Cemil Eren Fırtın and Tom S. Karlsson
This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care…
Abstract
Purpose
This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care have been affected by accounting as a performative device. Special attention has been paid to how accounting brings about performative consequences in shaping the medical profession and its context.
Design/methodology/approach
The article employs qualitative research methods and draws its analysis on empirical data from in-depth interviews at an emergency health-care unit in Sweden.
Findings
It is demonstrated how accounting, in the form of calculations of treatment time and number of patients, enables performative consequences for medical professional work. It is also demonstrated how the use of accounting engages (re)descriptions of practices and roles, creates accounts of patients, and helps to sustain such (re)descriptions. Accounting terms (such as efficiency and control) have been reframed into medical terminology (such as health-care quality and security), ensuring and retaining (re)described medical professional work in terms of practices and emerging roles.
Originality/value
This article contributes to (1) the literature on accounting practices within health-care contexts by demonstrating a case where the accounting ideas and practices of medical professionals are coexistent and interwoven and (2) the increasing body of literature focusing on accountingization by showing how emerging calculative technologies carry performative power over medical professional work through formative (re)descriptions.
Details
Keywords
This study aims to explore the calculations and valuations that unfold in everyday practices within social care settings. Specifically, the paper concerns the role of accounting…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore the calculations and valuations that unfold in everyday practices within social care settings. Specifically, the paper concerns the role of accounting in dealing with multiple calculable and non-calculable spaces within the case management process. The study sheds light on the multiplicity produced in constructing the client as an object through the calculations and valuations embedded in the costing and caring practices in social work.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a qualitative case study in a Swedish social care organisation, with a specific focus on the calculations and valuations within the case management process. The data have been gathered from 20 interviews with social workers, team leaders, managers and a management accountant, along with more than 36 h of on-site observations and internal organisational documents, including policy documents, guidelines and procedural lists.
Findings
The case management process involves interconnected practices in constructing the client as an object. While monetary calculations and those associated with worth are embedded in costing and caring practices, they interact and proliferate in various ways. Three elements are found: transforming service units into centres of calculation, constructing the accounts of calculation and establishing the cost-value calculations. Calculations and valuations are actuated in these elements in describing the need, matching the case with the unit and caseworker and deciding on the measure. The objectification of the client entails the construction of accounts, for example, ongoing qualifications, categorisations and groupings of units, juridical frameworks, case types, needs and measures. As an object multiple, the client becomes different objects at different stages, challenging the establishment accounts, and thus producing a range of calculations and valuations. Such diversity in calculations concomitantly produces more calculations to represent the present and absent multiple facets of the client, resulting in a multiplicity of costing and caring.
Practical implications
The study might flag up for practitioners the possible risks and unintended consequences of depending too much on fixed guidelines and (performance) indicators since social work involves object multiples, which are always in diversity and changeable in situ. Considering the multiple dimensions within the specific contexts could thus be helpful to mitigate such risks in the evaluation of social care processes and the design of (performance) metrics.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature on accountingisation by extending the concept as a part of ongoing organisational practices, materialised within the calculations of money and worth in everyday social care. Besides demonstrating their reconsolidation, this study shows a multiplicity of costing and caring practices depending on the way the client is constructed, resulting in the proliferation of accounting(s) and ultimately accountingisation of social work.
Details
Keywords
Peter E. Johansson, Helena Blackbright, Tomas Backström, Jennie Schaeffer and Stefan Cedergren
The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding regarding how managers attempt to make purposeful use of innovation management self-assessments (IMSA) and performance…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding regarding how managers attempt to make purposeful use of innovation management self-assessments (IMSA) and performance information (PI).
Design/methodology/approach
An interpretative perspective on purposeful use is used as an analytical framework, and the paper is based on empirical material from two research projects exploring the use of IMSA and PI in three case companies. Based on the empirical data, consisting of interviews and observations of workshops and project meetings, qualitative content analysis has been conducted.
Findings
The findings of this paper indicate that how managers achieve a purposeful use of PI is related to their approach toward how to use the specific PI at hand, and two basic approaches are analytically separated: a rule-based approach and a reflective approach. Consequently, whether or not the right thing is being measured also becomes a question of how the PI is actually being interpreted and used. Thus, the extensive focus on what to measure and how to measure it becomes edgeless unless equal attention is given to how managers are able to use the PI to make knowledgeable decisions regarding what actions to take to achieve the desired changes.
Practical implications
Given the results, it comes with a managerial responsibility to make sure that all managers who are supposed to be engaged in using the PI are given roles in the self-assessments that are aligned with the level of knowledge they possess, or can access.
Originality/value
How managers purposefully use PI is a key to understand the potential impact of self-assessments.
Details
Keywords
Therese Nilsson and Andreas Bergh
There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to…
Abstract
There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.
Details
Keywords
Josefine Weigt-Rohrbeck and Mai Skjøtt Linneberg
Previous work on employee-driven innovation (EDI) has demonstrated the benefits of employees’ proactive behavior in achieving success with innovations. The purpose of this paper…
Abstract
Purpose
Previous work on employee-driven innovation (EDI) has demonstrated the benefits of employees’ proactive behavior in achieving success with innovations. The purpose of this paper is to employ the concept of personal initiative to investigate the underestimated role of employees’ agency in complex processes of innovation, showing the impact of personal initiative on employees’ innovation success.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on two embedded cases of environmental bottom-up innovation at a large manufacturing company, this study examines employees’ behavior in generating, championing and realizing such initiatives.
Findings
This paper provides insights into how employees succeeded, through taking initiative in generating, championing and realizing environmental initiatives despite facing high complexity, and resource constraints. Without being prompted from the top down, employees started these initiatives themselves and showed phase-specific behavior in overcoming the various challenges. Thus, self-starting behavior was found dominant in generating ideas, whereas proactive and persistent forms of behavior were found to be prevalent in championing and rolling out the initiatives.
Originality/value
Current understandings of EDI highlight the importance of developing employees’ potential capabilities and organizational-level guidance. Using an active performance perspective, this study emphasizes the importance of employees’ agency in ensuring EDI success, even when conditions are not conducive to their doing so.
Details
Keywords
ShiNa Li, Lawrence Hoc Nang Fong, Carol Xiaoyue Zhang and Mengxin Chen
This paper aims to identify peer-to-peer accommodation hosts’ perceived motivations and constraints, to examine the prediction of the motivation and constraint factors on hosts’…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to identify peer-to-peer accommodation hosts’ perceived motivations and constraints, to examine the prediction of the motivation and constraint factors on hosts’ intention to continue business based on hosts’ attitudes and to explore the moderating role of the business scale.
Design/methodology/approach
A scale for hosts’ perceived motivators and constraints was developed. Mixed methods were used to develop and analyse a conceptual framework for demonstrating how constraints and motivations influence hosts’ behavioural intentions. Findings from interviews with hosts interpretatively supported the survey results.
Findings
Chinese hosts’ perceived constraints and motivators are identified and explained. The survey results indicate that constraints lower intention to continue one’s business and motivators heightens it. Motivators have a higher effect on attitudes and intentions than constraints do. The business scale was confirmed as a moderator in the constraint–attitude link but not in the motivator–attitude relationship.
Practical implications
This paper offers policy implications for governments, online platforms and hosts in terms of establishing incentives and solving problems so that Chinese hosts can sustainably operate their businesses.
Originality/value
This paper identifies constraints and motivators and develops a measurement scale for both simultaneously, which provides a holistic explanation of hosts’ attitude and behavioural intention. It also reveals the moderating role of the business scale. In investigating the thoughts of existing hosts operating on global and local platforms in China, this paper complements the literature, which mainly focuses on the Western context and a single global platform.
Details
Keywords
Gerard P. Hodgkinson, Robert P. Wright and Jamie Anderson
Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as…
Abstract
Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.
Details
Keywords
Pawan Budhwar, Andy Crane, Annette Davies, Rick Delbridge, Tim Edwards, Mahmoud Ezzamel, Lloyd Harris, Emmanuel Ogbonna and Robyn Thomas
Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce �…
Abstract
Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.
Details
Keywords
The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible…
Abstract
The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.