Management accounting and power: A contested relationship

This paper is structured in two parts. In the first part we undertake a brief discussion on the concept of power and we explore the way this concept has been regarded in several strands of literature on management accounting – the conventional, the contingency, the pluralist, the interpretive, the critical and the post-structuralist. Some of these strands – for instance, the pluralist, the critical and the post-structuralist – explicitly recognise the importance of (some conception of) power in their approach to management accounting in society and organisations. Other approaches are less explicit in that recognition or simply overlook/reject it. The second part of the paper takes sides, departing from the idea that there is a relationship between management accounting and power and proposes a framework for conceptualising that relationship. This framework attempts to bring together different dimensions/conceptions of power, and is proposed as a way to study management accounting and its change within organisations.power, management accounting, change, circuits of power

Power, ERP systems and resistance to management accounting: a case study

This paper reports an intensive longitudinal case study carried out in a Portuguese manufacturing organisation in which attempts to promote change through management accounting were made in recent years. In a first pilot visit to the organisation, two puzzling observations were made. Firstly, and particularly in the manufacturing area of the organisation, management accounting systems introduced in recent years were not being used in everyday interactions and practices. Secondly, a newly introduced ERP system was having no apparent impact on management accounting or on the work of management accountants. We found that these observations were related to issues of power. There were different and conflicting conceptions of which rules should be followed in the manufacturing area, and strategic attempts to enact those conceptions (or to resist alternative ones). This paper draws on the insights of the Circuits of Power (Clegg, 1989a) in order to explain, in theoretically informed manner, the puzzling observations in the case.

Corporatisation and accounting change: the role of accounting and accountants in a Malaysian public utility

Using an explanatory case study, this paper presents an in-depth analysis of a Malaysian public utility which was required to transform itself into a self-financing, efficient and profitable organisation through a process of corporatisation. Despite attempts to enhance profitability by imposing new rules of budgeting, and by recruiting new accounting graduates, the case reveals that although accounting changes were enacted, over time they became separated from, and only loosely coupled to, other organisational activities. Concepts from institutional theory were used as sensitising devices to inform the research, but alone they were unable to fully explain the case. Consequently, an extended framework, which treats loose coupling as both a process and an outcome, and which recognises the intertwining of trust, resistance and power was developed. This theoretical framework provides a possible explanation for the mixed findings about the effectiveness of public sector financial reform which have been revealed in a wide array of research studies

Impact of Mobile Platforms on Performance Management: An Imbrication Perspective

Although extant research on mobile platforms emphasises the strategic benefits of the platform ecosystem, little is known about how mobile platforms influence organisational routines. In this paper, we explore the process through which smartphones and mobile platforms became incorporated within the performance management routines of a luxury hotel resort. Drawing on an imbrication framework, our case study research that the different sets of affordances and constraints arising during the smartphone adoption process acted as building blocks that reconfigured the performance management routines. The paper contributes to the accounting IS literature by unpacking how smartphones and mobile platforms affect the performance management routines through an improvised process involving various groups of hotel employees. Our results highlight the importance of improvisation and the flexibility of mobile platforms in improving the management control system