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This paper aims to interpret and compare managerial intentions for and employee perceptions of group-based incentive systems.

The data comprise interviews with managers and employees in four Finnish firms with experience of company-wide incentive systems involving profit-sharing and team-based rewards. Benefitting from social exchange theory, managers’ intentions and employees’ perceptions are examined.

Managers’ and employees’ views resemble each other concerning profit-sharing as reflecting reciprocity rooted in perceived distributive fairness, whereas examination of the team-based rewards revealed impediments in reciprocity. While managerial intentions for team-based rewards refer to social exchange with economic intensity via selection of controllable performance measurements aimed at making individual-level effort count, the employees’ perceptions deem such metrics non-controllable, reflecting perceived distributive and procedural unfairness.

Profit-sharing seems to create fair social obligation and goal congruence between managers and employees, whereas team-based incentives easily suffer from unfairness, reducing their effectiveness.

Distinguishing between managerial intentions and employee perceptions pertaining to incentive systems facilitated in-depth exploration of the social exchange inherent in them, conceptualized in terms of economic intensity, fairness and controllability. With this lens, qualitative analysis revealed differences in interpretations of controllability and fairness between the managerial intentions and employee perceptions. The central contribution to scholarship takes the form of interpretations reflecting upon these key findings.

The purpose of this paper is to concern the use of analytics as a calculative engine enabling coordination and control for the development process in a creative digital business environment.

This research employs an explorative field study approach, using interview data from professionals working with free-to-play mobile game development. Drawing on the concepts of cycles of accumulation, accounting as an engine and mediating instruments, this study examines how organisational actors using the analytics in a digital business environment participate in the data generation that accumulates knowledge about and new insights into the desired outcome.

The real-time metrics provided the means for organisational actors to continually monitor, visualise and if necessary intervene in the creative “good game” development process. Timely quantification and visualisation of user actions, collected as digital traces, enhanced the cycle of information accumulation. This new knowledge resulted in a desire for improvement and perfection, which directed the actions towards the organisational objectives.

This study furthers our understanding of the performativity of accounting as an engine and the user behavioural data trace as its “fuel” in a digital product development. It highlights the role of analytics as a “fact-generating” device, capable of transforming the raw user behavioural data, the fuel, into powerful explanations through visualisations of ideals. The real-time metrics, understood as mediating instruments, enable the generation of new insights and accumulation of knowledge guiding the further development towards the desired outcome, the “good game”.

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of the work of management accountants in the context of a shared services centre.

A single case study method is used and data are collected via semi-structured interviews and internal documents. The empirical materials are analysed from the theoretical perspective of dirty work, incorporating aspects from practice theory.

Findings suggest that management accountants working in a shared services centre develop their occupational esteem by refocusing and reframing strategies. Through these strategies, management accountants can decrease the perceived “dirtiness” associated with their work.

The study sheds light on the under-researched topic of management accountants’ work within a shared services centre. Moreover, it offers the metaphor of liminal work to characterise how management accountants develop their occupational esteem in circumstances where gaining efficiency is the main objective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how softer issues such as emotions function in the alignment of a management accounting and control system (MCS) following an international acquisition.

To tap into the interplay of softer issues and formal structures, the paper compares the sensemaking of the changes in the structures related to and following an acquisition in the acquiring firm and the acquired firm.

The results show that the people in the acquiring firm take the company perspective and identify the processes of change and technical matters affecting consolidation. Their interpretative frames are thus more rational than the emotional frames of the people in the acquired firm, who explain the changes in terms of their personal experiences. Accordingly, softer issues, such as emotions, affect how structural changes are interpreted.

The paper contributes to the existing research on the post-acquisition integration of MCSs by showing that not only do the basic assumptions of MCSs challenge the alignment, but the positions of individuals also create certain perspectives that may evoke emotions and affect sensemaking. In this specific situation emotions may already be evoked by the changes in work, not only by accounting figures and technologies. The contradiction between rational and emotional frames may cause difficulties in alignment, since introducing new formal accounting structures does not provide any unambiguous frame for sensemaking. These structures may be interpreted through their content or through the effects on daily work.

This study seeks to add to the knowledge of the formation of social positions and power of individuals and their effects on the role of accounting in the development of management control systems (MCSs).

Drawing on institutional and the mobilization of power frameworks, the case analysis explores the development of the role of accounting in the MCS.

The results show that loose coupling between management control routines and formal accounting leaves room for individuals whose roles are important in the development of the MCS. These individuals with central social positions are the glue which enables loose coupling to persist through changes. The organizational culture of a family‐led firm may facilitate the individuals to mobilize power, so that they with central social positions mediate the encoding of institutions into rules and routines as well as the reproduction of the formal rules and informal routines and the relationship between them. Similarly, their own social positions may reproduce.

The paper is of value in showing how the power of an individual over (and in) accounting can be constructed in the MCS. In addition, the discussion is linked to operating in certain transitional economies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a parent company ensures reliable accounting information from its subsidiaries located in a significantly different environment, analyzing the process and its outcomes.

The paper employs the conceptualization of management control as a loosely‐coupled system to explore the integration of accounting‐related work between a parent company and subsidiaries. Three Western firms and their subsidiaries in the territory of the former Soviet Union are studied, focusing on the couplings between different elements of control and their outcomes, and taking accounting as an object and element of control.

The results show how other elements of control can steer accounting‐related work. As the organizational structures made possible personnel controls in the form of informal training in accounting, results controls were responsive to these personnel controls. This constructed common models of thinking, meaning that cultural controls were responsive to results controls. The responsiveness also supports generative learning, since accounting‐related training includes and introduces Western business thinking.

The findings show that loose couplings within management control systems may lead to generative learning due to the rules imposed by the parent company. Elaborating the dual role of accounting as an object and element of control illustrates a relationship different from the earlier view that loose coupling between parent's rules and what is locally done tends to foster local stability based on preservation of existing ways of thinking, i.e. adaptation instead of adaptability.

Several scholars have recently highlighted the narrowness of accounting research regarding it as a threat to scholarly developments in the field. The aim of this study was to chart progress in management accounting research using a sample of doctoral dissertations published in Finland. In particular, the study examines the range and diversity of research strategic choices in Finnish dissertations over time, including the topics and methodological and theoretical approaches chosen. The authors also briefly compare findings over time and with other progress studies.

A longitudinal historical investigation was selected. All of the 80 management accounting doctoral dissertations published in Finnish business schools and departments during 1945-2015 were analysed.

The findings reveal that an expansion of doctoral education has led to an increasing diversity of research strategic choices in Finland. Different issues have been of interest at different times; so, it has been possible to cover a wide range of cost, management accounting and other topics and to use different methodological and theoretical approaches over time. Consequently, management accounting has become a rich and multifaceted field of scientific research.

While this analysis is limited to doctoral research in Finland, the results should be relevant in advancing the understanding of the development of management accounting research.

Overall, the findings support the view that there have been, and continue to be, many ways to conduct innovative research in the field of management accounting.

Dissertation research in this field has been extensive and vital enough to educate new generations of academics, guarantee continuity of the subject as an academic discipline and make management accounting a significant academic field of research.

The paper contributes to current research on management accounting change by an analysis of a sample of doctoral dissertations.