Supply-Chain Accounting Practices in the UK Retail Sector: Enabling or Coercing Collaboration?

Drawing on two longitudinal field studies in the UK retail sector, this paper explores the way that accounting practices carried out under the same category management framework can be vested with contrasting meanings in different interorganizational relationships. The case studies illustrate that accounting techniques implicated in supply-chain management, such as open-book accounting, performance measurement and controls, forecasting, and budgeting, can enter into specific buyer-supplier dyads in both coercive (premised on adversarial appropriation of resources and profit) and enabling (amenable to joint problem solving, flexible adaptation, and attempts to expand total category sales and profits) ways. This paper extends Ahrens and Chapman's 2004 intraorganizational analysis of coercive and enabling uses of accounting to an interorganizational context. While much of the rhetoric surrounding category management emphasizes collaboration, sharing, and trust, this analysis suggests that its operation may result in vastly different types of relations reinforced by different uses and interpretations of accounting techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]