Bringing the organization back in: Flexing structural responses to competing logics in budgeting

Benedetto Lepori and Martina Montauti

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2020, vol. 80, issue C

Abstract: This paper aims to understand the mechanisms through which organizations, over time, manage competing logics within budgeting practices. We draw insights from new institutional studies in accountingto highlight the importance of practice-level negotiations for managing institutional conflicts, but we complement them with a focus on the organizational embeddedness of hybrid practices from organizational studies in accounting. More specifically, we build on the notion of ‘structured flexibility,’ according to which organizational structures frame and enable negotiations on hybrid practices, as critical to manage complexity in face of changing environmental conditions. We thus show how ‘structured flexibility’ is made possible by a number of characteristics of decision-making that have been widely studied by the behavioral theory of the firm, i.e. the decomposition of decision-making processes, the framing of local negotiations and the search for satisficing solutions. Our findings from a case study of a public university facing the conflict between a professional and a managerial logic shed light on how organizations may actively manage institutional complexity over time and suggest specific interventions to transform complexity into a source of strategic advantage.

Keywords: Institutional complexity; Organizations; Organizational studies in accounting; Structured flexibility; Bounded rationality; Interactive budgeting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:80:y:2020:i:c:s0361368219300686

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2019.101075

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