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Purpose – This study investigates the interplay between strategic performance measurement and management accounting to gain a deeper understanding of how strategic measures of performance evolve with the managerial accounting practices.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The study explored the performance measures used at a bank focused on the development and sustainability initiatives in Africa. Thirty-two semistructured interviews were conducted with directors, managers, and analysts from nine different categories of job families.

Findings – Analysis shows that managers assimilate a comprehensive, multifaceted measurement system to understand the creation and delivery of sustainable value. The results show that the managerial accounting practices adapt to incorporate an integrated set of performance measures that afford sustainable value to the stakeholders. The findings provide rich insights into how the managers adapt their information assimilation practices to the changing demands of the different stakeholders and adopt practices which innovate measures of performance that are aligned to the strategic goals. Finally, the findings illustrate that the interplay between strategic performance and managerial accounting practices has the potential to improve or inhibit sustainable development.

Originality/Value – Little is known about how performance measures evolve, and how they interplay with the managerial accounting practices within organizations. This study reveals that the interplay of strategic performance measurement and managerial accounting can only be understood in the confluence of organizational change and sustainability. While acknowledging the need to embrace change and sustainability simultaneously, the study offers insights into the dynamics of change – the duality of emergent managerial accounting practices and the evolution of strategic performance measurement systems.

Purpose – In the last decades, Italian healthcare organisations have been subject to important normative changes, aimed at increasing their efficiency. As a response, performance measurement and evaluation (PME) systems have been introduced. The present study attempts to examine PME system changes as institutional processes. In studying such processes the healthcare literature acknowledges the presence of two logics: managerial and professional, as peculiar to healthcare settings, whose convergence or divergence can explain the success of any institutional process.

Design/methodology/approach – We adopt Busco et al.'s (2007) framework as an approach for unbundling PME system change into four relevant coordinates, namely: (1) the object (PME system), (2) the subjects (institutional forces), (3) the place and time of change (the managerial and professional logics) and (4) the how and why change happens (change as an institutional process). We conducted a longitudinal case study at a large teaching hospital in Southern Italy, directed to interpret PME system changes during the period from 1998 until 2009.

Findings – Our observation distinguishes episodes of successful institutional processes, where the introduced innovations are transformed into objectivated practices, from episodes of missed institutionalisation, where new procedures were rapidly abandoned.

Research and social implications – This theoretical framework can be useful for interpreting the PME system changes in different institutional contexts.

Originality – The Busco et al.'s framework allows us to understand PME system changes by integrating the perspectives from Neo-Institutional Sociology, representing healthcare organisational responses to external institutional pressures, and Old-Institutional Economics, conceptualising PME system changes as an institutionalisation process.

This chapter aims to study international experience and prospects for improving accounting practices to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises. The research is based on a sample from 202 countries for 2019–2022, relying on World Bank statistics. The authors ranked the factors related to accounting practices in terms of their significance in ensuring the global competitiveness of enterprises. The most significant factors are the detalization of accounting, communication with tax inspectors, and accounting digitalization of accounting. The least significant and contradictory factor was the inclusivity of top management. The theoretical significance lies in the fact that its results revealed previously unknown influences of accounting practices (managerial factors) on the competitiveness of enterprises. The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the rethinking of the process of managing the global competitiveness of enterprises in the accounting system through the prism of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), substantiating that this management most actively supports the implementation of SDG 16 and SDG 17, generally supports SDG 9, and slightly contributes to SDG 5. The practical significance is associated with the perspective of enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises through the improvement of accounting practices (using Uzbekistan as an example). It demonstrates that even with low activity and small market capitalization of domestic enterprises on the stock market, improving accounting practices can significantly increase this activity and capitalization. The author's recommendations will help improve accounting practices and ensure the growth of the global competitiveness of enterprises in Uzbekistan in the medium term until 2026.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of empirical research on performance management (PM) in former communist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, to evaluate the state of knowledge in this area and suggest possible directions for future research.

An examination of the literature was undertaken to review the empirical studies treating on PM in ex-communist countries from CEE. A total of 96 journal articles, PhD thesis, and conference papers were identified, categorized, and analyzed according to research questions, methodology, and theoretical framework. Contributions are classified by countries, according to progress in transition process (post-transition/transition countries) and membership in the Soviet Union (Soviet/non-Soviet countries). The review examines publications in four languages (English, French, Romanian, and Russian).

The literature review identified various stages of development of PM research and practice in the different groups of CEE countries.

In post-transition CEE countries, PM research follows the trends settled up in the developed countries (quantitative studies examining the extent of usage of different PM tools, influence of contingent factors, relationship PM-strategy, and impact on company’s performance). Also, the findings illustrate the modernization of PM practices: increasing importance of nonfinancial indicators and integrated performance management systems (PMS), although financial indicators are prevailing.

On the contrary, in transition countries PM research and practices are at an early stage, the reviewed literature highlights some specific issues related to transition context: the dynamic aspect of PM, change management, importance of informal systems, cultural aspects, and business traditions.

Because of the large number of CEE countries and the diversity of their national languages, many studies conducted in native languages have not been addressed in this literature review, which is essentially based on publications in English and French. Only for three CEE countries (Russia, Romania, and Moldova) publications in national language were considered.

This literature review may be useful for practitioners, providing insights on the extent of diffusion and usage of different PM tools and identifying difficulties and pitfalls to avoid in their implementation.

The chapter represents one of the first contributions to the knowledge about PM research and practice in former communist CEE countries. The adopted framework for reviewing and classifying the literature allows identifying the differences in PM research and practices between post-transition/transition and Soviet/non-Soviet countries.

This article reflects on the lack of focus on history characterizing the strategic management field. Reasons and consequences of such a peculiar situation need to be pointed out in order to develop a better history-grounded research approach inside the field.

In terms of (the missing) history of thought, a fear of history seems to characterize the field, for a more aware historical understanding of strategic management and practices is likely to question not only notions and concepts, but the very perception of the field as a practically oriented discipline. A lack of historical reflection is usually preferred, wherein strategic management seems to come out of the blue, ignoring its inner evolution over time, and the relationships with previous bodies of knowledge in the business realm, such as for instance administrative sciences and accounting.

In terms of the history of practice the situation is – if possible – even worse, with an obscure understanding of contexts and features of managerial practices in the past. Archival research is called for here, drawing on two research projects on pre-industrial revolution context (the Spanish Royal Tobacco Factory in the XVIII century, and the Venice Arsenal in the turn of the XVI century), in order to examine how prior management practices can influence and inform our present understanding of the discipline of strategic management. A less simplistic view of managing practices in the past emerges, which challenges the commonly held cycle of innovation and discontinuity perpetually alleged in the strategic management field to legitimize its own existence as a research area.

While strategic management tools show a potential contribution to historical understanding in this archival research, a more historically aware understanding of the evolution of the field is thus intended as a way to falsify strategic management theory.

This paper examines accounting practices and legitimacy in Tanzanian Local Government Authorities (LGAs).

It uses data from multiple sources, including interviews, observations and documents, to provide theoretical and practical understanding on how accounting has been practiced and the conditions which sustain its undertaking. It applies a grounded theory method to develop a theory systematically from the raw data.

The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of ‘manipulating legitimacy’. This involved the purposeful and deliberate use of accounting techniques to influence and control (and sometimes even to falsify) the perceived reasonableness of the Councils’ operations. The paper revealed that the effective operations of the Tanzanian LGAs were highly constrained by their context. This had forced the LGAs’ officials to use important accounting practices such as budgeting, financial reporting, auditing and performance measurement, to manipulate the organisational legitimacy, a process which ensured the availability of resources to both LGAs and the individual officials.

The main limitation of the research is that the data was collected from a limited number of local authorities in just one developing country. It is hoped that future research in other developing countries will be undertaken to broaden and deepen our understanding.

The paper identifies the importance of manipulating legitimacy in understanding accounting practices in local government.

There has been a call for additional managerial accounting research that examines the effect of non-pecuniary preferences (such as those for honesty and fairness) on managerial reporting decisions.

Drawing from trait theory, agency theory, and psychological contracts theory, Kidder (2005) suggests that personality traits and perceived unfairness in the workplace both help predict detrimental workplace behaviors, with perceived fairness affecting the honesty in reporting of some individuals but not others. We test Kidder’s (2005) theory in an experimental setting where participants have opportunity and incentive to report dishonestly.

Participants’ honesty preferences and ethical values (idealism and relativism) were measured, and the fairness of the participants’ employment contracts was manipulated. As predicted, higher preferences for honesty are significantly associated with honesty in reporting, suggesting that participants make trade-offs between increasing their own wealth and acting honestly. Additionally, the perceived fairness of compensation interacted with honesty preferences and relativism to affect honesty in reporting.

The implication for practice is that while a small number of employees are likely to consistently behave in honest or self-interested ways, firms may be able to positively influence the behavior of the majority of employees by enacting policies and procedures that contribute to perceptions that compensation is fair.

These findings contribute to our understanding of non-pecuniary preferences on managerial reporting decisions.

This article focuses on the role of accounting performance measurement in the creation of public value in the context of the network associated with the justice portfolio within the Australian Commonwealth.

We use concepts of bonding and bridging social capital to theorize the use of performance measurement in government networks.

We find that there is relatively little use of performance measures that reported network level performance and the primary emphasis was on building social capital with funders rather than across network partner agencies. We therefore conclude that existing Australian public sector performance measurement practices are not supportive of intra-governmental networks and therefore the notion that improvement in performance measurement will deliver public value needs further reflection.

The research scope is restricted to governmental network performance measures from a justice portfolio budget perspective. Despite the focused attention of the research, the application of the findings has relevance across all government portfolios and broader public management more generally.

Despite calls for accountability and governance innovation where public value is delivered across organizational boundaries through dependency and collaboration, the case environment offers little evidence that forms of performance measurement over the period examined recognize this practicality. The research primarily adds considerable weight to the argument that the delivery of public value by networks requires an evolution in accountability and performance reporting away from traditional institutional forms of performance representation.

The research is highly novel in its unveiling and examination of contemporary performance measurement reporting from a network perspective.