An institutional perspective on management accounting change in the public sector : a case study from Canada

This thesis reports on a four-year field study conducted at the Saskatchewan regional office of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, a large department of the Government of Canada. Over the course of the study, a sweeping government-wide accounting reform took place entitled the Financial Information Strategy. An ethnographic study was conducted that documented the management accounting processes in place at the regional office prior to the Financial Information Strategy reform, the organization’s adoption of the new accounting system associated with this initiative, and the state of the organization’s management accounting system once the implementation was complete. This research, therefore, captures in detail a management accounting change process in a public sector organization. This study employs an interpretive perspective and draws on institution theory as a theoretical framework. The concept of loose coupling and insights from the literature on professions were also employed in the explanation-building process for the case. This research contributes to institution theory and the study of management accounting change by recognizing conflicting institutional forces at the organizational level. An existing Old Institutional Economics-based conceptual framework for management accounting change is advanced and improved upon through the development of a new conceptual framework that incorporates the influence of wider institutional forces, the concepts of open and closed organizational systems and loose coupling, and the recognition of varying rates of change and institutionalization of organizational activity sets. Our understanding of loose coupling is enhanced by the interpretation of institutional influences developed in this study as is the role of professionalization as a normative influence in public sector organizations.

Informational institutions in the agrifood sector:meta-information and meta-governance of environmental sustainability

In the agrifood sector, the explosive increase in information about environmental sustainability, often in uncoordinated information systems, has created a new form of ignorance ('meta-ignorance') that diminishes the effectiveness of information on decision-makers. Flows of information are governed by informal and formal social arrangements that we can collectively call Informational Institutions. In this paper, we have reviewed the recent literature on such institutions. From the perspectives of information theory and new institutional economics, current informational institutions are increasing the information entropy of communications concerning environmental sustainability and stakeholders' transaction costs of using relevant information. In our view this reduces the effectiveness of informational governance. Future research on informational governance should explicitly address these aspects.

Degree of vertical integration and its buffering effects on political uncertainty

The focus of this study is on the governance decisions in a concurrent channels context, in the case of uncertainty. The study examines how a firm chooses to deploy its sales force in times of uncertainty, and the subsequent performance outcome of those deployment choices. The theoretical framework is based on multiple theories of governance, including transaction cost analysis (TCA), agency theory, and institutional economics. Three uncertainty variables are investigated in this study. The first two are demand and competitive uncertainty which are considered to be industry-level market uncertainty forms. The third uncertainty, political uncertainty, is chosen as it is an important dimension of institutional environments, capturing non-economic circumstances such as regulations and political systemic issues. The study employs longitudinal secondary data from a Thai hotel chain, comprising monthly observations from January 2007 – December 2012. This hotel chain has its operations in 4 countries, Thailand, the Philippines, United Arab Emirates – Dubai, and Egypt, all of which experienced substantial demand, competitive, and political uncertainty during the study period. This makes them ideal contexts for this study. Two econometric models, both deploying Newey-West estimations, are employed to test 13 hypotheses. The first model considers the relationship between uncertainty and governance. The second model is a version of Newey-West, using an Instrumental Variables (IV) estimator and a Two-Stage Least Squares model (2SLS), to test the direct effect of uncertainty on performance and the moderating effect of governance on the relationship between uncertainty and performance. The observed relationship between uncertainty and governance observed follows a core prediction of TCA; that vertical integration is the preferred choice of governance when uncertainty rises. As for the subsequent performance outcomes, the results corroborate that uncertainty has a negative effect on performance. Importantly, the findings show that becoming more vertically integrated cannot help moderate the effect of demand and competitive uncertainty, but can significantly moderate the effect of political uncertainty. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications, and extend our knowledge of the impact on uncertainty significantly, as well as bringing an institutional perspective to TCA. Further, they offer managers novel insight into the nature of different types of uncertainty, their impact on performance, and how channel decisions can mitigate these impacts.

Institutional reforms, productivity and profitability:from rents to competition?

This paper explores the divergent effects of institutional reforms on firm's productivity and profits. To assess this empirically, we investigate the impact of various components of economic liberalisation on the performance of firms from Central and Eastern European countries from 1998 to 2006. The impact of reforms on profitability vis-à-vis productivity differs, which we interpret as an indication that profitability is an ambiguous measure of performance: one needs to distinguish between unproductive rents and productivity-based quasi-rents. We find that competition-enhancing liberalisation measures have more impact on state owned firms as compared with domestic and foreign owned firms. © 2012 Association for Comparative Economic Studies.

The social values of wireless technology in the institutional context

Despite growing attention, social values, compared to economic aspects, of information technology (IT) capture substantially less attention in the mainstream IT literature. In the context of mobile technology, social values might be as critical to help justify technology investment as the predominant economics perspective in the existing IT literature. As wireless networks and relevant mobile technologies continue to penetrate the global society and business world, an emerging social phenomenon rapidly reshapes how organizations interact with the technology and reposition themselves in their specific institutional context where organizations often develop networked alliance to compete against one another. This study thus seeks to shed light on how organizations make sense of the social aspects of wireless network implementation. Preliminary understanding derived from two higher education organizations' experiences is summarized. Implications for future research endeavor are suggested.