Accountants as institutional entrepreneurs: changing routines in a telecommunications company
Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management
ISSN: 1176-6093
Article publication date: 23 September 2014
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explicate the role of institutional entrepreneurs who use accounting technology to accomplish change within a privatised telecommunications company.
Design/methodology
The case study method is adopted. The authors draw on recent extension to institutional theory that gives greater emphasis to agency including concepts such as embeddedness, institutional entrepreneurs and institutional contradiction.
Findings
As part of the consequences of new public management reforms, we illustrate how institutional entrepreneurs de-established an older state-run bureaucratic and engineering-based routine and replaced it with a business- and accounting-based routine. Eventually, new accounting routines were reproduced and taken for granted by telecommunications management and employees.
Research Limitations/implications
As this study is limited to a single case study, no generalisation except to theory can be made. There are implications for privatisation of state sector organisations both locally and internationally.
Originality/value
The paper makes a contribution to elaborating the role of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change towards privatisation and how accounting was used as a technology of change.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the University of Waikato for funding this project. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ) Conference in Adelaide in 2009 and the Fourth New Zealand Management Accounting Conference at the University of Waikato in 2010. The authors would like to thank Markus Milne, who was the discussant at the AFAANZ conference, and the participants at the conferences mentioned above for their constructive suggestions. The authors would like to thank James Guthrie, Jesse Dillard and Irvine Lapsley for their constructive suggestions on previous versions of the paper. The authors would also like to thank the editor Professor Deryl Northcott and the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their perceptive comments, who have helped to improve the paper.
Citation
Sharma, U., Lawrence, S. and Lowe, A. (2014), "Accountants as institutional entrepreneurs: changing routines in a telecommunications company", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 190-214. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRAM-10-2012-0047
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited