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This paper aims to unravel the puzzle that the United Kingdom’s high-quality government accounting and fiscal architecture is associated with low-quality outcomes, including poor productivity growth, high public debt, public services which do not meet citizen expectations and historically high levels of taxation. It contributes to public sector accounting research in the fields of fiscal transparency and governance.

This paper uses Miller and Power’s (2013) economization framework and Dunsire’s (1990) concept of collibration to explain why being a global leader in public sector accounting reform and in fiscal and monetary architecture has not protected the UK from weak governance. The intersection of economization’s roles of accounting with modes of government accounting clarifies the puzzle.

Whereas accruals government accounting contributes to fiscal transparency, this is not a sufficient condition for well-judged policy and its effective application. Collibration is the dominant mechanism for mediation in the fiscally centralized UK, but it has failed to deliver stable outcomes, in part because Parliament is limited in its ability to hold back inappropriate behaviour by the Executive. Subjectivization has disrupted adjudication because governments at all levels resist constraints on their behaviour, with unpredictable and often damaging consequences.

This paper provides insights through the combined lens of economization and modes of government accounting, demonstrating the practical value of this conceptualization. Although some causes for unsatisfactory outcomes are specific to the UK, there are cautions for accounting and fiscal reformers in other countries, such as Member States of the European Union.

This paper contributes to discourse about complex disasters by applying cultural lenses to the study of coastal infrastructure (such as seawalls and dikes), thus departing from studies that focus on characterising, assessing, and predicting the physical resilience of hard structural forms that dominate knowledge about coastal infrastructure.

This ethnographic study nuances Philippine coastal infrastructure through examining the material registers of a seawall bordering an island inhabited by artisanal fisherfolk. By “material registers”, this research refers to the socially informed ways of regarding and constructing material configurations and how the latter are enacted and resisted. Data collection was accomplished through focus groups with community leaders, on-site and remote interviews with homeowners, and archival research to further understand the spatial and policy context of the structure.

The discussion focuses on the seawall’s three material registers (protection, fragility, and misrecognition) and reveals how infrastructure built for an island community of fisherfolk simultaneously fulfils, fails, and complicates the promise of disaster resilience.

This research demonstrates the potential of “material registers”, a term previously used to analyse architecture and housing, to understand the technopolitics of infrastructure and how materially informed tensions between homeowners' and state notions of infrastructure contribute to protracted experiences of disaster and coastal maladaptation.

This research signposts the need for disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and sustainable development policies that legitimize the construction of infrastructure to recognize the latter's relationship and impact on multiple sphere of coastal life, including housing and citizenship implications.

This research highlights how infrastructure for coastal disaster risk management implicates geographically informed power relations within a community fisherfolk and between their “small” island community and more politically and economically dominant groups.

Whereas studies of coastal infrastructure are focused on quantitative and predictive research regarding hard structural forms in megacities, this study apprehends disaster complexity through examining the cultural and contested nature of infrastructure for coastal flood management in an island community of fisherfolk.

This study aims to introduce a multilevel micro-foundational perspective on supply chain (SC) ambidexterity, grounded in organizational learning and adaptation research. It investigates the interplay of contextual factors, strategic orientation and a bundle of supply chain management practices to foster ambidextrous performance.

Leveraging a blend of perceptual and objective data and measures, this study explores the intricacies of macro and micro factors at multiple levels, offering empirical support for the research framework. The interrelationships among these factors are scrutinized through three analytical approaches: selection, interaction and system forms of interdependence analysis.

First, the authors offer empirical support for their conceptual model, illustrating that ambidexterity behavior and outcomes in the SC emanate from intricate interactions between macro and micro factors across various levels. Second, the authors present robust empirical evidence endorsing a system/gestalt form of interdependence analysis in capturing SC ambidexterity and performance. This analytical approach effectively captures the complementarity and contradictory interdependence among the opposing poles of efficiency and responsiveness.

The organizational and SC activity configuration faces numerous paradoxical tensions, such as profitability versus sustainability. This study offers valuable insights into establishing an ambidextrous system capable of navigating and addressing these paradoxical situations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between strategy, strategic management accounting (SMA) and performance. Specifically, it aims to explore how SMA alignment is achieved to support both the internal and external fit of organizational configurations and achieve superior performance.

This study has adopted a longitudinal case study approach, focusing on a leading company in the credit mediation industry, and uses the configurational theory and a network approach to understand how an alignment between organizational configurations and SMA leads to superior performance.

This study shows that the configurational fit involves interactions between environmental, strategic and structural elements and SMA. Moreover, it helps understanding the causal complexity of these interactions by showing how various organizational configurations, along with SMA, may lead to superior performance. Finally, from a longitudinal perspective, the study shows how SMA alignment continuously supports both the external and internal configuration fit.

Case studies often lack generalizability due to their detailed, context-specific nature. In addition, the study assumes that aligning SMA practices with organizational configurations leads to higher performance, although outcomes may be affected by other unobserved factors.

This study also has practical implications for managers, as it provides a profound understanding of the role of SMA in supporting both the external and internal alignment of the organizational configuration. Managers should particularly leverage SMA to gather and analyze external environmental data, thereby enabling the organization to ensure the continuous consistency of its strategic priorities, as well as to support and reinforce both existing and emerging strategic imperatives. However, it is essential for managers to perceive SMA not as an isolated instrument, but as an integral component of the broader organizational system. Effective implementation necessitates the integration of SMA techniques with the strategic and structural elements of the organization, which complement their implementation, determining the actual contribution to external and internal fit.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study has been one of the first to adopt a qualitative approach to investigate the relationships between strategy, SMA and performance through the lens of the configurational theory. It elucidates the causal mechanisms underlying the relationships between configurations and SMA from a dynamic, change-oriented perspective, showing how SMA continuously contributes to configurational fit and performance.