Search results

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize insights from previous accounting, performance measurement (PM) and accountability research into the rapidly emerging field of knowledge-intensive public organizations (KIPOs). In so doing, it draws upon insights from previous literature and other papers included in this special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal.

The paper reviews academic analysis and insights provided in the academic literature on accounting, PM and accountability changes in KIPOs, such as universities and healthcare organizations, and paves the way for future research in this area.

The literature review shows that a growing number of studies are focusing on the hybridization of different KIPOs, not only in terms of accounting tools (e.g. performance indicators, budgeting and reporting) but also in relation to individual actors (e.g. professionals and managers) that may have divergent values and thus act according to multiple logics. It highlights many areas in which further robust academic research is needed to guide developments of hybrid organizations in policy and practice.

This paper provides academics, regulators and decision makers with relevant insights into issues and aspects of accounting, PM and accountability in hybrid organizations that need further theoretical development and empirical evidence to help inform improvements in policy and practice.

The paper provides the growing number of academic researchers in this emerging area with a literature review and agenda upon which they can build their research.

The purpose of this paper is to further develop a conceptual framework for analysing performance management systems (PMS). The framework aims to be useful for a rich understanding of a specific organisation’s PMS. At the same time, it should preferable be simple so that it could be used even in practice. The framework adds to earlier work by Malmi and Brown (2008), Ferreira and Otley (2009), Broadbent and Laughlin (2009), Bedford and Malmi (2015) and Johanson et al. (2001).

The paper is theoretical but has also been applied to a Swedish municipality. The purpose of the latter was to understand if the framework is feasible so far.

The authors hold that the framework in its present form is useful to use as an analytical tool even if it needs to be subjected to further development.

The paper addresses an issue that is continuously changing. This means that the suggested framework may suffer from theoretical weaknesses in some respects. To balance between a theoretically deep and exhaustive framework and a framework that is simple enough to use is a tricky question that needs further investigation.

The ambition with the framework is that it shall be useful even in practice.

The need for further research in the PMS area has been emphasised by the above researcher but also by, e.g., Van Helden and Reichard (2016). They hold that the authors need rich European cases to improve the understanding of how PMS works. The authors hold that the present framework has the potential to meet the demands from Van Helden and Reichard.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a longitudinal study on the use of mandatory knowledge balance sheets (KBS) in Austrian public universities. It contributes to the discourse on fourth-stage intellectual capital (IC) research. Conclusions drawn from the analysis of the empirical material are expected to focus further research on fourth-stage IC and to improve practices of IC disclosure.

A mandatory KBS has been used to govern the Austrian Higher Education Institution sector for more than a decade. In a qualitative longitudinal case study, the authors analyze two series of qualitative interviews and documents in order to reveal functional and dysfunctional effects of the KBS in use.

The conclusions focus on the communicative culture in the implementation process, the way change processes are organized and the value of strategy for orientation, sense making and an effective allocation of resources.

The practical implications are twofold: first, to identify aspects of monetary, utilitarian, social and environmental value dimensions, a concerted effort to embed quantitative data in a discourse on qualitative impact on value would be needed. Second, the authors support a “communicative culture first” rather than a “tool-box first” approach.

Original empirical data have been gathered in a longitudinal study of a valuable and unique case. Retrospectively, a better understanding of the top-down implementation of the KBS and its pitfalls is achieved.

This study analyses how the implementation of PPPs to operate rural water infrastructures and deliver water to local population has led to a new accountability archetype.

The archetype theory is used to analyse the process of implementing PPPs as a new archetype and setting up systems and structures of accountability between contracting parties. The empirical part of the study is based on extensive document analysis in an East African country. Documents analysed are from governmental sources, UNICEF and the World Bank and cover a period from 1998 to early 2019.

The process of implementing PPPs was revolutionary at the national level and evolutionary at micro levels. The sequence of the change process moved from central to peripheral. The linearity followed a reorientation track strategy. Setting up systems and structure of accountability was evolutionary, peripheral to central following the reorientation strategy. National authorities reacted proactively to comments and suggestions from international donors and local population. However, not all districts have fully implemented PPPs in their rural water sector. The structure of accountability at the local level, however, still suffers from logistical and professional capacity constraints.

Empirical findings cannot be generalised to other situations, but the theoretical framework used in this study can be applied elsewhere.

Giving priority to hearing from end users themselves before designing and implementing policies that intend to respond to specific local needs is recommended.

This study explains the ways in which micro-organisational change can lead to revolutionary archetypes such as PPPs, whereas the implementation of systems and the structure of accountability at inter-organisational level remain evolutionary.

The present study aims to address the emergence of platform-organized open innovation (OI). The research has the two main aims: the first is to increase the understanding of the performance of OI by investigating how the achievements of OI are measured in situated practices from a performative and strategic knowledge management (SKM) orientation. The methodological disadvantages of not pre-given case selection are partially counterbalanced by the second aim of the research, which is to extend existing SKM theory and examine how platforms create knowledge as they include actors and digital devices, thereby potentially redistributing relations of accountability.

Building on performativity theory, the paper studies how the achievements and knowledge created in OI are managed and evaluated in practice. The case description draws on different sources from a spiral case study, as openness is performed by platform, firm, crowd and innovation intermediaries.

The paper illustrates how a strategy of digitally enabled openness brings its own issues as platforms enable knowledge sharing and perform a redistribution of accountability. In the heterarchies studied through this research endeavor, managers and their team members were accountable not only to multiple units, or teams, across the organization, but also to the crowd. The case material demonstrates that the ecology of devices and their performative struggles create lateral accountability.

While recent streams of research suggest that the context of OI (i.e. distributed sources of knowledge for innovation) shifts the unit of analysis of organization design from the individual firm to networks of actors organized on platforms, the authors find that the focal firm still remains a key conceptual parameter in SKM research, which, in turn, makes it difficult to capture the suggested radicality of OI.

The authors show, that in practice, the firm has to take into account the performance of the external crowd and at times put resources into its training and education. In heterarchy, distributed authority is assumed to be facilitated through lateral accountability, whereby the traditional principles of vertical authority no longer hold, but rather, managers and their team members can be accountable to multiple units, or teams, across the organization.

The paper develops a performative theory of openness. OI is a model, strategy and socio-material practice whereby digital designs create an ecology of devices that can enact all kinds of openness. Ultimately, the current paper proposes that SKM and OI theory need to consider how platforms perform relations of accountability beyond the boundaries of the single organization.

This study aims to answer the research question of how a calculative regime for public universities is implemented, how and under which conditions its symbolic use emerges and what kind of unintended consequences occur over time.

The empirical material presented in the paper derives methodically from a longitudinal qualitative research approach analyzing higher education systems (HES)-reforms in Austria. To better understand the consequences of the organizational changes in line with the new legal framework, 2 series of qualitative interviews in 2011/2012 and 2016/2017 on the field level and the organizational level were conducted.

Identifying two enabling consequences from the tactical behaviors of resistance and symbolic use, i.e. new processes of communication and horizontal network building, allows for theory-building with a focus on the dynamics how accounting begins, then next becomes an established infrastructure, is then destabilized and re-elaborated before it becomes, again, an infrastructure which is different from before.

Although the findings are based on a national empirical context, they are linked to the international discourse on HES in transition and the role of calculative regimes including performance measurement and management attitudes and instruments. They are relevant for an international research community open-minded toward differentiated case studies in a longitudinal perspective on HES-reforms.

When reflecting on their own specific settings governing bodies and practitioners managing the transition of HES may find insights from longitudinal case studies inspiring. The dynamics initiated by new calculative regimes installed need a sensitive framework to handle dissent, resistance, tactical behaviors and changes in power relations between the field level and the organizational level.

This is a unique longitudinal case study of the Austrian HES and its public universities in transition.

The aim of this paper is to debate various critical issues in the implementation and use of the balanced scorecard (BSC) as a management control tool. Because there is no self‐evident solution to these critical issues, they are termed dilemmas.

The paper contributes to the BSC debate by collecting insights from empirical findings, as well as exploring various theoretical aspects.

After presenting four perceived dilemmas and how they affect the implementation and use of the BSC in various settings, the paper concludes that there is a need for further debate and research on these dilemmas.

The paper is primarily a contribution to the debate concerning the balanced scorecard and its range of application as a management control model.

The paper is motivated by an overall high rate of implementation failure in various practical settings.

Some of the problems described have been debated before, whereas others are new. However, there has been hardly any discussion of the dilemmas in conjunction with one another. The paper is an attempt to generate important new questions about the future implementation and use of the BSC.

This paper aims to present an empirical case where fundamental changes in the environment have forced an organization to re‐evaluate its management control systems and possibly search for destabilizing supporting routines in order to unlearn the established ways of measuring and controlling within the organization. The problem, however, is that organizational technologies often work in the other direction, i.e. they promote stability in organizational routines. The paper seeks to increase understanding regarding the importance of destabilizing, or, as the authors like to call them, sensebreaking activities within organizations that are present in rapidly changing environments.

The authors used multiple sources and multiple techniques to collect data; interviews with managers, participation in meetings, and document analysis such as annual reports, pamphlets, speeches and Swedish Armed Forces's (SAF's) web site.

The study is clearly presented in a design‐oriented way. The benefits, however, are that it illustrates that the available models take for granted that the organization has a mission that is accepted. When the mission is debated, the focus and practice of management control falls into pieces. Also, when the ontology of the organization is debated, flexibility does not suffice. The proposition is that it is through sensebreaking that a reflective position may be held. That is, a position where everything may be questioned and that this questioning never stops.

The study of the SAF could probably be labeled a study of an extreme case. Extreme cases facilitate theory building because the dynamics being examined tend to be more visible than they might be in other contexts. The caveat, however, is that this particular case study risks becoming anecdotal since the SAF is, per definition, one of a kind. The paper's argument, however, is that the SAF acts as an illustration of the limits (and possibilities) of management control theory and how it is framed as a technology in a milieu that is neither relatively stable nor stable, but rather under extraordinary pressure for change.

The purpose of the paper is to reflect on how sensegiving cues are encapsulated in models of reporting for human resources. This has been by investigating elements, arguments and formats of the models.

This paper focuses on the three discourses of human resource reporting that Jan‐Erik Gröjer is a part of. This paper is an appreciation of the importance of Jan‐Erik's work in the field of human resource communication as well as an illustration of how ideas and models changes over time.

The paper concludes that: there is no coherent idea of how sensegiving should be made in order to affect the sensemaking processes of human resources, the models emanate from different forms of critiques and the sensegiving cues change accordingly, and accounting for human resources has an ethical dimension.

The choice of model for reporting on human resources affects not only the content of the human resource report (the what and how question), but also affected by which arguments are considered as most efficient in the sensegiving process..

The paper contributes to the understanding of how sensemaking is dependent on which sensegiving cues bring forward in the accounts of human accounts.