Bundling management control innovations
A field study of organisational experimenting with total quality management and the balanced scorecard
The Authors
Sven Modell, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the annual conference of the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, the Gold Coast, and the 5th Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting Conference, Auckland. The author is grateful to Paul Andon, Christian Ax, Jane Baxter, Rob Chenhall, Anders Grönlund, Sue Llewellyn, Habib Mahama, Hanne Nørreklit and Lee Parker for insightful comments. The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine how organisational experimenting with total quality management (TQM) and the balanced scorecard affects the bundling of design characteristics associated with these innovations in a Swedish central government agency.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts an exploratory, longitudinal case study approach which builds on and extends the management fad and fashion literature.
Findings – While both innovations encountered considerable implementation problems, they continued to exercise a lingering influence on the “new” performance management system emerging in the focal organisation. The original adoption of the two innovations can be explained from a traditional management fashion perspective. However, the subsequent development of performance management features a more complex mix of explanatory factors and highlights how the bundling phenomenon is entangled with managerial learning processes. This resulted in a less linear trajectory of change than that predicted by prior research on the notion of bundling.
Research implications – The paper contributes to the literature on management fads and fashions by refining its conception of the role of managers of adopting organisations and organisational adoption, implementation and rejection of innovations.
Originality/value – The paper constitutes a first attempt to examine in greater detail how organisational experimenting with contemporary management control innovations affects the process of bundling in an individual organisation.
Article Type:
Research paper
Keyword(s):
Balanced scorecard; Fashion industry; Management accounting; Total quality management.
Journal:
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
Volume:
22
Number:
1
Year:
2009
pp:
59-90
Copyright ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:
0951-3574
1. Introduction
The past two decades have seen a wave of innovations in management accounting and control practices, notably epitomised by such notions as activity based costing/activity based management and the balanced scorecard to mention but a few novel techniques. The adoption and diffusion of such techniques have been extensively examined in the private (e.g. Bjørnenak, 1997; Brown et al., 2004; Gosselin, 1997; Malmi, 1999; Speckbacher et al., 2003) as well as the public sector (e.g. Chan, 2004; Jackson and Lapsley, 2003; Lapsley and Wright, 2004; Northcott and France, 2005). An important source of inspiration for much of this research has been the literature on management fads and fashions (e.g. Abrahamson, 1991, 1996) suggesting that managerial innovations are popularised as a set of conceptual components, which are more or less successfully adopted by organisations. A closely related research topic is that of how conceptual components, or design characteristics associated with different management accounting and control innovations are bundled together as innovations evolve (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005, 2007; Bjørnenak and Olson, 1999). The notion of “bundling” implies that elements of different innovations are re-combined into “new” innovation packages in the process of adapting these to a particular context (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2007). It is thus a potentially important analytical category for understanding why and how fashionable innovations become implicated in organisational control practices.
From a traditional fad/fashion perspective, bundling has primarily been described as a supply-driven phenomenon as it is used by propagators of particular innovations (e.g. consultants, trade associations) to increase their attractiveness to potential adopters (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005, 2007). However, this perspective has recently been criticised for neglecting the complexities of change associated with local adaptation of innovations in a particular organisational setting (Clark, 2004; Czarniawska and Sevón, 2004; Jones and Dugdale, 2002; Mueller and Carter, 2005). The majority of empirical research following the fad and fashion perspectives has focused on broad diffusion and adoption patterns and relies heavily on survey data (e.g. Bjørnenak, 1997; Lapsley and Wright, 2004; Malmi, 1999) or secondary sources, such as references to particular innovations in professional or trade publications (e.g. Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005; Carson et al., 2000; Giroux, 2006; Mazza and Alvarez, 2000). Moreover, few of these studies have examined the connections between different innovations in any greater detail. Hence we have very limited knowledge of how management accounting and control innovations interact as adopting organisations implement these and how this affects the need to re-conceptualise the bundling phenomenon.
In the present paper, we address this gap in the management accounting literature inspired by the fad/fashion perspective by viewing the bundling phenomenon as an outcome of organisational experimenting with novel accounting and control techniques over an extended period of time (Andon et al., 2007). Focusing on two innovations that have gained increasing popularity over the past two decades – namely total quality management (TQM) and the balanced scorecard – we examine how these have affected the development of control practices in a Swedish central government agency. While drawing on the literature on management fads and fashions, we explicate how this needs to be extended to capture the complexity of the bundling phenomenon.
We start by outlining how the development of TQM and the balanced scorecard can be understood from a fad/fashion perspective and elaborate on the critique informing our analysis of the notion of bundling. We then account for the research method applied. The empirical part of the paper starts with an overview of the supply of management innovations in Swedish central government before examining how such innovations have evolved in the case organisation. The concluding section summarises our main findings and implications for future research.
2. Conceptual framework
The literature on management fads and fashions seeks to explain diffusion processes based on the assumption that organisational adoption of innovations is determined by imitation rather than rational choice (Newell et al., 2001). Drawing heavily on DiMaggio and Powell (1983), Abrahamson (1991) introduced the fad and fashion perspectives as complements to the efficient choice perspective, suggesting that adoption results from reasoned cost/benefit-centred decisions, and the forced selection perspective, according to which adoption is driven by the need to comply with regulatory powers. The fad and fashion perspectives differ, however, in that the former sees similar organisations within a particular group of adopters as the main source of imitation while paying little attention to the origins of innovations. On the other hand, the fashion perspective emphasises the active involvement of fashion-setters, such as influential consulting firms and other expert powers, typically located outside the group of adopting organisations in the creation of management fashions (see also Abrahamson, 1996). This has led a number of authors to deepen the analysis of the strategies applied by promulgators of management fashions in disseminating innovations (e.g. Benders and van Veen, 2001; Collins, 2000; Jackson, 2001; Kieser, 1997).
Against this backdrop, it is useful to start a discussion of how TQM and the balanced scorecard may be bundled by examining the relationships between these innovations as they have been portrayed by key propagators. This leads to an interest in the rhetoric invoked as well as the constitutive design elements of these innovations (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2007).
TQM emerged as an increasingly fashionable management innovation in response to the lacking competitiveness of US manufacturing industry in the 1980s and especially the perceived superiority of Japanese firms in delivering high-quality products in accordance with customer demands while achieving operating efficiency (Giroux, 2006). Thus, the rhetoric surrounding the promulgation of TQM tends to be loaded with references to the need for management practices fostering customer orientation and satisfaction (Dean and Bowen, 1994; Mouritsen, 1997). The paramount role of the customer is also reflected in studies teasing out the core design characteristics of TQM as specified by key propagators (Anderson et al., 1994; Hackman and Wageman, 1995). Based on the views of an expert panel, Anderson et al. (1994) condensed the 14 TQM principles prescribed by Deming (1986) into a smaller set of key concepts emphasising the role of visionary leadership for stimulating cooperation and learning as vehicles of process management, continuous improvement and employee fulfilment with the ultimate objective of enhancing customer satisfaction. Similarly, Hackman and Wageman (1995) revisited a number of classical TQM writings and identified the necessity of meeting customer needs as the primary motivation for TQM. Internal organisational practices, such as continuous improvement efforts, cross-functional teamwork and the development of process-orientated management techniques, were portrayed as subsidiary to this overriding priority.
While achievement of customer satisfaction or the fulfilment of customer needs are generally perceived as an overriding design priority, it is also possible to identify some consensus about the management control techniques required for the realisation of TQM. The development of an organisational climate conducive to cross-functional cooperation and process-orientated management is typically considered to necessitate lateral, rather than hierarchically orientated control practices (see, e.g. Chenhall, 2008; Munro and Hatherly, 1993). Popular conceptualisations of TQM emphasise the need for mechanisms supporting lateral control, such as the empowerment of managers with cross-functional process responsibilities, team-based rewards and use of non-financial goals and performance measures indicating how internal processes and performance improvements contribute to customer satisfaction (see Hackman and Wageman, 1995; Johnson, 1992).
Similar to TQM, the origins of the balanced scorecard can also be traced to the growing concerns with the decline of US manufacturing industry in the 1980s, which was arguably exacerbated by the over-reliance on short-term, historically focused and predominantly financial performance indicators (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987). However, while recognizing the importance of satisfying customers and achieving operating efficiency the rhetoric of leading balanced scorecard propagators, such as Kaplan and Norton (1996), emphasises the alignment of performance management with the overriding objective of maximising shareholder value (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005). Another key element of the rhetoric surrounding the balanced scorecard is that such long-term, strategic goal alignment is achievable by managing the causal relationships between underlying performance drivers (Nørreklit, 2000, 2003). This is accomplished by disaggregating the strategic vision and objectives of companies to a set of causally linked indicators representing financial performance, customers' views, internal business processes and learning aspects stimulating long-term growth of the firm (Kaplan and Norton, 1996, 2001)
In contrast to popular conceptualisations of TQM, emphasising the need for lateral control, the balanced scorecard has a predominantly hierarchical orientation. This is notably manifested by the suggestions that it constitutes a useful mechanism for disaggregating organisation-wide objectives and targets into personal scorecards for managers and employees at various hierarchical levels and that strategic goal alignment is reinforced by “cascading” indicators up and down the organisational hierarchy (Kaplan and Norton, 1996, 2001; see also Bukh and Malmi, 2005). While references to TQM in Kaplan and Norton's (1996, 2001) earlier works were rather tangential, more recent advances (e.g. Kaplan and Norton, 2004) deal more extensively with it and portray it as complementary to the balanced scorecard. However, this argument mainly rests on the suggestion that indicators incorporated in the balanced scorecard may support the process improvement efforts embedded in TQM while the more fundamental challenges of reconciling hierarchical and lateral logics of control are largely eschewed (Chenhall, 2008; Hackman and Wageman, 1995)
Table I summarises this brief review of the relationships between TQM and the balanced scorecard with particular reference to how overriding and subsidiary design priorities, reflecting the fundamental motifs of these innovations, are linked to key management control features. However, merely relying on popular conceptualisations of fashionable management innovations is insufficient for understanding how these may be bundled. While an inspection of Table I suggests that TQM and the balanced scorecard represent largely incompatible logics of control, empirical research indicates that reliance on TQM may indeed be conducive to the adoption of balanced scorecard-like performance management systems (Hoque and Alam, 1999: Malmi, 2001). This cautions against a conception of these innovations as monolithic “wholesale” solutions. Although the communication between key propagators of TQM and the balanced scorecard seems to have been rather limited (see also Chenhall, 2008), prior research shows that these innovations are both nebulous concepts, which may be subject to considerable re-construction in practice (see, e.g. Aidemark, 2001; Edenius and Hasselbladh, 2002; Lozeau et al., 2002; Modell, 2004; Mouritsen, 1997; Zbaracki, 1998).
This observation draws attention to the considerable ambiguity often inherent in fashionable management innovations (Benders and van Veen, 2001; Giroux, 2006; Kieser, 1997). Ax and Bjørnenak (2005, 2007) argued that the interpretative viability stemming from this ambiguity constitutes a precondition for successful bundling of innovations. By utilising the scope for multifaceted interpretations, suppliers of innovations may reconfigure these to make them compatible with a particular social setting or reduce conflicts with other innovations. Examples of this can be found in the dissemination of the balanced scorecard to public sector organisations and its subsequent transformation from a shareholder- to a stakeholder-focused model with less emphasis on financial performance as an overriding design priority (Modell, 2004). Conversely, excessive stereotyping of the ideas underpinning various innovations can hamper their prospects of influencing evolving management practices (Parker and Ritson, 2005).
Interpretative viability may be a valuable resource in the dissemination of innovations as it enables suppliers of management innovations to increase market size (Benders and van Veen, 2001). However, prior research into its role in the diffusion of fashionable management innovations has been hampered by a lack of attention to the dynamics associated with the demand for such innovations (Giroux, 2006). This limitation can be traced to the tendency to focus on seminal fashion-setters as “lone creative geniuses” (Clark, 2001, p. 1660), deliberately and skilfully developing novel management techniques, while downplaying the active involvement of managers of adopting organisations in shaping innovations (see also Clark, 2004). This suggests an interesting paradox in the literature on management fads and fashions: in de-emphasising rational choice explanations of adoption it has tended to portray recipients of innovations, such as managers of adopting organisations as passive, unreflective actors while stressing the inherently intentional and rational manoeuvring of promulgators.
Consequently, the fad and fashion perspectives provide limited insights into the complex interplay between the suppliers and adopters of innovations in the process of bundling. In particular, the action repertoires of managers of adopting organisations and their role in re-constructing and linking innovations remain under-researched. We now turn to examine these issues in greater detail.
3. Research method
The following empirical study is set in the context of Swedish central government and, more specifically, in a central government agency – the Swedish National Board of Student Aid (SNBSA) – experimenting with TQM as well as the balanced scorecard. This case study is part of a larger research programme examining how recent central government reforms have influenced the development of performance management and control practices of central government agencies (see Modell et al., 2007; Modell and Grönlund, 2007). This research programme entailed extensive interactions with senior civil servants and managerial staff at different levels of a broad range of central government agencies. In combination with archival data sources and prior empirical studies, this research provides valuable insights into the context of central government reforms.
While being part of this broader, field-based data collection, the SNBSA was selected for deeper analysis for the present study as it has experimented with multiple management innovations over a relatively short time-span as well as adapting to changes in the Government's reform agenda. This offers a promising opportunity to examine the complexities associated with the bundling phenomenon in an individual organisation. However, it should be noted that the importance of the concept of bundling as a metaphor for understanding the process of change in this particular case emerged inductively during the process of data collection and analysis and became the object of deeper probing as the research progressed (Ahrens and Chapman, 2006). Overall, the case study was of an exploratory, non-interventionist nature (Lukka, 2005).
Data collection in the SNBSA took place between 2004 and 2007 and primarily comprised semi-structured interviews, group discussions and a number of secondary data sources. At the outset of the study, the organisation was in the midst of devising a “new” performance management system. Our initial contacts with the organisation indicated that a small number of headquarters staff had been instrumental in these changes and prior attempts to implement TQM- and balanced scorecard-inspired control techniques. Our first round of interviews (in October 2004) aimed at probing into their experiences of these innovations and were relatively open-ended to allow interviewees to elaborate freely on what they saw as the driving forces behind adoption of various innovations, their benefits and the problems encountered during implementation. Similarly, in early 2005, the managers of three regional offices of varying size and geographical location were interviewed to examine the wider experiences of the innovations concerned at the operating level. Later that year, we also interviewed the incoming Director-General and the government official in charge of monitoring the performance of the SNBSA to provide complementary perspectives on the wider governance and reform context of the organization.
A preliminary analysis of these interviews and documents provided by the SNBSA (e.g. internal planning documents, memos and presentation material describing its experiences of the innovations) revealed some interesting connections between the organisation's experimenting with different management techniques and its ongoing development of strategic planning and performance management practices. To examine these connections in greater detail, additional interviews were conducted in 2006 and 2007 with individuals extensively involved in past and ongoing change initiatives at various levels. These interviews were more focused to probe into issues emerging as particularly critical in the earlier research phases (a sample of interview questions used in the later research phases is given in the Appendix). Hence we introduced a longitudinal element in data collection allowing us to gradually sharpen our focus on issues of key interest and gain a deeper understanding of emerging control practices. The distribution of interviewees across different interview phases is given in Table II. Following this iterative interview process, five of the 16 interviewees were interviewed on more than one occasion.
The interviews typically lasted between one and two hours. To stimulate an open dialogue and avoid bias related to potentially controversial or sensitive issues we refrained from taping the interviews
As a final means of validation and probing into emerging interpretations, we organised feedback sessions, based on preliminary case study narratives and oral presentations, with key informants on two occasions (April 2006 and October 2007). Especially the latter of these sessions, taking the form of a group discussion with six headquarters staff, proved valuable for shedding additional light on the process of bundling and the unfolding implementation of the “new” performance management system. The meaning of the bundling metaphor was presented to the participants, who were subsequently encouraged to reflect on past and ongoing changes in light of this, while notes were taken and later transcribed. Such member checks constitute a crucial technique for assessing the credibility of researcher interpretations in qualitative research (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) and helped enrich our analysis.
4. The supply of management innovations in Swedish central government
Swedish central government agencies have been subject to an increasing element of “management by objectives” or “managing for results” over the past decades
The gradual evolution of “managing for results” in the 1990s was paralleled by the diffusion of other management techniques among central government agencies. TQM and the balanced scorecard were two of the most salient innovations in this respect, displaying a varying degree of consistency with the ethos of “managing for results”. We briefly review the origins and development of these innovations in Swedish central government.
Total quality management
TQM-inspired practices began to diffuse across central government agencies on a larger scale in the mid-1990s (Modell et al., 2007). A key source of inspiration in this respect was the Swedish Institute for Quality Insurance (SIQ). The SIQ is a non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting “modern” quality management practices within the private as well as the public sectors. To this end, the organisation undertakes a range of promotional activities, including conferences, training, “quality contests” and the development of quality enhancement tools. The quality management practices emerging in several central government agencies since the mid-1990s have drawn on these tools, especially the SIQ Model for Performance Excellence (Modell et al., 2007). This model was, in turn, heavily inspired by tools developed by prominent standard-setters in the international TQM movement, such as the Malcolm Baldrige Award in the USA and the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). The model bears testimony to key TQM principles such as a heavy emphasis on customer and process orientation, employee empowerment and continuous improvement. These aspects are funnelled into a measurement index for assessing organisational quality enhancement efforts, covering such areas as leadership, information and analysis, strategic planning, staff motivation and development, operating process orientation and results, and customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is currently weighted as the single most important assessment criterion accounting for 30 per cent of the total index score (SIQ, 2006).
The SIQ has taken pains to portray the Model for Performance Excellence as a flexible management tool that is easily adaptable to a wide range of organisational settings and other management techniques. For example, the model is arguably compatible with other influential quality standards, such as ISO 9001. Similarly, the model does not only emphasise quality aspects but also the achievement of productivity and financial results and stresses the importance of multidimensional performance measurement (SIQ, 2006). This flexibility is also mirrored by the considerable variations in the degree to which TQM principles have permeated central government agencies. More broadly based examinations reveal that several agencies have implemented process-orientated organisational structures as a complement to hierarchical management control practices although few of them have conformed completely to TQM principles such as those advocated by the SIQ (National Council for Quality and Development, 2003a). Deeper case studies suggest that the adoption of the models promoted by the SIQ encountered considerable implementation problems and resistance but still left important vestiges in some agencies, such as a growing emphasis on systematic quality control and customer orientation (Modell et al., 2007; Quist, 2003; Wiesel, 2006).
Whereas TQM-inspired practices started to diffuse across central government agencies without much government intervention, the notion of quality management has also been entangled with reforms emphasising the need for enhanced citizen orientation since the late 1990s. Following the Government Bill setting out this reform agenda (Swedish Parliament, 1997/1998) a new advisory agency – the National Council for Quality and Development – was formed in 1999. The agency initiated a search for suitable quality management models for central government agencies but quickly concluded that it was preferable to continue developing models already emerging in practice, such as the SIQ Model for Performance Excellence (Modell et al., 2007).
Following this initial search, the National Council for Quality and Development has documented emerging quality management practices in central government agencies and prescribed ways of further developing these in a series of reports (National Council for Quality and Development, 2003a, b, 2004). Interestingly, however, emerging practices are here re-cast to emphasise process orientation as the main metaphor of change. The agency's prescriptions are heavily influenced by the TQM literature and key concepts such as customer orientation occupy an elevated position. Yet, central government agencies mainly seem to have approached quality management under the banner of process orientation as a contrast to the hierarchical emphasis of the “managing for results” system. The National Council for Quality and Development has also expended considerable efforts on explicating the importance of adopting a process-orientated perspective to avoid alleged dysfunctions of hierarchical control, such as a lack of attention to customer needs (see National Council for Quality and Development, 2004). However, little attention has been paid to the development of performance indicators to support quality enhancement.
The National Council for Quality and Development has also cautioned against the lack of inter-organisational process orientation stemming from the Government's emphasis on the objectives of single agencies and has called for enhanced collaboration between agencies to better serve citizen and user needs (National Council for Quality and Development, 2004). However, the Government has been reluctant to endorse the appeals for far-reaching process orientation. It has rather insisted that agencies should conform to the hierarchical “managing for results” system although it has recently emphasised the need to strengthen the system's focus on citizen- or user-orientated indicators such as customer satisfaction (Modell et al., 2007).
The balanced scorecard
Similar to the emergence of TQM-inspired practices, the balanced scorecard has diffused across central government agencies without much direct government intervention but through extensive involvement of private-sector consultants and other authoritative promulgators. As early as 1996, the National Audit Office issued a report describing how the balanced scorecard might be used to support “managing for results” within central government agencies (National Audit Office, 1996). The use of the balanced scorecard by various agencies has since been repeatedly documented by the National Financial Management Authority (2000, 2006)
First, the balanced scorecard is portrayed as largely compatible with the ethos of “managing for results”. While some agencies have adopted the idea of linking the balanced scorecard to strategic visions and objectives, others have aligned it to politically established objectives embedded in annual appropriation directives. Most agencies also disaggregate the objectives, targets and performance indicators to lower hierarchical levels although some only use the tool at an organisation-wide level and make limited use of it for management control. However, few, if any agencies use the balanced scorecard for distributing performance-based rewards (see also Carmona and Grönlund, 2003; Wiesel, 2006).
Second, similar to many private sector firms in Sweden (see Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005) most agencies have complemented the traditional categorisation of performance indicators into four perspectives with an explicit personnel or human resource perspective and have transformed the balanced scorecard to encompass a wider stakeholder focus (see also Carmona and Grönlund, 2003). While the National Financial Management Authority recognises this as an important divergence from the original balanced scorecard concept, it endorses it as a development compatible with the Swedish tradition of emphasising employee interests more strongly than in the USA (National Financial Management Authority, 2000).
Finally, the notion of linking performance measures into causal chains of leading and lagging indicators seems to be poorly understood. Although the National Financial Management Authority emphasises the integration of various perspectives into a coherent and “holistic” view of organisational performance, none of the agencies being described have made any great strides towards this end. The balanced scorecard is primarily used as a means of categorising and linking objectives, targets and performance indicators within each perspective but without much consideration of how various perspectives interrelate. The possibilities of continuously tracing causal relationships between various perspectives are also reduced by the lack of coordinated timing of the compilation of performance information in some agencies. Indicators within some perspectives are only reported at long intervals (e.g. annually) while others are subject to more frequent reporting (e.g. monthly).
Summary
To summarise, both TQM and the balanced scorecard have been promoted by a mixture of private and public sector promulgators but only involving limited intervention by the Government. Government-sponsored promotion of these innovations has largely pivoted on the documentation and dissemination of emerging practices in central government agencies. Similar to the more general development of TQM and the balanced scorecard there appears to have been very limited communication between key promulgators of these innovations and little bundling on the supply side (Chenhall, 2008). Taken together, this has resulted in a fragmented supply of management innovations. Novel management techniques, especially those inspired by TQM, are neither wholly compatible nor tightly coordinated with the “managing for results” model forming the backbone of government control of agencies. However, the promotion of novel management techniques has involved some deviations from standard TQM and balanced scorecard prescriptions. We now turn to examine how such supply conditions have affected the transformation and bundling of management control innovations in the SNBSA.
5. The case of the Swedish National Board of Student Aid
Contextual background
The SNBSA administers a range of state-subsidised financial support schemes geared towards secondary and tertiary education students and is held accountable to the Ministry of Education and Science. A substantial part of its operations entails administration of government grants and loans to university students and administration of re-payment schemes. The SNBSA was formed in 1964 and functioned as a supervisory body for a large number of autonomous regional student aid boards administering financial support schemes to university students. In 1992, these organisations were merged into a unified central government agency. However, the regional organisation was long retained as a strong local presence was considered important for serving students effectively. It is only recently that the number of regional offices has been reduced following the introduction of new operating practices and demands for enhanced efficiency (see the following).
In 2005, the SNBSA distributed 23 billion SEK in the form of various support schemes and administered outstanding loans of 175 billion SEK
The overriding objectives of the SNBSA, as spelled out by the Government, pivot on its role in furthering enrolment in higher education such that economic, geographic and social differences in the student population are evened out. However, very little information about how the agency contributes to meeting these wider educational objectives is available in its external reporting and management control systems. By contrast, similar to many other central government agencies the SNBSA is subject to very detailed targets and reporting requirements covering a broad range of short-term operating aspects as well as financial performance.
This short-term emphasis is also strongly reflected in the agency's internal control practices. Regional office managers have budgetary responsibilities primarily comprising salaries and rental charges. However, budgetary control was long subordinate to more detailed and frequent control of operating aspects. The organisation exercises very tight control of short-term service aspects such as lead times in processing loan applications and accessibility in terms of response times for telephone, mail and electronic mail. Interviewees argued that these performance aspects had always been of central concern within the SNBSA. For example, a member of headquarters staff with long experience from the agency characterised the organisation's control practices as follows:
It is a very inward-looking perspective with a focus on lead times and responding to phone calls. It has been the same thing for the past 30 years.
Achievement of short-term targets for such performance aspects is critical to maintain service levels and constitutes a considerable challenge for the organisation during certain parts of the year. Operations are highly cyclical, with a peak workload at the start of every university semester. Although the SNBSA takes considerable steps towards meeting such challenges through employment of temporary staff and re-allocation of resources, it has repeatedly been exposed to public criticism and negative media attention for having excessively long lead times and poor accessibility. Complaints are also addressed to the Ministry of Education and Science. This has bred political concerns and has occasionally resulted in a strained relationship between the agency and the Minister of Education. Hence continuous monitoring of lead times and accessibility indicators has high priority within the Ministry. According to the government official in charge of performance monitoring, the Minister of Education takes a direct interest in these matters. In times of escalating public criticism, as was the case during the recent re-structuring of the organisation, the Ministry has also imposed increasingly detailed controls requiring monthly reporting of lead times and accessibility indicators from the agency.
The short-term emphasis of traditional control practices was reinforced by the leadership style of the senior management team heading the SNBSA between the late 1970s and 1999. The former Director-General was characterised as a “charismatic” person with a preference for direct intervention in day-to-day matters, but not always concerned with the long-term consequences for the organisation. Control practices were described as ad-hoc and situated in the “back pocket” of the Deputy Director-General but involving little dialogue or feedback. One interviewee described management control practices as a matter of:
… receiving long letters [from the Deputy Director-General] and then you got a budget.
This leadership style was associated with a culture that one office manager described as “bohemian”. She also characterised the Deputy Director-General, in particular, as a person who:
… absorbed every novelty, although he may not have had a vision of what to use it for.
Consequently, a number of new technical solutions to facilitate payment procedures were introduced on the initiative of senior management. As explicated in the following, this willingness to experiment has also been manifest in the adoption of novel management techniques. Figure 1 illustrates the approximate timing of the changes unfolding since the late 1990s.
Experimenting with total quality management
Starting in 1998, the SNBSA has made a number of attempts to implement process-orientated work practices, inspired by TQM principles. As a first step, a number of core operating processes were identified based on specific services provided to different categories of beneficiaries. While these processes were largely based on the existing organisation of operations (e.g. payment and repayment procedures) these were “cross-functional” in that employees located in regional offices generally split their time between different processes. A new “customer service process”, pivoting on management of customer contacts via telephone, was also identified to focus attention to this critical area of operations. So called “process owners”, with a responsibility to develop these lateral processes, were appointed and plans were drawn up to establish a central committee to ensure that these individuals received sufficient support and resources. However, the “process owners” were not granted formal budgetary responsibilities, which remained with the regional office managers. Hence the new process-orientated responsibility areas came to overlap with the hierarchical structure in place for management control.
This early experimenting with process orientation was heavily inspired by existing, TQM-based standards. An important source of inspiration was the recommendations issued by the SIQ. Documentary evidence testifies to the increasing service demands of users and the public criticism of the SNBSA as a general impetus for the need for a more customer-focused approach to operations. However, interviewees rather pointed to the existence of a small group of employees firmly convinced of the benefits of process orientation as a more direct driving force behind adoption and implementation. Implementation also relied heavily on external consultants. One member of headquarters staff thus characterised the adoption decision as follows:
It was a consultancy idea and a bit of a fashion thing but there was a problem of explaining the value added by process orientation.
The Director-General supported the initiative. However, similar to the group of employees driving the implementation efforts, his endorsement was partly attributed to a striving for external recognition and legitimization. For example, one office manager suggested that:
The whole thing was based on SIQ's model … and then it was also possible to win quality awards and that was something [the former Director-General] liked
The view of process orientation as predominantly influenced by external standard-setters was corroborated in our follow-up interviews and feedback sessions. One key informant suggested that the process orientation efforts were “not really driven by top management but rather by consultants”.
Although the work with process orientation continued after the appointment of a new Director-General in 1999 and was gradually extended to headquarters functions, he grew increasingly wary of re-organising operations. In a feedback session, a key informant recalled that:
I remember how we discussed how to divide the roles between process owners and office managers. I think the idea was to allocate more resources and authority to the process owners … but then the office managers asked “what should we do?”. This led [the Director-General], who had inherited the work with process orientation, to pull the brake.
Hence the implementation of process-orientated control practices lost some of its momentum. While process orientation was still seen as a tool for improving operations its role in allocating resources and responsibilities was de-emphasised. Consequently, several interviewees claimed that the role of the “process owners” became increasingly diffuse. The process orientation efforts at the headquarters level also gradually ground to a halt. In early 2002, a memo summarising an internal evaluation of the experiences of process orientation identified the following main problems:
- Unclear distribution of tasks and roles between various parts of the organisation and a feeling that process orientation was implemented in a top-down manner without much consultation between headquarters and regional offices.
- Unclear articulation of the responsibilities of the “process owners” and failure to integrate these into management teams in charge of day-to-day, operating-level decisions.
- Lack of integration of local development initiatives linked to process orientation and failure to adopt a more holistic view of these efforts.
- Attitude problems among staff hindering a more customer-orientated approach to service delivery.
While our informants confirmed many of these observations, they also suggested that the work with process orientation assumed a very “technical” guise as a result of the need to adapt process descriptions to fit existing information systems supporting payment and re-payment routines. For example, in one of our feedback sessions, one informant recalled:
One problem [with process orientation] was that there were only technicians involved. This was reinforced by the problems of dealing with the millennium bug. It all became a matter of technology.
Another informant confirmed this:
Process orientation was equated with IT. There was no focus on customers and we were stuck with the IT systems that had been built up
While the introduction of process orientation was officially lauded as a means of enhancing the level of customer orientation, the extensive process mapping being undertaken was thus characterised as having a very “introvert” focus. Yet, some interviewees indicated that customer orientation gradually became more accepted than the work with process orientation. One reason for this, as an informant with long experience from the SNBSA explained, was that the notion of “customers” was not really new to the organisation but was introduced by the former Director-General already in the 1980s to emphasise the need for flexibility. While this was said to be rather controversial at the time, he suggested that it had supported the more systematic customer orientation efforts embedded in TQM-inspired practices. A concrete manifestation of this systematic approach was the clearer customer segmentation initiated as part of the process orientation efforts. For example, the organisation now refers to “customers” with special needs (e.g. beneficiaries with significant problems of re-paying loans) and have taken steps to provide more targeted services to these. Extensive efforts have also been made to train staff in customer management.
There were also indications of the enhanced emphasis on customer orientation impinging on the meaning of performance. The work on process orientation did not involve any far-reaching attempts to devise new performance indicators to clarify the responsibilities of the “process owners”. However, more aggregated customer satisfaction indexes were introduced to visualise the striving towards enhanced customer orientation. As illustrated in the following, such indicators have also formed an integral part of the performance management systems evolving in more recent years.
Experimenting with the balanced scorecard
In late 2000, the SNBSA started to develop a balanced scorecard-inspired performance management system, which was introduced more broadly in conjunction with the annual budgeting and planning process. According to one interviewee assuming a key role in this respect, the initial interest in this model originated from the new Director-General who “wanted to try something new and engaged consultants”. In an internal memo dated around the same time, the Director-General motivated the introduction of the system as follows:
To manage our task effectively and contribute to achievement of the educational policy objectives and simultaneously accommodate the demands of other stakeholders, the vision and overall objectives of the SNBSA have been further specified in comparison with last operating year through the development of the balanced goal card. In the card, there are four focus areas of utmost importance for operations with objectives, strategies, critical success factors and measures for each (excerpt from internal memo, September 20, 2000).
In contrast to existing control practices, the innovation was portrayed as a broadly based and more goal-directed performance management system, which would be:
… both short-term and long-term in nature. With the help of this strategic goal card control of operating activities is linked to the long-term vision and the strategies of the SNBSA (excerpt from internal memo, September 20, 2000).
Similarly, promotional material used for internal dissemination of the innovation primarily justifies its use with reference to general shortcomings of traditional control systems being emphasised in the balanced scorecard literature, such as the provision of misleading information for decision-making, a lack of non-financial and more externally focused performance measures and risks of sub-optimisation (Kaplan and Norton, 1996), rather than more specific, contextualised descriptions of the challenges facing the SNBSA. Hence the justifications for adopting the new system resonated with much of the rhetoric surrounding the balanced scorecard (Nørreklit, 2003). However, the change in terminology, with the notion of “scorecard” being replaced by “goal card”, was conditioned by the overly obtrusive connotations of the former term, or as one interviewee explained:
We were not allowed to say scorecard, because then it seemed too much like control.
Similar to the work on process orientation, the implementation of the “goal cards” was driven by a small group of enthusiasts under the influence of a range of external sources. One of the leading propagators of the balanced scorecard in the SNBSA acknowledged that she first encountered the concept while attending an executive management class at a nearby business school and described herself as “totally converted” to the idea. Several interviewees also emphasised the extensive involvement of consultants in introducing the concept more broadly in the organisation and developing it to fit the SNBSA. However, even though one interviewee suggested that the consultants gave the system “an SNBSA touch”, a more dominant feeling was that it only entailed limited adjustments in comparison with the original balanced scorecard model (which seemed well-known to most interviewees). For example, one member of headquarters staff described the system gradually evolving as “the balanced scorecard straight off the shelf”. Another interviewee referred to one of the publications on the topic by the National Financial Management Authority as “the Bible” for how to devise such systems in the organisation. The “goal cards” subsequently emerging also show considerable affinity to the balanced scorecard concept (see Figure 2).
The “goal cards” gradually evolved over the coming years. However, the development of the system primarily involved compilation of existing performance indicators into the various focus areas rather than a more open-ended search for suitable indicators linked to a coherent analysis of the organisation's strategy. For example, customer satisfaction was identified as an overriding performance criterion within the customer perspective and linked to the customer satisfaction indexes emerging from the TQM-inspired change efforts (see Figure 2). However, the development of the “goal cards” was not tightly coordinated with the parallel efforts to implement process-orientated work practices, or as one of the former “process owners” recalled:
Process orientation ran parallel to the development of the goal cards … We described and modelled the processes. But it ran as two separate tracks and we wondered what [the leading propagator of the balanced scorecard in the SNBSA] was really up to. We didn't think there was much to learn from the goal cards.
Neither was any analysis undertaken of the link between customer satisfaction and the over-riding political objectives of the SNBSA pivoting on its effects on enrolment in higher education. Similar to many other Swedish organisations in the public as well as the private sectors, the “goal cards” also encompassed a clearly defined employee perspective (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005; National Financial Management Authority, 2000, 2006). However, the organisation relied on the information in its existing employee development plans to assess achievement of the objectives established within this perspective.
The organisation-wide “goal card” depicted in Figure 2 was also transformed into office-specific “goal cards”, featuring a stronger emphasis on short-term targets and performance indicators. However, these “goal cards” mainly included measures which had long been of key concern in the organisation, such as lead times and accessibility indicators, without much analysis of how they contributed to achievement of more overriding objectives. Thus, one member of headquarters staff summarised the efforts to compile performance indicators as follows:
We found a lot of measures, but it turned out to have a very operational focus. We were not able to capture the more long-term measures.
Other informants referred to the “goal cards” as a “sorting” or “packaging” mechanism, arguing that little thought was given to how various performance dimensions were interlinked. One member of headquarters staff also suggested that such attempts to bring order to management control practices rather resulted in a lack of overview and information overload:
My point of departure is that controlling the SNBSA is fairly simple, but there is a tendency for more and more demands to be placed on the organisation. So the overall objects become complex and this was one reason why the “goal card” became too unwieldy.
Although the general idea of balancing short- and long-term performance measures and linking these into chains of leading and lagging indicators was emphasised in promotional material accompanying the “goal cards”, little of this materialised in the actual development of the system. At the outset, the idea of balance was described as a matter of:
… achieving balance between the various focus areas being established and also balance between the various levels of the organisation (excerpt from internal memo dated September 20, 2000).
In the subsequent development of the system, however, the emphasis on the “goal cards” for disaggregating performance measurement across various hierarchical levels gained the upper hand, while little effort was expended on analysing or mapping causal relationships between various focus areas. Office managers were expected to use the “goal cards” for systematically evaluating how individual employees contributed to meet the overall vision and objectives of the SNBSA. However, far from all office managers seem to have made whole-hearted efforts to this end, with one arguing that he preferred ongoing, personal contacts with subordinates and another seeing the “goal cards” as a “bureaucratic tool” and never “fully apprehending it”. Even where more concerted efforts were made to use the “goal cards” at the individual level the opinion was that this did not result in tighter control.
The “goal cards” also encountered a range of additional implementation problems. A widespread concern among headquarters staff as well as office managers was that the latter had not been sufficiently involved in the development and implementation of the system, which progressed in a top-down manner. Another frequently voiced perception was that the purpose behind the “goal cards” was unclear and that relatively little emphasis was placed on regular use of the system for performance evaluation based on quantifiable criteria linked to operating actions. For example, one member of headquarters staff argued that:
From my perspective [the “goal cards”] became too theoretical and something that ran parallel to operations. The link to everyday operations was poor.
Similarly, the Chief Financial Officer explained that budgetary control evolved on a largely “parallel” basis and was tightened to encompass more frequent feedback to office managers but not linked to other performance evaluation practices. She went on by saying that:
The problem within the SNBSA is that control of operations and financial control have never been linked together.
This observation was not only attributed to the evolution of the “goal cards”, but also to the old culture of the organisation where “things got done” by means of informal communication and decision-making. As explicated in the following, however, the striving for enhanced formality has been accentuated in recent years as a result of the ensuing development of performance management.
Towards a “new” performance management system
During this period of experimenting with novel management techniques, the financial situation of the SNBSA deteriorated considerably. Costs increased steadily as a result of several factors such as growing operating volumes and investments in computer systems to deal with the millennium bug. In addition, a centralised call-centre function was built up to strengthen telephone services and improve accessibility between 2001 and 2003. However, this initially led to additional cost increases, which were only partially compensated for through government funding.
In 2003, a major re-structuring of the organisation was initiated to cut operating costs. A review of headquarters functions was initiated and the number of regional offices was reduced from 24 to 13. Workloads were also gradually redistributed such that the administration of certain types of services was concentrated to a smaller number of offices. Consequently, the number of staff was reduced by about 200 to around 1,000. These changes caused considerable upheaval and were accompanied by a period of deteriorating service levels, public criticism and negative media attention. Several interviewees recalled these changes as highly stressful. Managerial attention was also absorbed to the detriment of the development of novel control practices. For example, one office manager explained that the implementation of process orientation and the “goal cards” “stopped dead” as a result of the managerial efforts expended on organisational re-structuring. Similarly, the Chief Financial Officer described 2003 as a “lost year” as far as the development of control practices was concerned. The view that the work with process orientation and the “goal cards” came to an abrupt end around this time as a result of lacking managerial attention was confirmed in a feedback session and is mirrored by the following exchange between two of the participants:
Top management didn't know what to do with process orientation. There were no clear objectives for it.
No, there wasn't enough space in their hard disks.
Coming out of this period of re-organisation, however, the SNBSA re-energised the efforts to develop the organisation's control practices. In 2004, a small team of “strategists”, several of who had previously been extensively involved in the work on process orientation and the “goal cards”, was formed to assist the Director-General in this matter. The task of this group was to undertake a comprehensive review of the organisation's strategy and produce a coherent, long-term plan for the development of the SNBSA.
An overriding concern in the ensuing development of the long-term, strategic plan was to better align short-term improvement efforts to the objectives of the SNBSA than had been the case in the previous experimenting with process orientation and the “goal cards”. However, some key elements of these initiatives were retained. The vision of the SNBSA as a “progressive and active service agency” was further specified into three broadly defined objectives similar to those found in the organisation-wide “goal cards”, namely:
- Enjoying full citizen confidence.
- Conducting operations in an efficient, lawful and democratic manner.
- Being an attractive workplace.
Vestiges of the balanced scorecard logic are also evident in the new performance management system, called the “target map”, being developed to guide the organisation towards this vision. The original versions of the “target map” were graphical representations linking overriding objectives to more specific functional strategies, which were then further specified into targets over a period of three years. However, the targets for each functional strategy were not identical across the years, but were to be updated as targets for the previous year were achieved. In addition, the targets reflect different, causally linked performance aspects believed to contribute to the achievement of long-term objectives. Targets for the current year were translated into more specific, short-term action plans, which were also updated as certain actions and projects were completed. One office manager thus characterised the target map as a “living document” rather than a static control mechanism.
The “target map” was more widely introduced to office managers in the early half of 2005 with an invitation to suggest changes to the model. Concomitantly, the system gradually started to be used for performance evaluation three times per year as an integral part of the annual planning and budgeting process. The development work continued after the appointment of a new Director-General in 2005 who fully supported this initiative but also initiated some simplifications of the design of the “target map”, which had now grown into very extensive graphic exhibits (covering four large paper sheets). A number of short-term targets were removed and some broad areas of priority were added to further specify the strategies emanating from the overriding objectives. The resultant “target map”, included in the strategic plan for the SNBSA for 2006-2009, is provided in Figure 3.
Despite the problems encountered in the implementation of the “goal cards”, several informants emphasised the continuity between this change initiative and the development of the “target map”. For example, in a feedback session a controller extensively involved in the design of the “target map” explained that:
When we started with the target map, the organisation had burnt itself badly on the balanced scorecard. But we also saw the merits of building on this. We surely had the balanced scorecard in mind when we started drawing the target map.
Other interviewees explained that the main similarity between the balanced scorecard and the “target map” was the ambition to adopt a holistic view of the relationships between the three overriding objectives in the latter. Some of them saw the “target map” as just another way of “packaging”, or organising managing for results in the SNBSA. The link between the balanced scorecard and the “target map” was also emphasised by one of the “strategists”, heavily involved in the organisation's prior experimenting with various management techniques:
The new system is also a balanced scorecard, but nobody has realised that.
In a follow-up interview, she reiterated this view, saying that she saw the “target map” as “something in between TQM and the balanced scorecard” and emphasised the close link between short-term action plans and targets as an important means of stimulating continuous improvement. However, with the exception of the heightened emphasis on customer orientation, informants were generally unable to elaborate on the linkages between the “target map” and the previous, TQM-inspired work with process orientation when queried about this topic. Yet, one of them explained that customer orientation was:
… the objective with highest priority. Everything we do is linked to that.
Notably, customer-orientated performance indicators introduced as a result of the TQM-inspired change efforts, such as customer satisfaction indexes, also occupy a prominent position as a key target in the “target map”. Since the appointment of the new Director-General in 2005, concerted efforts have been made to improve customer satisfaction, especially by focusing on key underlying performance drivers such as telephone response times. Significant improvements were also reported in such performance aspects in 2006. Office managers explained that an important means to this end was more focused utilisation of staff than had previously been the case, especially during peak seasons. In 2006, greater efforts were also initiated to measure satisfaction with specific service aspects (e.g. telephone service, e-mail correspondence) more accurately rather than mainly relying on aggregate customer satisfaction indexes.
Several informants ascribed this enhanced emphasis on more concrete, customer-orientated performance aspects to personal, hands-on initiatives by the new Director-General. Whereas her predecessor was generally seen as having a penchant for formulating ambitious visions and delegating decision making, a member of headquarters staff characterised the new Director-General as:
… a very practically orientated leader. Targets and controls are more grounded in practice now.
Similarly, in a follow-up interview an office manager suggested that:
Controls have been better structured over the past year … Above all, there is more workshop than talk today. It is largely an effect of [the new the Director-General] as she intervenes more directly and makes things happen.
In our interviews, the new Director-General also placed considerable emphasis on developing customer-orientated management practices while echoing the concerns with the overly technical emphasis of the earlier experimenting with process orientation. When asked to elaborate on the evolution of the notion of customer orientation she explained that:
The difference from the earlier attempts with process orientation in the SNBSA is that it is less of a matter of drawing process maps, which scared a lot of people, than talking about processes and taking this as an overall approach. The focus is now on who the customer is. Processes have to add value to the customer.
It is worth noting that the Director-General previously headed one of the leading propagators of TQM-inspired practices among Swedish central government agencies (the National Council for Quality and Development). However, rather than insisting on full-scale implementation of process-orientated control practices, a more cautious and selective approach has been adopted. A member of headquarters staff elaborated on this as follows:
Our current process thinking is not supposed to result in any re-organisation … What we have now is a half-way solution and it is more a matter of describing processes. People never understood the meaning of processes. It has calmed down with [the new Director-General] and it has been a process of maturation.
In our interviews, the Director-General also disassociated herself from the earlier experimenting with process orientation in the SNBSA with reference to the wider experiences of such practices in Swedish central government:
I have no plans to re-organise the SNBSA as they tried to do earlier but I rather try to instil process thinking as a general approach. No-one has succeeded in creating a totally process-orientated organisation. Everyone has abandoned it.
The unfolding development of control practices thus features some important vestiges of the earlier experimenting with TQM- and balanced scorecard-inspired techniques, although a rather selective approach has been taken in integrating elements of these into the new performance management system. In contrast to these earlier change efforts, however, our informants emphasised that the subsequent development of the “target map” was an entirely internal project unfolding without much explicit influence from external sources. The involvement of external consultants was minimal and the “strategists” emphasised that the ambition had been to start “from scratch”. Rather than compiling existing performance measures into the “target map”, a more open-ended approach was adopted starting with the identification of causally related objectives and targets and then initiating a search for suitable indicators linked to these. One of the “strategists” emphasised the advantages of this approach, saying that:
We didn't have any help from consultants which was good, because from them we only got the model [i.e. the balanced scorecard].
The initial justifications for the enhanced emphasis on strategic planning and development of the “target map” also made much less reference to fashionable management techniques, but largely pivoted on the need to revitalise the organisation after a period of radical and stressful change. Promotional material used to introduce the strategic planning activities to employees emphasised the need for a “fresh start” and setting the organisation “on course for 2008” after having gone through “one of the biggest changes ever” in the history of the SNBSA. Similarly, interviewees stressed the nature of the initiative as a response to the “crisis” that the SNBSA had recently experienced. This was especially emphasised by the office managers and was generally appreciated as it shifted their attention from the daily grind. For example, one of them stated that the “target map” had implied a “born again experience” for her.
Another important impetus behind the strategic planning efforts was the striving to link internal control practices more closely to political priorities embedded in the emerging, citizen-orientated reform agenda. A member of headquarters staff described this as follows:
The focus on the political objectives has become clearer through our work on the strategy. Earlier, we didn't really know where the SNBSA was going.
Planning documents produced by the ‘strategists’ also placed considerable emphasis on citizen orientation. The language of citizen orientation was here used largely interchangeably with that of improved customer service. For example, the need for improved customer service was justified as follows:
The transformation from exercising a purely administrative role to becoming a widely appreciated, service-orientated agency that effectively meets the needs of the “new citizen” will bring demands for change in the SNBSA. The demands imply that development of operations and the concomitant development of services need to be increasingly citizen-driven to meet requests for simple and constantly available, but also individualised and qualified service (excerpt from internal planning document, August 26, 2004).
Office managers felt more involved in the work on the “target map” than the previous efforts to implement process orientation and the “goal cards” and argued that implementation had enhanced their understanding of the system. In particular, the new visualisation of the linkages between short-term action plans and various targets was appreciated as it clarified the impact of specific efforts on the long-term strategy of the organisation. An important reason for this enhanced understanding was that senior management had adopted a more tightly coordinated approach, emphasising the need for broad involvement rather than delegating work to a small group of highly committed but isolated individuals. Whereas such an approach was adopted from the outset, with the Director-General expending considerable efforts on communicating the meaning of the “target map” to office managers and other managerial staff, his successor has continued along this path. In an interview, she underlined this as follows:
… implementation depends on the degree of management commitment and then I mean the whole management team … Earlier, we have had a few highly committed individuals but the new control techniques haven't been thoroughly anchored in different areas of operation.
At the same time, the importance of senior management “owning” the new strategy was emphasised by several informants. Several interviewees also suggested that implementation of the “target map” had progressed in a largely top-down manner. One of the “strategists” found this paradoxical, arguing that:
… there is more centralised control today, but it is also more accepted. Earlier on, there was a lot of internal talk about how centralised the SNBSA was, but now nobody reacts against it.
While reflecting the same, over-riding priorities the development of the “target map” between 2006 and 2007 entailed additional simplifications such that it largely ignores the links between various targets over the years. A controller explained the rationale for this:
Earlier, we had a perspective of five years but now we only concentrate on one year at the time because we don't know very much about the future anyway.
However, our follow-up interviews in 2006 and 2007 suggest that the “target map” had brought few novel performance indicators into use at the operating level, but that it primarily functioned as a means of structuring strategic planning. Those in charge of developing such indicators explained this with reference to the technical difficulties in devising measures reflecting several key targets, such as the coherence of rules and costs per customer. Some of the “strategists” also voiced concerns regarding the limited efforts of office managers to communicate the meaning of the strategy and the “target map” to lower-level employees.
6. Concluding discussion
This study constitutes a first attempt to examine in greater detail how contemporary management control innovations are bundled in an individual organisation with particular reference to TQM and the balanced scorecard. Our findings provide an interesting contrast to prior research on this topic in that we find little evidence of deliberate bundling on the supply side (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005, 2007; Bjørnenak and Olson, 1999). We rather illustrate how the process of bundling is part of a less linear trajectory of change involving considerable experimenting by an adopter over an extended period of time. While the implementation of process orientation and the “goal cards” largely progressed as two independent projects, the enhanced emphasis on customer orientation and use of customer satisfaction as a key performance indicator provided a point of connection between these innovations. Such performance aspects have also received heightened attention in the subsequent transformation of the “goal cards” into the “target map” while other vestiges of TQM were gradually de-emphasised. Yet, an element of “process thinking” still permeates the discourse invoked by senior management.
In this gradual process of bundling elements of TQM and the balanced scorecard, there is evidence of an increasingly reflective and reasoned managerial posture. While problematic, the earlier experiences of aligning objectives, strategies, targets and short-term actions, and adopting a multidimensional and holistic view of performance through the “goal cards” were re-mobilised in the design of the “target map”. However, this occurred as part of a more careful analysis of the political objectives and strategy of the SNBSA and was followed by a series of simplifications to increase the clarity of the system. Similarly, vestiges of TQM, such as customer-orientated performance indicators, were gradually refined and made more operational while being unbundled from other elements of TQM proving more problematic in the context of the SNBSA (e.g. process-orientated responsibility structures and resource allocation). This partly occurred against the backdrop of the wider, negative experiences of process-orientated management practices in Swedish central government (Modell et al., 2007). In addition, senior management seems to have taken stock of the experiences of the earlier, fragmented implementation efforts by adopting a more coordinated approach aimed at broader involvement.
These findings negate the view of managers of adopting organisations as unreflective actors blindly enacting readily packaged solutions, which permeates much of the literature on management fads and fashions (Clark, 2001, 2004; Giroux, 2006). The traditional fashion perspective is clearly valid in explaining the initial adoption of TQM- and balanced scorecard-inspired techniques, given the considerable influence from authoritative sources outside Swedish central government (e.g. the SIQ, private sector consultants) and the limited presence of efficient choice and forced selection rationales (Abrahamson, 1991; Malmi, 1999). However, the unfolding development of the “target map” reveals a more complex mix of rationales behind managerial action. Although the initial, fashion-driven experimenting with TQM and the balanced scorecard has shaped the experiences of key organisational actors, they subsequently appear to have adopted a more “rational” posture in an environment where little prescriptive advice for how to bundle such innovations is available. This position was rather underpinned by the enhanced emphasis on goal-directed, long-range planning in an attempt to revitalise the organisation after a stressful period of radical re-structuring and to better align control practices with political objectives and the Government's emerging reform agenda. In this process, management has also demonstrated heightened attention to the risk of novel control practices becoming overly stereotyped (Parker and Ritson, 2005) and has made considerable context-specific adjustments along the way.
These findings suggest two inter-related refinements to the fashion perspective in advancing research on the bundling phenomenon. First, the notion of bundling may need to be re-conceptualised to illuminate how it is entangled with managerial and organisational learning processes. While fashionable innovations provide important inputs to such processes, our findings suggest that learning entails important elements of serendipity as well as “rationality” as organisations experiment with various innovations. While the emerging literature on the bundling of management accounting and control innovations has ignored such processes (Ax and Bjørnenak, 2005, 2007; Bjørnenak and Olson, 1999) it may be extended through integration with organisational learning theories recognising that bundling involves some balancing between goal-directed behaviour and less malleable experimenting (see, e.g. Crossan et al., 1999; March, 1991). Successful adjustments of innovations to a particular organisational context may require selective incorporation of design elements, emerging as particularly useful during the process of implementation but being mediated by repositories of organisational experience. However, to accomplish more goal-directed change managers also need to ensure that such design elements are in line with the overall purpose of the “new” innovation package gradually evolving.
Second, recognising that experimenting with fashionable management innovations entails important learning aspects, we need to abandon the view of such innovations as relatively transient phenomena characterised by limited stability and impact on organisational practices over time (Abrahamson, 1996; Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999; Collins, 2000; Jackson, 2001). Our findings confirm prior research suggesting that fashion-driven adoption of management control innovations is associated with considerable implementation problems (Modell, 2004; Northcott and France, 2005). However, categorising the largely “failed” implementation of TQM and the balanced scorecard in the SNBSA as organisational “rejection” of these innovations (Abrahamson, 1991) would be an over-simplification given their lingering influence on the “new” performance management system evolving in the organisation. Extended analyses of organisational histories of experimenting with different management innovations and the residues it leaves in organisations are required to fully understand the reasons for such “unintended” consequences of change (Andon et al., 2007; Hopwood, 1987). However, such analyses are still rare in management accounting research informed by the fad and fashion perspectives.
While longitudinal field studies would be a preferred research strategy to accomplish these refinements, we also believe that our observations have some implications for the predominantly cross-sectional, survey-based literature on the adoption of management control innovations. This literature has paid scant attention to the complexity of implementation processes and has concentrated on individual innovations (Modell, 2007). To capture how prior organisational experiences of management control innovations affect the implementation of a particular technique, survey research may be enriched by qualitative inquiries into these experiences in a few, carefully selected organisations. A mixed methods approach would thus seem a promising avenue for examining the adoption and implementation of management control innovations and how this relates to the bundling phenomenon (Modell, 2005).
At a more general level, this paper also contributes to the recent debate on whether management accounting research should concentrate on largely fashion-driven innovations (Ittner and Larcker, 2001, 2002 vs Zimmerman, 2001). Our findings underscore that such innovations might play an important role in the continuous shaping of management control practices even though they may prove problematic from the perspective of implementation. We thus concur with Ittner and Larcker (2002) in that the role of fashionable management control innovations is certainly worthy of serious academic research. However, more attention needs to be paid to the bundling of such innovations than has hitherto been the case. By focusing on how organisations make selective use of the constituent elements of innovations over time rather than being pre-occupied with managerial fashions per se, we may be better positioned to capture the more fundamental role of such innovations for the purpose of management control (Weick, 2001).
Figure 1Timing of the experimenting with management control innovations in the SNBSA
Figure 2The organisation-wide “goal card” of the SNBSA in 2003
Figure 3Simplified depiction of the “target map” of the SNBSA in 2006
Table ICore design characteristics of popular conceptualisations of TQM and the balanced scorecard
Table IIDistribution of interviewees across different interview phases
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Appendix. Sample of interview questions regarding the evolution of management control practices and the bundling phenomenon in the SNBSA (used in 2006 and 2007)
Could you please describe the development of management control practices in the SNBSA over the past year?
How has the work with implementing a new strategy for the SNBSA and the “target maps” progressed? What have the main achievements been in this respect? Have any implementation problems emerged and how have these been tackled?
What targets and performance indicators have been of greatest importance in the SNBSA over the past year? Why is this so and what impact has this had in the organisation?
Have any new targets and performance indicators been introduced as a result of this work and how are these used?
What links can you see between these ongoing change efforts and the earlier experimenting with process orientation and the goal cards? How have these experiences influenced the work with the new strategy and the target maps?
How have you been involved in past and ongoing change efforts and what are your personal experiences of these?
Have any important changes occurred in the external environment of the SNBSA over the past year and what impact has this had on its control practices?
Have any new Government initiatives been of any consequence in this respect?
What role has the new Director-General had in the development of control practices?
Corresponding author
Sven Modell can be contacted at: Sven.Modell@mbs.ac.uk