The balanced scorecard and the construction of a management control discourse

Will Seal and Linna Ye

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, 2014, vol. 10, issue 4, 466-485

Abstract: Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to synthesise a pragmatic constructivist view of management control and a critical discourse perspective on organizational action. These theories are deployed to build a conceptual framework that can be used to interpret the construction of a management control discourse in specific empirical situations. The framework is deployed to show how, in a particular instance, the balanced scorecard (BSC) can be seen as impacting on organizational action and success/failure. Design/methodology/approach - – The paper develops a theoretical framework for management control which is used to interpret a case study of a BSC implementation in a major bank. Findings - – The paper reports on a case study of a major bank where the BSC changed actors’ perceptions and actions. Although the bank avoided some of the worst excesses of pre-Credit Crunch delinquency, other problems such as misselling suggest that the BSC’s impact on organizational success/failure was ambiguous. The BSC may have improved organizational coordination but long-standing values based on a bonus culture contributed to long-term commercial problems. Research limitations/implications - – With mainstream researchers on the BSC lacking a conceptual basis that explains the communicative impact of the BSC and interpretive researchers focusing on the role of rhetoric in spreading the BSC amongst practitioners, then the conceptual framework in this paper suggests a way of synthesising mainstream and interpretive research on the BSC. Originality/value - – The originality of the paper lies in its application of pragmatic constructivism and critical discourse analysis to interpret and explain the impact of the BSC in a particular organizational setting.

Keywords: Management control; Critical discourse analysis; Pragmatic constructivism; Balanced scorecard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:jaocpp:jaoc-10-2012-0098

DOI: 10.1108/JAOC-10-2012-0098

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change is currently edited by Prof Zahirul Hoque

More articles in Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().