Amoeba Management and Enabling Control: A Field Study of Small and Medium-Sized Public Hospitals

Hiroyuki Sekiya

Chapter 11 in Management Accounting for Healthcare, 2022, pp 205-226 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Amoeba management is a cost management technique that entails an entrepreneurial thought process and is a leading system in management accounting in Japan. Its fields of application have expanded in recent years to include the medical and social welfare industries. However, few examples exist of its introduction in hospitals, and the factors leading to its adoption are yet to be explained. This chapter aims to clarify the organizational learning process necessary for the adoption of amoeba management by drawing on the perspective of the enabling control design principle, and takes Ohchi Municipal Hospital as a field study to examine its adoption of the technique. Results show that in order to establish amoeba management, the use of both coercive and enabling control afford each amoeba the opportunity to learn by trial and error, thus increasing motivation. In addition, in this study, hospital staff were not seconded from a central government office, but were instead almost exclusively employed by the hospital itself, thus suggesting that the accumulation of organizational memory is likely.

Keywords: Management Accounting; Hospital Management; Japanese Management; Cost Management; Profit Management; Cost Information; Healthcare Organization; Empirical Study; Performance Measurement System; Management Control System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789811237164_0011 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811237164_0011 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

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:wsi:wschap:9789811237164_0011

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().