Accounting Reform in Italian Universities. Internal Response to Accounting Change

This paper aims to examine the public sector accounting reform in Italy, focusing on universities and addressing the specific aspect of the accounting change from an internal perspective. The study focuses on the question of how universities in Italy responded internally to governmental pressures for accounting reform, and it examines the extent to which universities implemented the new accounting systems based on the accrual accounting introduction and the new budgeting and reporting implementation. This paper makes use of the key elements identified by Lapsley and Pettigrew’s framework (1994) to shed light on accounting change in three Italian universities, and it identifies the key elements that qualify receptive and non-receptive contexts of change in practice.