Purpose:
Most football clubs were founded by members of the local community within which they are based. The success of a club is built on the time, effort and resources given by these locals, which is offered due to the benefits that football promises to the community in return. However, the game has increasingly been dominated by a focus on financial (monetary) value, at the expense of such benefits being delivered to the clubs’ local communities. This article examines a need for deliberation over what accountability is owed by football clubs to their local communities in the context of questioning what and for whom football is for.
Design/methodology/approach:
This exploration is undertaken within the context of the English game, where a series of issues has resulted in the UK Government undertaking a ‘fan led review of football governance’. The report produced by this review is analysed to understand whether the contents and recommendations enters the debate over what accountability is owed to local communities.
Findings:
While the UK Government’s fan led review recognises the pivotal role of local communities in the formation of the English game, its focus and resulting recommendations are mostly on the financial sustainability of the clubs. The analysis demonstrates that, due to their focus on financial value, the implementation of the report’s recommendations is more likely to exacerbate the underlying issues rather than resolving them.
Originality/value:
The call for deliberation over whether and what accountability is owed to local communities has been repeated over time. The UK Government’s fan led review provided an important opportunity to engage in that deliberation. However, the dominance of financial value within football has all but silenced any call for, and action regarding this.

The primary focus of this special issue is on the role of accounting in framing and shaping the everyday experiences of citizens, managers and policy makers in public services’ delivery. The role of accountants in such settings has grown significantly over recent decades; indeed, today’s accountants embody one of the central forms of expertise shaping management practices, organisational processes and regulatory mechanisms in multiple organisational settings. Equally, the potential impact of accounting, and calculative practices more generally, has an increasingly extensive reach. There is substantial evidence of the influence of accounting work in, for instance, central and local government, hospitals, higher and further education. Such influence within the sphere of the State and beyond, continues despite debates over the status of professional accounting expertise and critiques of the provenance, uniqueness and usefulness of accounting. This special issue offers a collection of papers which extend our understandings of the intermingling of accounting practices and bureaucratic procedures, in the context of reforms to and within public service organisations. This is a research arena which may yield rich insights into the role of accountants and calculative practices in the shaping of social and economic life. We would like to thank all the authors who have contributed to this special issue, and the reviewers who have kindly offered their valuable time and expertise to challenge and improve the papers.

This contribution to the Festskrift for Hanne Norreklit examines how the use of management controls by senior management of universities impacts on the everyday academic. This examination is rooted in two interrelated issues, being, first, what should the purpose of a university be and second, what should they look to contribute to society. To keep the analysis that follows manageable, England provides a representative setting due to these issues having been heavily debated there within recent decades. While these debates continue, market-orientated understandings have come to dominate, influencing the focus of successive governments and, in turn, the situated practices of universities. Specifically, this has changed the focus of senior managers, at universities, away from their traditional remit towards revenue generating activities. Key to their efforts is the understanding that external impressions of their university, as provided by, for example, rankings, will affect financial performance. This results in senior management increasingly managing for the rankings and other such external signifiers. In so doing, they have progressively introduced management control regimes that focus the organisation’s activities onto the external signifiers. However, as senior managements’ performance, and thereby rewards, has become increasingly linked to the external signifiers, their focus has narrowed only to the output metrics of the management controls they have put into place. Hence, they become wilfully ignorant of the wider impact these management controls have, and the pressure cooker situation this creates for many everyday academics. While this outcome has been well documented in the extant literature, this article adds, through the analysis of exemplars, how this is resulting in the grimmest of situations, with dire consequences. As part of noting that this could, and should, be different, speculation is raised over whether other management controls may act as release valves to this pressure cooker situation.

This article seeks to initiate research around the potential roles of the accounting profession for tackling the challenges of the vulnerable. Its backdrop is the current consideration of the profession’s public interest role. The importance of dialogue around the public interest role is evidenced by the increasing levels of vulnerability, even within developed countries. Accounting underpinned by broader values has potential to provide knowledge of issues relating to the vulnerable. However, the accounting profession has only engaged with such potential to a limited degree. The article overviews existing knowledge and areas within which more research is required. In order to illustrate the potential for such research, initial findings from two case studies of homelessness (an example of the vulnerable) provide evidence as to the importance, and challenges, of accounting for the vulnerable. This article highlights the need to: take a principles-based approach in defining the vulnerable, undertake an accounting that reflects the lives they value, acknowledge that there are different ways for addressing these issues, recognise that an absence of perfect numbers should not become a barrier to action, and that accounting for the vulnerable is one way that the accounting profession may discharge their public interest roles.

Anthony Giddens is generally considered one of the most prominent sociologists of modern time. In this paper, we draw upon a micro-process case study to explore how his theory of structuration (ST) can be used to analyze the interplay between strategy and accounting in day-to-day-organizational life. In short, we find that strategizing and accounting should not be viewed as two separate practices, but rather as two aspects of one and the same practice, which form and feed each other in a recursive manner over time. Based on these findings, we also elaborate on how ST may be usefully applied to understand continuity and transformation of strategizing practices more generally. An overall conclusion is that ST not only provides a strong and consistent ontological framework for theorizing about these practices, but also offers a rich conceptual toolbox which can be usefully applied to better understand how and why structural continuity and change may coexist and intermingle in the durée of daily organizational life.

We explore two hospital departments, one of which is laterally dependent on the other to function, but which are subject to distinct vertical managerial controls. This complexity in vertical-lateral relations generates tension amongst the hospital’s senior managers and a perception of coordination difficulties. However, we show how the interplay between managerial and non-managerial controls, plus important employee ‘work’, moderates tension and facilitates day-to-day lateral coordination at the patient-facing level.
This is a case-study, relying mostly on the findings of semi-structured interviews. Theoretically, we draw from previous insights on inter-organisational relations (but informing our focus on intra-organisational coordination) and an ‘institutional work’ perspective.
Consistent with much extant literature, our research reveals how non-managerial controls help to moderate tensions that could emerge from the coercive use of managerial controls. However, we also show a maintained influence and flexibility in the managerial controls at patient-facing levels, as new circumstances unfold.
Our findings cannot generalise for all laterally dependent spaces in hospitals, nor could we generalise patterns across different hospitals. We recommend future research into the dynamics and interaction of managerial and non-managerial controls in other complex settings, plus focus on the purposeful work of influential agents.
The paper has two primary contributions: (1) extending our knowledge of the interplay between managerial and non-managerial controls inside complex organisations, where non-managerial controls reinforce rather than displace managerial controls, and (2) highlighting that it is seldom just controls per se which ‘matter’, but also agents’ purposeful actions that facilitate coordination in complex organisations.

Purpose: This paper chronicles the evolution of the academic debate regarding diversity in management accounting research and discusses its impact on the current state of management accounting research.

Purpose - This paper aims to offer a brief personal reflection upon, and celebrates, the 10th anniversary of Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management (QRAM). More specifically, the author highlights the journal's contributions towards advancing qualitative management accounting research over the last decade, and the author suggests possible future avenues. Design/methodology/approach - This short paper mainly constitutes a review of qualitative management accounting articles published in the first ten years of QRAM's publishing life, plus some personal reflection and suggestions for future directions. Findings - the author celebrates the impressive achievements of QRAM's founding editors, and the author is encouraged to offer the personal views on how the journal might excel further in years to come. Research limitations/implications - Although the piece is primarily personal reflection, there is hopefully some food for thought with regard to fruitful directions in tomorrow's qualitative management accounting research. In particular, arguments are made for more undertaking of processual qualitative research and also for more targeted focus on the connections between management accounting and other relevant disciplines such as management and organisation studies. Practical implications - the paper offers no practical implications as such, but does discuss, and in fact heeds some caution against, the apparent trend of (possibly too uncritically) seeking to tease out practical implications from qualitative management accounting research. Social implications - Again, while this paper offers no specific discussion on its social implications, the author would add that any qualitative management accounting research paper inherently carries at least some implications for society; management accounting and the wider society are continually intertwined through time. Originality/value - the author would not claim that there is much that is original in this short piece - most of what is offered simply gathers others' past contributions. But hopefully there will be some values in the ideas offered with regard to the exciting future ahead for qualitative management accounting research in QRAM. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Consistent with calls for in-depth studies of social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) intervention (Bebbington, 2007; Fraser, 2012; Contrafatto, 2012), our paper focuses on the interrelationship between organisational change and SEAR practices, as well as the involvement of management accounting in such organisational dynamics. Drawing insight from both Laughlin (1991) and Burns and Scapens' (2000) theoretical frameworks, we explore the processes of change through which SEAR practices become elevated to strategising status, in the context of broader organisational and extra-organisational developments, but we also illuminate how institutionalised assumptions of profit-seeking limit the extent to which broader sustainability concerns become infused into day-to-day business practice. Our paper highlights the importance of management accounting in facilitating and shaping the cumulative path of SEAR practices (and sustainability more generally); however, we also heed caution against uncritical reliance upon conventional management accounting tools. The following paper extends our understanding of SEAR practices as cumulative process over time, an awareness of the potential limits to such developments in profit-seeking organisations, and stresses a need to be circumspect when involving management accounting. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

The evidence that strategic management accounting (SMA) techniques have not been adopted widely and that developments in the SMA literature seem to have languished may be consistent with the relatively short lifecycle of most strategic management (SM) tools and many concepts. Nevertheless, there is an inherent contradiction between the apparent decline of SMA and the sustained growth in the number of concepts, models, tools, theoretical perspectives, disciplines, academic and professional journals and consultancy practices that populate the SM domain.

This paradox of SMA is explored in the context of the evolution of the SM literature, SMA practice, as exemplified by two recent case studies, and the cognate literatures of management control, performance measurement and knowledge management. It transpires that the SMA literature is based in large part on a narrow, first-era, view of the SM literature that reached maturity with Michael Porter's industry analysis model and generic competitive strategies.

The second era of SM that began in 1977 with a move to a more internal, resource-based view of the firm and competitive advantage has been mostly neglected by the extant SMA literature. However, to judge from the small number of published case studies, SMA practices are developing in line with their strategy formulation and organisational processes. The links among the bundle of techniques that are usually included in SMA and between SMA and cognate literatures need to be integrated into a coherent, cohesive framework to complement SM.


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Twenty five years ago, Giddens’ structuration theory (ST) was introduced into accounting research as a reaction to the history-less, apolitical and technical-efficiency focus of traditional functionalist research. A quarter of a century later, this growing stream of research consists of some 65 published papers and has become one of the dominant alternative approaches used to explore accounting as an organizational and social practice. We review this literature based on the following two research questions; (i) what are the major achievements of this literature, and in what respects has it contributed to our understanding of accounting in relation to other alternative streams of accounting research, such as those grounded in critical theory, actor-network theory (ANT), new-institutional sociology (NIS) and practice theory? and; (ii) what are the limitations of the ST strand and, considering these (and its relative strengths), how should it be advanced in the future? Overall, we find that the mobilization of ST as a general ontological framework has generated three major and largely unique contributions, namely; (i) the introduction of a duality perspective; (ii) the conceptualization of accounting as an interwoven totality comprised of structures of signification, domination and legitimation, and; (iii) an ontological basis for theorizing how, when and why socially embedded agents may produce both continuity and change in accounting practices. However, we also conclude that it is difficult to identify a particular and distinctive empirical imprint of the ST literature, and that some of the theory’s ‘competitive advantages’ are far from fully exploited. Based on these identified strengths and weaknesses of the ST perspective, we consider an array of directions for future scholarly effort.

Our paper aims to explore management control as complex and intertwining process over time, rather than the (mainstream) fixation on rational, optimising tools for ensuring business success. We set out to contribute towards our understanding of why and how particular management controls evolve over time as they do. We discuss how the management control routines of one organisation emerged and reproduced (through software), and moved towards a situation of becoming accepted and generally unquestioned across much of the industry. The creativity and championing of one particular person was found to be especially important in this unfolding change process. Our case study illuminates how management control (software) routines can be an important carrier of organisational knowledge, both as an engine for continuity but also potentially as a catalyst for change. We capture this process by means of exploring the ‘life-story’ of a piece of software that is adopted in the corrugated container industry.

Purpose – the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between management accounting
software and the management accountant, as (re)produced in adverts appearing in professional
management accounting journals. The paper analyses how such adverts have shaped the management
accountant and the social practice of management accounting; in particular, whether these adverts are
producing an image of management accountants who are in control of their management accounting
system or who are controlled by it. The paper also discusses whether these adverts reflect changes in
broader social practices.
Design/methodology/approach – the paper analyses two software adverts that were published in
Chartered Institute of Management Accountants’ professional journal. It uses discourse analysis to
understand both the image of management accountants and the nature of the management accounting
software portrayed in these adverts, as well as to explore the relationship between management
accountants and their control systems.
Findings – it is concluded that the software adverts project an image of management
accountants who are effectively handing over control to their systems, and who are encouraged to
place substantial trust in the software. The paper relates these changes to trends in contemporary
social practices, and reflects in the light of recent events in the financial markets and global economy
more generally.
Originality/value – This paper contributes by adding more insight to the diffusion of the images of
the accountant as a more action oriented and hedonistic person (while the software system “does the
work”), as well as considering the broader implications of such diffusion in the context of the recent
financial crisis.

Purpose – the aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which a profound change in the image
of accountants can be seen in the discourse used in accounting software adverts that have appeared in
the professional publications of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants over the last four
decades.
Design/methodology/approach – Methodologically, the paper draws from Barthes’ work on the
rhetoric of images and Giddens’ work on modernity. By looking at accounting software adverts, an
attempt is made to investigate the image of the accountant produced by the discourse of the adverts,
and whether the image produced reflects a wide social change in society.
Findings – it was found that in the 1970s and the 1980s the accountant was constructed as a
responsible and rational person. In the 1990s, the accountant was presented as an instructed action
man. However, in a recent advert the accountant appeared as a more hedonistic person. Overall, the
changes observed reflect changes in wider social practice from modernity, through high modernity, to
hyper-modernity.
Research limitations/implications – the image of the accountants has implications for the
development of the accounting profession. In particular, the move towards hyper-modernity, where
empathy towards others and the virtues of self-discipline and fairness are not at stake, has
implications for the trustworthiness of the accounting profession.
Originality/value – Although there has been some research into the image of accountants,
particularly in the media and popular movies, extant works have mostly investigated how others
perceive accountants and how accountants are generally portrayed. The paper however, places more
stress on the construction of the image of the accountants when appealing to the accountants.

The article looks at the fact that institutional theories offer more insight into the processes that account for institutional stability than those that would explain institutional change. The authors then focus on institutional change within organizations. They seek to conceptualize and collect empirical evidence for when, why and how people within organizations influence change while they are part of the institutional fabric of their organizations. When formulating theories of institutional change, the relevant dimensions of change, and the time frame of the study must be specified. Also, processes that account for causal relationships among variables, as well as the way in which ideas constraint or facilitate institutional change must be specified.

Recent years have witnessed a flurry of commentaries, mainly in the professional accounting literature, on new business-oriented roles for management accountants. Often premised on the generalisation of survey data, such work undoubtedly provides useful publicity to the underlying trends. However, to date, empirical research into the dynamics of role(s) change in actual organisations is scarce. This paper describes the emergence of new team/process-oriented roles for so-called 'hybrid' accountants in the manufacturing division of a multinational pharmaceuticals organisation. Adopting institutional theory, the following provides insight into role(s) change, as processes that encompass both institutional embeddedness and transformational agency. We highlight institutional contradictions that create potential openings for change, and discuss the praxis that underpin when, how and why role(s) change is carved out.

This paper examines a failed change initiative (the implementation of economic value added, EVATM) in an in-depth case study of a major UK retailer (RetailCo, a pseudonym). The paper locates this change initiative within inter-professional competition between on the one hand the finance managers and on the other hand the buyers and merchandisers in RetailCo. Finance managers sought to strengthen their professional jurisdiction and enhance their financial and symbolic rewards by imposing stricter controls over buyers and merchandisers, which the latter resented as an undesirable intervention into their work practices and mobilized their influence and work knowledge to ensure the abandonment of EVA. This boundary work involved the use of a multiplicity of entry points centred on control strategies and the fundamentals of retailing. Implications for professional competition and organizational change are considered.

Starting from the position that management accounting systems and practices constitute organizational rules and routines, this paper describes an institutional framework for the conceptualization of management accounting change. Drawing from (old) institutional economics, the framework explores the complex and ongoing relationship between actions and institutions, and demonstrates the importance of organizational routines and institutions in shaping the processes of management accounting change. The inherent stability and continuity of organizational life is discussed, and three categorizations of institutional change are explored. The framework is offered as a starting point for researchers interested in studying management accounting change, and through such studies the framework will be extended and refined.

This paper explores accounting change in the product development department of a small UK chemicals manufacturer. An institutional framework of accounting and a framework of power mobilisation help tease out the dynamics of the processes of change. The case highlights power over resources, decision making and meanings as being key facilitators to the implementation of accounting change. It also demonstrates barriers to change and conflict which emerge as new accounting routines fail to impinge on existing laboratory ways of thinking. Focusing on the processes of accounting change within a specific organisational setting illuminates aspects of the change process which more conventional “static” approaches would likely ignore.