Hoogovens Steel (HS) is a vertically integrated steel company, which until 1995 was functionally structured. During the eighties the steel market became saturated and more heterogeneous. In order to remain a flexible, market-oriented company, HS changed its organizational structure, by...

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Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which a profound change in the image of accountants can be seen in the discourse used in accounting software adverts that have appeared in the professional publications of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants over the...

Purpose – The paper aims to look at a joint venture (JV) set up by a Portuguese company and a global corporation (GC) in the hospitality sector. The paper seeks to examine how, and why the JV's managers introduced variations in the management control (MC) rules and procedures in...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to assess and explain the role of grounded theory (GT) in interpretive management accounting research (IMAR) and seeks to answer the question: can interpretive researchers use GT? And if so, how? Design/methodology/approach – This is a theoretical paper...

Purpose – The aim is to provide a commentary on “Case studies and differentiated realities”, a paper by Sue Llewellyn, published in Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2007. Design/methodology/approach – Examines the ontological statements in Llewellyn's paper...

Purpose – To explore the contributions made by two strands of institutional research that have been applied to the study of management accounting change: “old institutional economics” and “new institutional sociology”. To propose ways of developing these theories, and in general to...

This paper reports an intensive longitudinal case study carried out in a Portuguese manufacturing organisation in which attempts to promote change through management accounting were made in recent years. In a first pilot visit to the organisation, two puzzling observations were made. Firstly,...

This paper is structured in two parts. In the first part we undertake a brief discussion on the concept of power and we explore the way this concept has been regarded in several strands of literature on management accounting – the conventional, the contingency, the pluralist, the interpretive,...