Search results

Beyond budgeting has received an increased amount of scholarly attention in recent years. However, because most of the published research is discrete and unconnected, an overall picture of what is known about beyond budgeting has not evolved. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research on beyond budgeting. In particular, the authors compare conceptual papers that mostly stress the benefits of beyond budgeting with empirical evidence on beyond budgeting implementation and offer ideas for future research on beyond budgeting.

This paper uses systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and examination of references/citations, 32 papers were analysed with regard to bibliographical information, research design and findings.

Although proponents of beyond budgeting have put substantial effort into developing and promoting this concept, numerous empirical studies demonstrate that many organizations being investigated would still rather improve traditional budgeting than abandon it completely. This review also highlights the main criticisms of traditional budgeting, development of management control systems under beyond budgeting and factors hindering the implementation of beyond budgeting.

This paper suggests that further research is needed on the scaling of beyond budgeting, organizational changes under beyond budgeting and challenges resulting from the implementation of beyond budgeting.

The paper is the first comprehensive literature review on beyond budgeting.

THE PROBLEM A number of corporations that responded to the competitive pressures of the 1980s and early 1990s by reorganizing and right‐sizing are dissatisfied with the results.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the changes organizations can adopt to move beyond budgeting. We show how these changes can be understood as modes of adaptive performance management that explains the ways in which organizations move beyond budgeting to become more adaptive. The proposed modes are then used to derive propositions for future research.

Methodology/approach: We follow a conceptual approach through an analysis of the beyond budgeting principles using the management and systems literatures on radical decentralization. We theorize how organizations can enhance their adaptability to environmental uncertainty through changes to their management structure and control processes.

Findings: We show that organizations can move beyond budgeting by decentralizing within or beyond their management structure and modifying or removing their budget-based control processes. We propose that beyond budgeting can be conceptualized as four modes of adaptive performance management: better budgeting, advanced budgeting, restricted budgeting, and nonbudgeting.

Research limitations/implications: The four modes of adaptive performance management can be used in future research to consider how changes to management structures and budget-based control processes can enhance the organizational adaptability needed to manage environmental uncertainty.

Practical implications: We show that while the nonbudgeting mode may be most suited to organizations facing high levels of environmental uncertainty, organizations facing low–to-moderate levels of environmental uncertainty can achieve sufficient levels of adaptability with less extensive changes to management structure and budget-based control processes.

Originality/value: The four modes of adaptive performance management reflect different approaches for dealing with environmental uncertainty. Positioning nonbudgeting as one mode and identifying alternate modes of adaptive performance management provides a basis for comparing and understanding the changes organizations make to move beyond budgeting.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper reviews the literature concerning when and in what way citizen participation can have an impact on budgeting. The first part of the paper conceptualizes, through the literature, five budgeting models, each having both problems and solutions for citizen involvement. The second section of the paper explores intervention designs that can be constructive in dealing with the larger problems connecting budgeting and citizen participation. The paper, therefore, seeks to determine where participation in budgeting can have an impact on citizen anger, estrangement, distrust and pessimism.

We develop and validate measurement instruments for the business partner, watchdog, and scorekeeper roles of controllers. This study addresses calls to enhance the quality of survey research in management accounting by devoting more attention to scale development and especially to construct validity. By focusing on the activity sets of the controllers’ roles, we provide a theoretically and empirically grounded picture of their current roles. The measurement instruments presented in this study enable systematic research progress on controller roles, their relationships, antecedents, and performance outcomes.

Using a Constrained Choice Theory framework, this paper will identify variation in choosing the constraint-reflective priorities of budget, taste, or health by sociodemographic group, familial status, and weight category. Identifying which groups experience unique constraints will allow for customized healthy eating programs to address barriers specific to each group.

Data are derived from a paper survey of families with children in Lexington, KY and analyzed using logistic regression.

The results of this study confirm that some sociodemographic groups are more likely to choose priorities that reflect contextual constraints in their lives than others. In particular, having a higher income reduces likelihood of prioritizing budget and increases chances of prioritizing taste. Being married or cohabitating is correlated with choosing health, but having more children reduces the likelihood of prioritizing health. Being obese correlates with increased likelihood of prioritizing budget. Membership in each of these categories reflects constraints on which foods are purchased for the home.

Families are encouraged to improve their diets by eating at home, but families face many constraints when choosing healthy foods at the grocery store. Understanding the constraints experienced by various groups when shopping for food will lead to health policy that more fully addresses barriers to healthy eating for groups with disproportionately high incidence of diet-related disease.

This paper extends Constrained Choice Theory by applying it to a new aspect of health, purchasing groceries, and also by examining a wider variety of sociodemographic groups than previous research.

This study focuses on ratcheting and budget behavior in nonprofit museums. Specifically, the authors examine how performance compared with the budget affects future revenue budgets, and how this differs from the extant literature focused on for-profit organizations. The study focuses specifically on the relationship between museums and their sources of public funding and how this affects how museums prepare budgets.

Based on four years of data covering 97 state-subsidized Danish museums, the authors analyze budget ratcheting using least absolute deviation (LAD) estimations in the form of median regressions.

The authors find that when actual revenue from admission charges is below the budget, the decrease in the following year's budget is greater than the increase in the following year's budget when actual revenue from admission charges is above the budget (i.e. the authors find asymmetrical ratcheting).

The findings are based on a specific setting (Danish museums), and the results may not be generalizable to other settings.

This study provides insights into the museum sector and other sectors with similar characteristics and contributes to understanding the differences between museums and for-profit organizations when it comes to budgeting. As private-sector management practices are gaining ground in the museum sector, it is important to learn more about budgeting-related issues in this sector.

The asymmetrical ratcheting the authors find is the opposite of ratcheting typically found in for-profit organizations. The authors attribute the results to the incentive conflict between museums and their public funding sources. The authors point to the museums' dependence on public funding as an explanation for the results and, thereby, extend the knowledge on ratcheting to organizations with different characteristics than traditional, for-profit organizations.

An international management movement known as New Public Management (NPM) emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. It relies on the normative use of economic market models, transaction cost theory, and public choice theories to deliver public services. While the manifestations of this new approach have taken many different avenues across the world, in the United States the primary manifestations have been found in the “Reinventing Government” movement (Gore, 1993), and the “Competitive Sourcing” plan of the Bush Administration (Office Management and Budget, 2002, 2003). A central component of NPM practices in the United States is the use of “outsourcing” of government service delivery to private or non-profit organizations.

With the advent of the Montreal Protocol, the removal of flux residues from printed circuit assemblies using solvents based on CFC‐113 is no longer an acceptable option. An alternative range of cleaning technologies is being developed and marketed for this purpose, and the aim of this work was to study the efficiency of a variety of these alternative cleaning regimes after IR reflow soldering. The results indicated that: (i) all the cleaning regimes were capable of removing flux and flux residues after standard IR reflow soldering; (ii) as the level of flux contamination under the components increased, the ability of the cleaning regimes to clean the boards decreased; (iii) the cleaning regimes had varying problems in removing the flux residues after the non‐standard (overheat) IR profile processing; (iv) when additional flux is introduced under the components (i.e., non‐standard IR reflow), the delay between soldering and cleaning becomes important; and (v) the cleaning regimes exhibited a wide variation in their ability to clean under components with small stand‐off heights.