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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how fairness evaluations are constructed in a B2B context.Design/methodology/approachThis paper conducts a field study of Air Greenland and its internal and external customers based on strong structuration theory (Stones, 2005). The authors employ context and conduct analysis to analyze how fairness evaluations emerge across four levels of structuration.FindingsThe paper finds that fairness evaluations emerge as a result of the interaction between external institutional pressures, agents' internal structures, and situated reflection and outcomes. The construction of fairness evaluations was embedded in contradictory institutional structures, where groups of actors constructed different evaluations of fair profits, procedures and prices. Actors furthermore worked on changing position-practice relations which shifted relations, external structures and affected outcomes and fairness evaluations.Originality/valueThis paper offers a conceptualization of embedded agency as emerging across the four levels of structuration. This contributes to debates in strong structuration theory through conceptualizing and analyzing how actors may be both be constrained and oriented by structures while reflexively adapting structures across the four levels of structuration. The paper extends extant pricing fairness research by illustrating how actors' construction of fairness flexibly develop fairness evaluations while responding to legitimacy and societal demands, including the needs of particular customer groups.

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the impact of information technology (IT) system implementation on the integration of data and information between sales and accounting departments, and how data integration affects relations with supplier and customers. Design/methodology/approach The change between three different reservation and distribution systems in an airline company was assessed over 20 years based on qualitative data collected while events unfolded and interviews that traced events retrospectively. Findings This study finds that data integration challenges affect the capacity to use revenue and sales data for control purposes and integrating with suppliers and customers. The systems either facilitated the ability to integrate sales and accounting data or enabled integration in wider supplier and customer networks. The implementation of different reservation and distribution systems resulted in a trade-off between integration within the firm and into wider customer and supplier networks. Research limitations/implications Data were mainly obtained from the focal firm, Air Greenland. The protracted study period meant that the data were not as concentrated as they would have been had the analysis been performed over a shorter duration or had the focus been on one implementation process. Originality/value Extant research suggests that integration challenges when implementing IT systems are caused by differences in information needs between groups with different logics. The authors illustrate how data integration is also a crucial challenge when implementing IT systems.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze price decision-making through a practice-based approach. The paper investigates the micro-level practices used to arrive at sales price decisions. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a qualitative study approach is used to develop findings abductively. The data are gathered through an in-depth case study at two firms: semi-structured interviews, meeting observations, shadowing and pricing documents. Findings This paper finds that pricing is a collective decision-making process involving multiple actors across the organization. The case firms work on solving information, coordination and control problems to arrive at sales prices by enacting interlinked practices. Pricing is therefore neither a structure nor a single decision but a process consisting of multiple micro-level practices that enable firms to make pricing decisions. Originality/value This paper develops a practice-based approach to pricing that conceptualize the micro-level practices used to to make pricing decisions in the face of information, coordination and control problems. The paper is interdisciplinary and adds to the accounting literature and the market literature, which have tended to study pricing as a decision made by one decision maker, and not as an organizational process where multiple actors share, evaluate, interpret and coordinate information and decisions.

Current research relates multiple control practices as packages, systems, or accumulations. This relationship signifies that management control practices exist as multiplicities and interact in various ways. These interactions strengthen management control practices. However, this generalisation misses the when of relations, which is a problem, as management control practices are not always related, for example, because they often have their own domain attached to an organisational entity’s tasks. This paper reports on a study of a firm’s (Automaker) management control of its supply chain. This was organised as two types of concern – risk and performance management – that were delegated to two organisational entities each having its associated management control practices. This organisation was a delegation of responsibilities, decision rights and control practices. The study draws on Michel Callon’s distinction between framing and overflow to analyse the framing activity involved in upholding this separation and the overflows stemming from the difficulties of upholding strong framings. In effect, the paper discusses when risk and performance management practices are related, un-related and re-related and concludes that the when helps explain how the relation works to rearrange the importance of the framings and via overflows to introduce completely new framing devices.

The control and coordination of design and technological innovation pose a dilemma for design-driven organizations because the measurability of design and technological innovation differ. On one hand, a product's aesthetic value might increase if its design is separated from technological innovation and if design is controlled by means other than those used in technological innovation. On the other hand, tight integration is warranted because a product's design affects its cost, technical performance, and manufacturability. This dilemma is the focus of the paper. The paper contributes to extant literature in several ways. First, it conceptualizes control as a process that manages design and technological innovation through distinct, separate control mechanisms. Second, it analyzes and develops three modes of convergence through which the potentially contradictory concerns of design and technological development can be compared and evaluated. Finally, the paper suggests that coordination can be achieved through convergence processes that unfold and develop over time.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse how contradictions between institutional pressures shape accounting and organisational change within Air Greenland. Design/methodology/approach The paper applies document analysis and retrospective interviews to trace accounting and organisational change spanning 50 years and analyses developments on multiple levels: societal, governance and micro levels. Findings The paper illustrates the didactical development of the organisation and management accounting. The contradictory impetus from the institutional level generates a space where actors are able to affect development and change management accounting systems. Actors at the company level further acted on the institutional level to affect change in governance and institutions. Research limitations/implications The case differs from case studies in emerging countries owing to the low number of inhabitants in Greenland, its income per capita and the legislative influence asserted by Denmark, the former colonial power, restricting the generalizability of findings. Originality/value The paper extends extant research on development of organisations and management accounting change in developing countries through a longitudinal study of how contradictory demands from the governance and legislative levels affect accounting and organisational change. Moreover, the paper is the first case study to address management accounting practices in Greenland.

In this article, we describe a basic mechanism by which risk events can induce indirect value losses to the risk owner: a value loss arising from a risk event interfering with activities that have no logical connection with the risk event other than that of having the same owner; a mechanism we have named Structural Risk. This effect is caused by the occurrence of a resource fluctuation which challenges the risk owner's ability to gain control of adequate resources, thus forcing the risk owner to prioritize and terminate other activities and projects. In this process value is destroyed. The risk cost component presented in this article, whose existence has previously been argued in the risk literature, has been documented in a single factorial experiment with a unique simulation device named Risky Business. Through our experiments, we have shown that the first response of subjects exposed to large risk events is to mitigate the consequences of the risk event through negotiating with the environment. If such negotiations fail, the subject will have no alternative but to let other activities and projects under direct control of the risk owner suffer. We end the article with conjectures and implications for ERM, suggesting the addition of a risk resource forecast and discussing implications for four types of risk mitigation strategies: capital requirements, risk diversification, network relations and insurance.

This paper analyses path dependence and path creation in firm innovation focusing on the effect of cognitive frames and organisational processes. A Northern European medical device firm is analysed through a detailed assessment of the structural and processual elements of cognitive path dependence. Cognitive schemas are analysed through development of ideal typical views on innovation and through an investigation of two specific innovation projects. Drawing on sensemaking and actor network theory the paper adds to the literature in three respects. First, it provides a more systematic analysis than available in the existing literature of how cognitive frames enable and constrain firm innovation. Second, it presents an empirical analysis that contributes to a differentiation of the concept of path dependence, distinguishing between innovative path dependence and technological path dependence. Third, the paper analyses the timing of constraints and path dependence. In the cases studied the innovation approach frames the innovation problem and constraints in relation to technologies have an impact on the innovation processes later, after new technologies have been thoroughly researched. The paper illustrates how the case firm is cognitively locked into an innovation path focused on generating ever-new product versions on different technological platforms, regardless of cannibalisation among the firm's different product versions. Despite the cognitive lock-in to an innovation path the firm is unconstrained in its choice of technological platforms and paths. Firms’ innovation processes may thus simultaneously be characterised by unrestrained search processes and myopic behaviour.

This paper discusses and reconceptualises the role and practice of accounting in dynamic and complex business networks. The paper conceptualises change in complex inter-organisational systems as a process where various perturbations from the environment or installation of management accounting affect the system. This initiates two types of development. Firstly, the system searches the inter-organisational space, and branches out into new inter-organisational configurations—the system bifurcates. Secondly, the systems studied in this paper did not stabilise to the new order and inter-organisational configuration—rather they oscillated between institutional orders. The inter-organisational system is therefore schizophrenic in a sense, since it can shift between fundamentally different behaviours and orders within a short span of time. Management accounting in this complex evolving inter-organisational system is a source of instability rather than stability, a source of emergent, unintended order rather than planned or institutionalised change.

This article analyses the relationship between management control and boundaries of firms and supply chains. We suggest that an inter-disciplinary and pluralistic approach to boundary setting, which investigates boundaries in an interpretive, functionalist and constructionist perspective is capable of capturing important aspects of the complex processes that construct, deconstruct and reconstruct firms and supply chains. Specifically, the article demonstrates the dynamics of boundary setting and relationship development through the study of a large hearing aid manufacturer and its relationships with suppliers and customers. We show how inter-organizational controls and boundaries gradually emerged in response to local interactions, learning and inter-dependencies between entities in the field. Accounting served both to integrate entities, which were internal and external to the focal firm as well as to fragment the focal firm. The article thus demonstrates the dynamics of integration and fragmentation within a supply chain and shows how firms and supply chains have multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions of identity and scope.

This study investigates the risk reporting between central administration and different operating units performed on major project investments supervised by the Danish Ministry of Defense. The stud...

Summary In this paper we study how risk management systems are applied to make organizational actors interested in responding to emerging risks. The empirical domain of the paper is the Defense Procurement Unit in a Scandinavian country. The paper is based on detailed data from monthly risk update meetings, interviews with both military and civilian managers, and 1 year's worth of monthly risk reports. Our study illustrates how Frontline Managers – to make General Management at the Procurement Unit interested in responding to emerging risks – use the content of the risk reports. The translation of emerging risks changes over time in response to a lack of action on reported risks. In these processes Frontline Managers take on new responsibilities to make General Managers take action on reported risk. The reporting practice changes from the mere identification of risk to risk assessment and, finally, to incorporating the possible response into the risk report. These findings add to extant literature by illustrating that actions do not automatically flow from the identification of risk. Rather, risk and action are dynamically interrelated in the sense that the prose in the risk report is a variable input to generate action and that a lack of action encourages managers to change their approach to reporting.