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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the multidimensional nature of social and nonprofit organisations' accountability and performance measurement systems (PMSs). It further considers how these systems help in defining outcome performance indicators downward to beneficiaries

The paper discusses participatory action research (PAR) within an Italian social enterprise. In order to increase dialogue, participation and engagement, the researchers adopted focus groups as a preferred method of investigation and conducted a broad documental analysis from July 2016 to March 2018. The paper discusses the gathered data in light of the social impact value chain as well as the multiple-constituency approach.

The findings support the idea that social and nonprofit organisations lack the expertise and resources to evaluate outcomes and impact; however, through PAR, the organisation defined their desired outcomes and ascertained which internal output measures were most likely to be correlated with these outcomes. Moreover, the findings highlight that nonprofits develop outcome measurements less frequently because they have more control over their immediate activities and outputs.

This research suggests the need to reinforce lateral and downward accountability based on mission and mission-based activities in order to make the performance management system of social and nonprofit organisation linked to the organisational strategies.

This paper innovates methodologically in two directions: 1) it adopts action research as a qualitative method, allowing the researcher to generate solutions to collectively-identified problems and 2) the paper's arguments are strongly supported by rich empirical exploration that occurred over a period of 20 months in an Italian social enterprise.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Austrian public universities (APUs) respond to the challenge of maintaining academic freedom while complying with legal requirements and enhancing competitiveness by using Management Control Systems (MCSs). Specifically, it examines how APUs respond to the co-presence of academic, government and business logic.

The perspective of institutional logics as a theoretical lens and the framework of MCSs by Malmi and Brown (2008) serve to analyse how APUs respond to the existence of different institutional field-level logics. In-depth expert interviews from the perspective of APUs’ research management are conducted to identify the applied management control practices (MCPs) and APUs’ responses to the different institutional field-level logics.

This study identifies how academic, government and business logic are represented in field-level-specific MCPs and field-level-specific corresponding narratives. Reflecting upon APUs’ responses to the co-existence of academic and government logic, compliance or rather, selective coupling with government logic or decoupling from government logic became obvious.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study at higher education institutions representing academic, government and business logic in the applied MCPs in research management. The study reveals that APUs have developed specific responses and narratives regarding the existence of different institutional field-level logics.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

Healthcare systems receive criticism from both providers and recipients. The diversity in these systems throughout the world makes innovation and change difficult. However, a structured analysis of healthcare systems is crucial to identify areas for improvement and to share best practices for the betterment of healthcare throughout the world.

The paper uses organizational theory as an unbiased tool for evaluating healthcare systems. This theory analyses healthcare systems across five dimensions: environment, culture, social structure, physical structure and technology. This analysis provides an in-depth understanding of the organization's surroundings, formation and function. It offers a lens through which healthcare systems can be envisioned and establishes a vocabulary for communication.

Organizational theory presents a multifaceted approach to initiate assessments aiming to enhance existing healthcare systems and customize them to serve all stakeholders within the focused ecosystem. It alters the dynamics of criticism and presents an opportunity to sustainably address unforeseen healthcare challenges in the future. As the author proceeds to understand healthcare organizations through the perspective of organizational theory, the author also uncovers subtle yet crucial issues such as resource dependence, cultural clashes, organizational silence, bureaucracy, hierarchy, ethics, values, engagement and burnout.

This paper was crafted from a collaborative paper for the final of a master's degree. A collaboration was conceptualized using organisation theory as the tool to align processes and achieve successful outcome. The narrative of the collaboration has been edited and paper presented highlighting the importance of the tool of organisation theory in healthcare systems.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how to apply the abductive research process for developing a theoretical explanation in studies on performance management and management control systems. This is important because theoretically ambitious research tends to require explanatory study outcomes, but prior research frameworks provide little guidance in this regard, potentially facilitating ill-defined research designs and a lack of common vocabulary and criteria for evaluating studies.

The authors introduce a methodological framework that distinguishes three interwoven theoretical abstraction levels: descriptive, analytical and explanatory. They use a recently published qualitative field study to illustrate an application of the framework.

The framework and its illustrated application make the systematic logic of the abductive research process visible and accessible to researchers. The authors explain how the framework supports moving from empirical description to theoretical explanation during the research process and where the three levels might open spaces for the positioning of novel practices and conceptual and theoretical innovations.

The framework provides guidance for an explanatory research design and theory-building purpose and has been developed in response to recent criticism in the field that highlights the wide gap between leading-edge practice and the lagging state of theory. It offers interdisciplinary vocabulary and evaluation criteria that can be applied by any accounting and management researcher regardless of whether they pursue critical, interpretive or positivist research and whether they primarily use qualitative or quantitative research methods.

The paper explores processes associated with the adoption of corporate sustainability communication in a B2B context. It employs a combined action research and sensemaking approach to document moments that precede the initiation of external sustainability communication.

The paper is the outcome of an action research project, where we examine the case of one industrial company that was silent on its multiple sustainability-related practices, but recently decided to become more transparent to the outside world. A processual approach to sensemaking is adopted to show how organisational and non-organisational members actively participated in meaning co-construction.

Corporate silence can be disrupted by triggering events that cause moments of sudden realisation for organisational members, eventually leading to the initiation of sensemaking processes inside the organisation. Once this occurs, the possibility of externally communicating sustainability appears a feasible and strategic approach to pursue. We document how different actors are involved in meaning co-construction and how the entire process of sensemaking unfolds.

A sensemaking approach sheds light on the complexity of sustainability communication, where multiple actors are involved. This is a useful approach to consider in order to couple sustainability with other organisational practices. Moreover, sensemaking opens a window of opportunity for various societal actors' interventions to shape the role and content of sustainability communication.

The paper offers an original, theoretically informed methodological contribution to the literature on sustainability communication by coupling a sensemaking approach with action research. The approach is employed to examine the role of internal organisational actors in sustainability reporting processes, an area that has received scant attention.

This paper examines the contested value of healthy life and wellbeing in a context of severe austerity, exploring how the value of “Public Health” is constructed through and with material-discursive practices and accounting representations. It seeks to explore the political and ethical implications of constructing the valuable through a shared consensus over the “facts” when addressing complex, multi-agency problems with long time horizons and outcomes that are not always easily quantifiable.

The theorisation, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) scholars and Karen Barad's (2007) agential realism, opens up the analysis to the performativity of both material and discursive practices in the period following a major re-organisation of activity. The study investigates two case authorities in England and the national regulator through interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

The paper demonstrates the deeply ethical and political entanglements of accounting representations as objectivity, consensus and collective action are constructed and resisted in practice. It goes on to demonstrate the practical challenges of constructing “alternative accounts” and “intelligent accountabilities” through times of austerity towards a shared sense of public value and suggests austerity measures make such aims both more challenging and all the more essential.

Few studies in the accounting literature have explored the full complexity of valuation practices in non-market settings, particularly in a public sector context; this paper, therefore, extends familiar conceptual vocabulary of STS inspired research to further explore how value(s), ethics and identity all play a crucial role in making things valuable.