction at the individual level.

Faculty collegiality was highly and significantly related to job satisfaction at the individual level (0.86) and at the institutional level (0.93). At the individual level, pretenured women faculty and faculty of color indicated significantly lower levels of collegiality. At the institutional level, pretenured faculty interactions with tenured faculty colleagues were positively and significantly related to individual-level perceptions of faculty collegiality.

Study limitations include self-report data that were dependent upon accurate responses from faculty participants, and cross-sectional data. Future analyses could extend study findings by examining the influence of faculty collegiality upon such outcomes as faculty productivity and retention in future multi-level analyses.

It is recommended that interventions be undertaken to embed prosocial behaviors into faculty research, teaching, and service activities, and to foster relationships between pretenured and tenured faculty members.

This paper underscores the importance of collecting nationally representative faculty data and conducting rigorous multi-level analyses to inform higher education policy and practice.