Search results

For professional service firms (PSFs) the partnership form of governance is the most effective means of reconciling the potentially competing claims of three sets of stakeholders: shareholders, professionals, and clients. Increasingly, PSFs are abandoning this traditional form of governance in favour of incorporation and flotation. Very little is known about the implications of this trend. We examine an alliance between a partnership and a corporation and analyse the systems and structures that professionals in both firms deploy in their efforts to preserve and sustain the interpretive scheme of professionalism and partnership. We emphasise the need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between governance as a legal form and governance as an interpretive scheme.

Which courses of action and levers are used by companies in the quest for renewal? Do renewal initiatives create value for the company? Can successful renewal initiatives provide models for managers committed to change, enabling them to identify certain levers that can be exploited in their own drives for renewal? This paper aims at providing answers to these questions by describing different aspects (implementation and corporate value creation perspectives) of the renewal experience conducted in 1993 by a large French electrical engineering company, Spie-Trindel. In this company, a competence building process was identified and analyzed as a driving force behind renewal. Thanks to an analysis of different performance measures (return on investment, return on equity and stock market prices) of Spie-Trindel, the competence building process was studied as a transformational leverage and its impact on the resulting value creation of the company was put into light. Moreover, this paper provides a concrete and detailed description of a specific competence building process which led the company to both alter the hierarchy of competences (see “reordering mechanisms”) and institutionalize new competences (see “institutionalization and routinization mechanisms”) within its core competence portfolio.

This paper provides a review of the progress made in both academic literature and corporate practice over the last forty years. Although there has been an increase in the number of companies producing social and environmental reports, the quality of the disclosures has not increased. Further, there is little evidence of progress in the integration of social and environmental impacts into management decisions. The paper provides suggestions on research needs to increase the integration of social and environmental impacts into management decisions and improve both the internal reporting and external disclosures and accountability of corporations.

An important management topic across a wide spectrum of firms is reconfiguring the value delivery system – defining the boundaries of the firm. Profit impact should be the way any value chain configuration is evaluated. The managerial accounting literature refers to this topic as “make versus buy” and typically addresses financial impact without much attention to strategic issues. The strategic management literature refers to the topic as “level of vertical integration” and typically sees financial impact in broad “transaction cost economics” terms. Neither approach treats fully the linkages all along the causal chain from strategic actions to resulting profit impact. In this paper we propose a theoretical approach to explicitly link supply chain reconfiguration actions to their profit implications. We use the introduction by Levi Strauss of Personal Pair™ jeans to illustrate the theory, evaluating the management choices by comparing profitability for one pair of jeans sold through three alternative value delivery systems. Our intent is to propose a theoretical extension to the make/buy literature which bridges the strategic management literature and the cost management literature, using A-P-L and SCM, and to illustrate one application of the theory.

The pressure to remain competitive in a dynamic, global economy forces organizations to consider the results-based approach when deciding on investments in information technology (IT). Senior IT managers are convinced that they do create value and believe that if measured properly and with adequate support, they would be significant profit centers for their organizations. However, without adequate performance evaluation systems they have difficulties proving the value-adding role of IT and find themselves continually fighting for and justifying the resources that are needed. The article provides a model and a methodology for evaluating performance in IT to help chief information officers (CIOs) better justify and evaluate their initiatives and aid CEOs and CFOs in making better resource allocation decisions. The IT Contribution Model and the subsequent IT Payoff Methodology is illustrated by and empirically tested in Istrabenz Group, an international group engaged in food, investments, tourism, and energy. The study shows that the methodology's requirement for active employee involvement in the identification of the critical drivers of success, the expected outputs of the IT initiative, in particular, substantially facilitates the IT initiative implementation by increasing the level of understanding and acceptance.

IFAC's Management Accounting Practice Statement Number 1, revised in 1998, is concerned with management accounting practices. This research note describes an operationalization of its conception of the evolution of management accounting. The paper is informed by experience in developing and applying an IFAC-based model to survey the stage of evolution of the management accounting practices in a United Kingdom industry sector. The model is intrinsically interesting and has the potential for replication in other contexts and in comparative cross-national, inter-industry or longitudinal studies.

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.

Attention focusing on intangible forms of capital is increasing in both research and practice. Lev and Zambon (2003) write in the introduction of a special issue of the European Accounting Review, “We strongly believe that intangibles are the major drivers of company growth” (p. 597). Intellectual capital seems to have led the way in the conceptual development of intangible values. However, other forms of intangible capital are being defined, including: organizational, human, relationship, social, political, innovation, and collaborative. This volume consists of papers that focus on the latter. We broadly define collaborative capital as the organizational assets that enable people to work together well. It is manifested in such outcomes as increased innovation and creativity, commitment and involvement, flexibility and adaptability, leveraging knowledge, and enhancing learning.