0000000000417006
AUTHOR
Timo Hyvönen
The role of standard software packages in mediating management accounting knowledge
PurposeThis paper aims to analyse how cost accounting knowledge is mediated in a large multinational organisation employing a company‐wide enterprise resource planning system and off‐the‐shelf activity based costing software to create a uniform profitability management system within the organisation.Design/methodology/approachThe case analysis is informed by the theoretical notions of dis‐and re‐embedding of expert knowledge, expert systems and standards.FindingsThe results indicate that standardised cost accounting software packages may be useful not only because of their superior data processing properties and technical efficiency, but also because of their usability in overcoming resista…
Struggling for the New Role for Business Controller
The recent discussion on changes in the controller's role has mainly focused on the national and organizational level culture aspects of that professional role. While earlier studies have demonstrated how the role changes have been stimulated by corporate culture, IT systems, new accounting technologies and interprofessional competition, we contend that such changes cannot be achieved without active individuals in organizations. Our study is informed by the concept of institutional entrepreneurship, concentrating on changes in institutions, such as professional roles, which are achieved by an active agency. Thus we concentrate on the individual level by tracing how the role of a single cont…
Institutional Logics, ICT and Stability of Management Accounting
The purpose of this paper is to study the institutional logics of how and why two case units in the Finnish Defence Forces have reacted differently to external pressures originating from the State Audit Office to change their management accounting systems. The situation is made complex due to the fact that in military organisations, accountants’ tasks have traditionally consisted of bookkeeping and financial reporting, while management accounting tasks especially (e.g. planning and control) have been performed predominantly by military personnel, who can be called hybrid accountants. The data for this study consists of project memos and interviews with people involved in designing and imple…
A virtual integration—The management control system in a multinational enterprise
Abstract This paper draws on actor-network-theory, especially Law and Hassard [Law, J., Hassard, J. (Eds.), 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwell, Malden, MA] and Latour [Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to the Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford] to investigate how a division-wide management control system was created in a multinational enterprise. The empirical findings were gathered from different actors involved in the implementation of enterprise's ABC and ERP projects. Our study focuses on the ontological politics [Mol, A.-M., 1999. Ontological politics. A word and some questions. In: Law, J., Hassard, J. (Eds.), Actor Network Theo…