Public-sector reforms and balanced scorecard adoption: an Ethiopian case study

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine adoption of the balanced scorecard (BSC) by a large public-sector health organisation in an African country, Ethiopia as part of a programme to implement a unified sector-wide strategic planning and performance monitoring system. The study explains how this trans-organisational role of the BSC is constituted, and explores how it operates in practice at the sector-and organisation-levels. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs the case-study method. Semi-structured interview data and documentary evidence are analysed by drawing on the concept of translation from actor-network theory. Findings: The case-study organisation adopted the BSC as a part of broader public-sector reforms driven by political ideology. Through a centralised government decision, the BSC was framed as a sector-wide system aimed at: aligning the health sectors strategic policy goals with strategic priorities and operational objectives of organisations in the sector; and unifying performance-monitoring of the sectors organisations by enabling aggregation of performance information to a sector level in a timely manner to facilitate health sector policy implementation. While the political ideology facilitated BSC adoption for trans-organisational use, it provided little organisational discretion to integrate financial administration and human resource management practices to the BSC framework. Further, inadequate piloting of information system use for the anticipated BSC model, originating from the top-down approach followed in the BSC implementation, inhibited implementation of the BSC with a balanced emphasis between the planning and performance monitoring roles of the BSC. As a result, the BSC underwent a pragmatic shift in emphasis and was reconceptualised as a system of enhancing strategic alignment through integrated planning, compared to the balanced emphasis between the planning and performance m

IFRS adoption and accounting regulation in Ethiopia

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) adoption in Ethiopia to explain transnational political-economic antecedents of this change and its associated consequences on the regulatory landscape of accounting. Design/methodology/approach: Using a neo-Gramscian theory of globalization and the state, the study examines interview and document review evidence pertaining to IFRS adoption in Ethiopia by focusing on the period from 1991 to 2014. Findings: The study illustrates that a dialectical rather than deterministic interaction between global and national forces explains IFRS adoption in Ethiopia, i.e. IFRS adoption falls within the broader scheme of universalizing regulatory institutions in the globalizing world economy. Compared to the commonly understood trends of IFRS adoption circumscribed within a pre-existing regulatory framework, this study illustrates IFRS adoption as a primary driver of major reforms to the accounting regulatory landscape. Originality/value: This study contributes original theoretically grounded insights into the transnational political-economic rationale for IFRS adoption and consequences of the adoption on the accounting regulatory landscape