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This paper aims to analyse contrasting discourses on education and competitiveness from four countries to show the different national values that are a key driver in economic development.

The paper uses content analysis to compare and contrast the newspaper discourse surrounding the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in four countries with above OECD average performance: Japan and South Korea (improving performance) and Australia and Finland (declining performance). PISA has attracted much government and public attention because it reflects education and the economic value of that education.

There are key contrasts in the discourses of the four countries. Despite shifts to globalised perspectives on education, strong national and cultural differences remain. Educational competitiveness and economic competitiveness are strong discourses in Japan and South Korea, while in Australia and Finland, the focus is on educational competitiveness. The media in Finland has few references to economic competitiveness and it does not feature in Australia. The discourse themes on PISA from 2001 to 2015 are presented with trends in educational attainment and shifting national perspectives on education.

Analysis is limited to the top two circulation newspapers in English language in each country over 2001 to 2015. These newspapers in Finland, Japan and South Korea include translated content from local language papers.

The paper provides longitudinal perspectives to understand the contrasting societal values placed on education and how these relate to perspectives on competitiveness. This media evidence on national discourses can inform education policy orientations in the four countries examined.

While new institutionalism‐inspired accounting literature has opened up new perspectives for the study of micro‐processes of change in accounting practices, little is still known about how individuals subjectively experience these processes. In this paper, the authors propose to study the role of subjectivities in the institutionalization of new accounting practices.

Based on an extension of Hasselbladh and Kallinikos' framework, the authors analyze the implementation of a new performance management and measurement system in the division of a large French public sector firm. The authors' research is based on the company's internal archives, samples of the new performance scorecard, interviews and non‐participant observation.

The system as a technique of control and related discourses and ideals formed a coherent “rationalized package” which actors had actually internalized. Still, they collectively used the new system in a very ceremonial mode and the authors' analysis identified discrepancies between actors' explicit understanding and practical experience of the system.

The authors' research suggests that studies of accounting change should further explore the complex and sometimes paradoxical nature of subjectivities at work in the adoption of new systems. Studies should combine the analysis of actors' behaviours and representations and their development over time, even though the latter longitudinal perspective is missing in the present research.

Experience encompasses more than understanding and cognitive agreement. Deliberate acceptance of systems may co‐exist with non‐deliberate reluctant behaviour.

Accounting transformation projects should reckon the role that actors' subjectivities can play in the institutionalization of new systems and practices.

The authors' research illustrates how subjectivity influences micro‐processes of accounting change. It highlights its experiential and non‐deliberate dimensions, thus complementing existing institutional research that has hitherto emphasized actors' deliberate actions and representations.

Discussion of health care costs has expanded beyond the technical domains of accountancy and entered the realms of public discourse. Analyses this discourse through an examination of all the stories published in The New York Times between 1 April 1992 and 1 May 1993 which contained the phrase “health care costs”. Describes the current discourse and examines how antagonostic social interests strive to inscribe the concept of health care cost with conflicting meanings and ideological accents.

The authors explore how entrepreneurs with limited resources legitimated (or failed to legitimate) a new organizational category in different jurisdictions in Canada despite severe resistance. The authors identify three meso-level domains of institutional action (public, administrative, and legal), where actors intervene to change their macro-institutional environment. The findings suggest that these domains mediate the relationship between micro-level agency and macro-level institutions. The authors describe how macro-level consensus about the category legitimacy emerges through a competition between judgments embedded in different discourses and how a particular discourse attains validity, forcing other actors to change their initial unfavorable legitimacy judgments and recognize the category’s legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Swedish Advertisers’ Association's role in the institutional development of Swedish international advertising during 1955–1972.

A qualitative analysis of business association sources is used to explore the institutional development of international advertising.

A new postwar paradigm that focused on a consumer-oriented brand ideology enabled marketing executives in the Swedish Advertisers’ Association to develop a new discourse on international advertising in Sweden, which then was institutionalized within a national network on export promotion. The institutionalization process was supported by a corporatist system typical of smaller export dependent postwar European economies.

While based on a national case, this study points to the importance of understanding how advertising concepts are embedded within other economic, political and cultural systems than in those they originated in and how this contributes to a heterogenous implementation of similar ideas and practices. This study also illustrates how members can use their association to institutionalize a new discourse on marketing and network with other actors to enhance the use and reputation of its ideas and practices.

By highlighting the importance of analyzing both internal and external organizational relations, this study contributes to the research on history of marketing by making salient the importance of an institutional perspective to understand key processes in marketing. In practice neither the institutional perspective nor the explanatory power of discourse has received much attention, therefore the study results should be both interesting and valid for practitioners as well.

The study of the historical development of international advertising is limited and often descriptive. This study contributes to the literature by using a theoretical and methodological approach to make salient how the interaction between discourse, marketing associations and other collective actors propelled the institutionalization of international advertising within a specific national context.

The authors aim to present an overview of the papers in this special issue on the theme of the role of management accounting and control in routine and change in organizations, which arose from the Management Control Association Conference at the University of Greenwich, London, UK in September 2010.

The authors place the research undertaken and the interpretations offered by the authors in the context of ongoing developments in new institutionalism in sociology.

The authors' review shows that researchers are now exploring routine and change in the context of competitive environments in both the private and the public sector.

The review brings attention to emerging work in the area of management accounting and control that explores change in changing organizational forms.

Findings of an extensive archival study of Pan American Airways (PAA) strongly support Acker’s (1990) notion of the presence and importance of a dominant discourse of organizing logic in structuring a gendered order. Findings also demonstrate that the presence of alternative, but not necessarily feminist, discourses can serve to upset the gender order of organizations. Thus, we conclude that changing the organization’s gender substructure (Acker, 1992b) by changing the dominant discourse or introducing competing discourses may help to destabilize “truths” and interrupt the perpetuation and reification of policies, practices, and understandings that are often taken-for-granted despite their ability to silence voices and privilege some groups over others.

This study reviews the literature on business-school (b-school) competition and competitiveness to extend our understanding of b-schools’ competitive strategies.

Both content and network analysis were used in the examination of the scholarly discourse.

The analyses distinguish three literature streams. The first concentrates on resources, capabilities and competencies; the second focuses on measures of competitiveness; and the third includes competitive dynamics and strategy discourse. The analysis shows that the conceptions of competitiveness are quite coherent concerning resources, capabilities and competencies. However, in the “measures of competitiveness” and “industry dynamics and strategy,” discourses were more diverse, indicating greater ambiguity in how the core competencies, capabilities and resources are portrayed as competitiveness outside the institutions. The literature suggests that the measures and indicators of competitiveness are ambiguous to external stakeholders and, furthermore, reflect institutional goal ambiguity.

The question of how, and to what extent, increasing competition in management education and research catalyzes unwelcome changes in the industry has been of great concern to management educators and scholars. This has given rise to a considerable body of literature referring to b-school competition. Despite its topicality, this discourse has remained theoretically fragmented and separate from the mainstream strategy literature. Therefore, this study provides a review and critical discussion of the current state of research on b-school competition, as well as proposes avenues for future research and tools for strategic management of b-schools.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse critically the Russian Academic Excellence Initiative (the Project 5-100), designed to propel five leading Russian universities into world university rankings (WURs) by 2020, and research it through the lens of neoliberalism. The paper seeks to reveal recurrent discourses and dominant orders of discourse constituting the overall concept of “excellence” in Russian higher education (HE) policy.

Since the Project 5-100 has been designed in line with a neoliberal model of academic excellence initiatives, emphasising “competition as a driver of excellence” (Hazelkorn, 2009), Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been adopted as a qualitative research method. There is no universally accepted definition of “excellence” in HE policy; therefore, this CDA also aims at revealing the Russian government’s vision of the concept and its voice in HE policy.

The paper concludes that the government reinforces neoliberal discourse on the HE agenda and transforms the 5-100 Universities’ identities through emphasising the role of WURs in modernising the HE system. Consequently, within the neoliberal paradigm, the Project 5-100 can be regarded as a manifestation of the commodification of “excellence” in Russian HE policy.

This research intends to broaden knowledge of excellence initiatives in HE policy and reveal their features and neoliberal natures. It also seeks to contribute in terms of showcasing a qualitative study of the Project 5-100 for future comparative analyses of similar HE policies.