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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the budgeting practices in the Tanzanian Central Government. New budgeting reforms were introduced following exhortations from the bodies such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF and reflect the new public management (NPM).

A grounded theory methodology was used. This methodology is inductive, allowing phenomena to emerge from the participants rather than from prior theory. This ensures both relevance and depth of understanding.

The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of “struggling for conformance”. Tanzanian Central Government adopted innovations in order to ensure donor funding by demonstrating its ability to implement imposed budgetary changes. Organizational actors were committed to these reforms through necessity and struggled to implement them, rather than more overtly resisting them.

The research is subject to the usual limitations of case study, inductive research.

This research has several implications for policy-makers of NPM and budgetary reforms. These include the recognition that the establishment of the rules and regulations alone is not adequate for the successful implementation of budgetary and NPM reforms and should involve a comprehensive view of the nature of the internal and external environment.

There are few empirical papers of NPM accounting practices being implemented in the public sector of developing countries and none at all based in Tanzania. The paper identifies the existence of struggling to conform to reforms rather than resistance identified in prior research.

Purpose – The negotiated order branch of symbolic interaction used to examine the process by which welfare regulations were dramatically changed in which the forty-year old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was abandoned, and a new W-2 (Welfare Works) welfare reform effort was developed and socially negotiated with the Federal government and in the State of Wisconsin. We probe interactions within the mesodomain of four levels of actors: the Federal government; State-level government in both the executive and legislative branches; county-level government; and public and private welfare service delivery agencies.

Method – Qualitative, naturalistic, ten-year field study entailing interviews and archival analyses.

Findings – The reform effort involved the mutual constitution of the W-2 social structure and the social interactions that surrounded it through such strategies as negotiation, conflict, manipulation, coercion, exchange, bargaining, collusion, power brokering, and rhetoric, which were all circumscribed by and interpenetrated with the predecessor AFDC rule system. In turn, the welfare budget was reduced from $652m to $257m. We observed that the macro structure of welfare shaped the micro social actions of a variety of actors, and that micro social action by institutional entrepreneurs reconstituted structure of welfare policy in what proved to be a moving matrix.

Research implications – Implications were directed at extending and refining the negotiated order perspective.

Social implications – Given that the number of welfare recipients was reduced from 300,000 to 10,000, their fate in a weak economy was explored.

Originality – Chapter extends symbolic interaction concepts to examine a contested social domain.

The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of the contributions of multiple theories to accounting and organizational research, which is often referred to as “theoretical triangulation” or “theoretical pluralism”, with a particular focus on the manner in which chosen research methods have informed these efforts at theoretical triangulation.

The authors conduct an analysis of how to employ theoretical triangulations and methodological pluralism in accounting and organizational research. To this end, they use prior empirical evidence for illustrative purposes.

The authors argue that using theories with epistemological tensions that are captured by appropriate research methods enable one to explore different, sometimes even contradictory, layers of meanings of realities pertaining to management accounting information and processes in organizations and society.

The paper contributes to the thinking about the interaction between theory development and research methods chosen by demonstrating how and under what circumstances multiple theories could be meaningfully integrated and executed to provide deeper understandings of accounting and organizational phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to respond to Modell’s paper entitled “Theoretical triangulation and pluralism in accounting research: a critical realist critique” (AAAJ this issue), which offers a two-part exposition of topics and issues pertaining to the recent paper “Theoretical triangulation and pluralism in research methods in organizational and accounting research” (Hoque et al., 2013).

Critical analysis of Modell’s observations pertaining to the paper drawing on the classical work of Burrell and Morgan (1979).

The authors reemphasize the need for an interaction between adopting an ontological stance and then conducting empirical research where the authors stated that the intention was not to argue any idea that theoretical triangulation approach should become the dominant approach and “take over” single theory approach. Instead, the authors demonstrate the ways theoretical triangulation can advance the understanding of multifaceted organizational realities.

The authors make a contribution to the generation of knowledge in research by addressing the tradeoffs involved such as possible theoretical incoherence and lack of focus when integrating theories with different ontological and epistemological assumptions.

The sociology of professions literature has theorized that the professions are undergoing a dramatic transformation from being traditional professions to “entrepreneurial professions” populated by “knowledge workers.” In part, this transformation is associated with the commodification and commercialization of professional endeavor.

Our purpose is to enlist the processual ordering perspective to examine the ongoing transformation of the Big 5 (and following the collapse of Arthur Andersen during our field study)/4 public accounting firms to become entrepreneurial firms populated by global knowledge experts. More specifically, we focus on the inter-play of power and meta-power across three moments of the social construction process – externalization, objectivation, and internalization – through which the ethos of entrepreneurialism is being socially constructed within these firms, their individual members, and in the public accounting profession. Finally, we explore impressions gleaned from our qualitative, naturalistic field study.

The organizational decision-making perspective (ODM) has a legacy regarding its concern for budgeting as an essential organizational routine in decision-making. Budgeting has also become a direct concern to organizational institutional theory (OIT) because of its prominent role in institution building, where budgeting can build trust in inter-organizational relationships. This paper builds on these two perspectives to explore organizational budget processes' formation, disruption, and re-creation over time.

We conducted a comprehensive review and critical analysis of the ODM and OIT perspectives, focusing on a fundamental paradox between ODM's emphasis on stability through organizational routines and OIT's focus on organizational legitimacy through the decoupled expression of organizational values. We then expanded on these paradoxical concerns in the context of budgeting, formalizing them into specific research propositions for future studies.

Tensions around the stability, decay, and re-creation of budgets as organizational routines emerge as a pressing issue requiring further empirical investigation from the ODM perspective. A critical issue in the OIT perspective is the potential for organizational budgets to provide an opportunity to decouple from practice through routinized expressions of rationality and to facilitate loose coupling in practice. These findings offer a fresh perspective and open up new avenues for future research in this area.

This paper contributes to the accounting and organizational research literature by shedding light on how organizations respond to the potential decay of budget routines and the manifestation of organizational values in decoupling processes by further re-creating and elaborating budget processes.

Francisco J. Alatorre earned his law degree in Mexico, where he also practiced law before emigrating to the United States in 1991. He completed his Ph.D. degree in Justice Studies in 2011, and he is now Assistant Professor of Criminology at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico. His dissertation research involved a study of undocumented immigrants in Arizona.

Traditional definitions of decision support systems emphasise their support role in individual decision making and utilise notions of rational choice. By considering decisions as an organisational activity, the interpretation of decision support systems use in organisations can move beyond this technical rational understanding, to include potential political and legitimating roles for these systems. These three possible interpretations are discussed in relation to the implementation of a large decision support system in a local government context described by Dutton (1981). In its technical role, the system was used as part of a rational planning agenda. However, the system was clearly also used politically, to promote particular interests and as a lever in negotiations between various groups. Part of the appeal of the decision support system was the appearance of rationality and technical neutrality that it gave to the planning and decision making process, and the legitimation it provided with external constituents. The paper concludes that an unquestioning acceptance of the technical received view of decision support system use is limiting, and that a more reflective approach to their development, implementation and use is required.