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This paper aims to show how our understanding of the effects of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on management accounting are influenced through “nudging” by researchers in their preamble before interviews begin.

There were two groups of comparable respondents. Each group received a different preamble to the same questions. The differences in group responses were analyzed.

When the impact of ERP implementation on the physical, transactional and information flows within the firm were nudged, the responses focused on how the chart of accounts had to be expanded to account for the additional data introduced by transaction processing. When the IT and ERP system knowledge and skills were nudged, the responses tended to emphasize analyses or the use of new information through the use of drill down functionality. This research provides new insights and contributions to understanding how nudging affects or directs respondent assessments of the impact of ERP systems on management accounting.

The research is limited by the relatively small samples and by the fact that these were different research projects.

Nudging has an obvious impact on research that should not be ignored.

Unintentional nudging should be considered with all research projects.

This paper makes explicit that nudging occurs in research whether intentional or unintentional.

Budgets are commonly viewed as a central component of management control systems (MCS). The beyond budgeting literature argues that managers can develop other controls to replace budgets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the MCS package of an organisation which has never in its history had a traditional budget.

The authors carry out an ethnomethodology informed case study at Mainfreight, a large multinational logistics company headquartered in New Zealand. Data were collected from interviews with managers and accountants, internal company documents, published corporate histories, a company presentation, the corporate Web site and site visits.

The authors found that Mainfreight’s MCS package was explicitly designed based on cultural and administrative systems which supported the planning, cybernetic and reward systems managers used to monitor key drivers of short-and long-term performance with a focus on profitability.

The implication of the finding is that a more holistic view of the MCS package is necessary to understand how control is achieved within organisations that have moved beyond budgeting.

The authors show that organisations can operate without traditional budgets and still maintain a high level of control by developing appropriate cultural and administrative control systems that are internally consistent with their planning, cybernetic and reward systems.

The scarcity of organisations that have never had budgets limits opportunities to investigate an MCS package intended to function without budgets. This unique case setting reveals the design of an integrated non-budgeting MCS package.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between external environmental reporting (EER) and internal strategies, processes and activities (ISPA) to understand the role EER plays in embedding sustainability into organisational practices.

The case study considered how carbon measures associated with the carbon emissions management and reporting scheme (CEMARS) embedded sustainability into organisational practices in a family-owned wine company. Evidence collected during semi-structured interviews with informed employees was triangulated with observational data, field notes and documentary evidence.

A dynamic relationship was found between EER and ISPA, which embedded sustainability into organisational practices and promoted the developments of environmental reporting. CEMARS data were embedded into production management, capital expenditure and budget review processes, whereas more frequent EER was required by managers to support their operational activities. The company at times relied on an eco-validation approach to justify sustainability decisions despite their negative impact on short-term profit. EER contributed to the strategic planning, target setting and control functions of the management control systems.

Sustainability research should simultaneously address EER and ISPA. The interplay between the two dimensions determines whether sustainability is embedded in organisations and whether organisations will act in a sustainable manner.

The practical implication of the research is that organisations need to integrate EER information into ISPA if they want managers to establish patterns of behaviour that simultaneously consider the financial and environmental impacts of decisions. An EER such as CEMARS can provide coherence and focus for sustainability initiatives.

This research reveals that sustainability is embedded into organisations through the interactions between EER and ISPA, thus contributing to the understanding of internal organisational change. It identifies an eco-validation approach to decision-making that complements the eco-efficiency approach and shows that EER need not operate independent of internal processes and can be integrated into management control systems.

This paper aims to consider the enabling and coercive features of formal control in non-hierarchical settings and the factors influencing perceptions of controls.

This paper is a qualitative case study of a single organization. Data are collected via semi-structured interviews, a range of published materials and a management presentation. Analysis considered the features of coercive and enabling control at the level of individual controls.

In this highly decentralized organization, internal and global transparency predominate and help managers respond to contingencies in flexible ways. Managers cannot repair certain elements of controls to ensure there is stability in an otherwise flexible system. The existence (absence) of enabling features combined with the type of controls (e.g. action or results controls) lacking enabling features influence managers’ perceptions of control.

Few studies have considered formal controls in non-hierarchical organizations. The findings reveal the importance of minimally coercive control features in creating a stable structure for controlling performance. The findings may not be relevant to other hierarchical organizations.

The study is conducted in a highly decentralized context where managers have extensive autonomy (flexibility). The context allows the role of minimally coercive control features to be explored in an essentially enabling organizational setting.

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 purpose of this paper is to investigate the holistic nature of control systems to understand how they operate across organizational levels and manage change.

This paper takes an analytical approach using the viable system model (VSM) to assess the two main frameworks of control reported in the accounting literature.

The VSM provides an elegant framework for management control systems with explicit consideration of: multiple levels of control, communication channels, interactions with the environment, and the mechanisms for attaining balance between stability and change.

The evaluation of current management control systems produces specific suggestions for improving the levers of control framework

The VSM has not previously been aligned with management control frameworks.