According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Individualism and collectivism

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

This review starts from the lines of enquiry suggested by Otley et al. [Otley, D.T., Broadbent, J.M., Berry, A.J., 1995. Research in management control: an overview of its development. British Journal of Management 6, S31–S34] and develops these themes in the light of more recently published research. Hence this review is structured around the following emerging themes; Decision making for Strategic Control; Performance Management for Strategic Control; Control Models for Performance Management and Measurement; Management Control and New Forms of Organisation; Control and Risk; Culture and Control; and Practice and Theory. Whilst research has been evident in all of these areas, relatively little attention has been paid to information and communication technologies and its impact upon control system design and capability, nor did we find much literature on control and gender, or on control and sustainability. Further there has been relatively little research on control and risk or upon control and culture. The limitations of overarching frameworks are noted and we conclude that it seems essential to place more emphasis on research which attends to the relationship of control practices and theory which will require more embedded and collaborative research processes.

/pdf/emerging-themes-in-management-control-a-review-of-recent-56rknk8phb.pdf

Emerging themes in management control: a review of recent literature

Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/19279/4/gupea_2077_19279_4.pdf

Bundling and diffusion of management accounting innovations—the case of the balanced scorecard in Sweden

Den nya ekonomistyrningen

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/19230/1/gupea_2077_19230_1.pdf

The Impact of Competition and Uncertainty on the Adoption of Target Costing

Although the introduction of a number of successful management accounting innovations over the past few decades has generated a vast amount of research, we have limited knowledge about how the diffusion of innovations is affected by the interplay between characteristics of adopters and characteristics of innovations. The study presented in this paper contributes to the literature that examines the adoption of innovations at the firm level of analysis. We develop and test an adoption model which draws on two recently introduced ideas about innovation adoption - the notion of compatibility between organisational culture and the values and beliefs embedded in innovations, and the perspective that early and late adopters might both be motivated to adopt based on expected economic and social gains and losses. In synthesising these models, we assume that a diffusing innovation that is compatible with a firm’s values and beliefs is adopted early if it is perceived as delivering adequate gains while the innovation is rejected if it is not perceived as doing so, and that a diffusing innovation that is incompatible with a firm’s values and beliefs is adopted late if it is perceived as reducing the likelihood of incurring losses while the innovation is rejected if it is perceived as not doing so. Hypotheses are generated and tested using data provided by a web-based survey of Swedish manufacturing firms on the diffusion of the balanced scorecard across those firms. In most respects, the pattern of results this study finds supports our model and assumptions.

Christian Ax

Papers

Bundling and diffusion of management accounting innovations—the case of the balanced scorecard in Sweden

Den nya ekonomistyrningen

The Impact of Competition and Uncertainty on the Adoption of Target Costing

Adoption of Management Accounting Innovations: Organizational Culture Compatibility and Perceived Outcomes

Relationships between internal and external information systems integration, cost and quality performance, and firm profitability