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Purpose - This paper aims to examine a management control constructed by senior managers, a core value focused on sustainability, as it travels through time and space. The criticality of sustainable development suggests the need to understand the effects that core values have on organisational actions. Design/methodology/approach - A case study methodology carried out at a multinational organisation is used. This analysis was informed by an actor-network theory which allowed placing the organisation's sustainability focused core value at the centre of this research. Findings - It was found that management control, in the form of a sustainability-focused core value, took on an active role in the case organisation. This enabled the opening of space and time that allowed actors to step forward and take action in relation to sustainable development. It is shown how the core value mobilised individual actors at specific points in time but did not enrol enough collective support to continue its travel. The resulting activities, though, provided a construction of sustainable development within the organisation more in line with traditional profit-seeking objectives rather than in relation to sustainability objectives, such as inter-and intra-generational equity. Research limitations/implications - These findings suggest possibilities for future research that examines the active role that management controls may take within sustainable development. Originality/value - This paper shows the active role a management control, a sustainability focused core value, took within an organisation. This builds on the research that examines management control in relation to sustainability issues and sustainable development as well as the literature that examines core values.

This paper examines how management credo and management accounting systems are linked to management accounting practices by employing evolutionary institutional theories as heuristic devices. Management credo and management accounting systems at the institutional level are understood as “things, ” whereas management accounting practices are understood as flow of events at the level of actions. On the basis of a detailed field study, in this paper, we argue that potential contradictions within management credo and management accounting systems are realized in practice via a certain set of routines that reflects institutional properties, and that the realized contradictions are dealt with in practice, thus creating another set of routines that are neither directly derived nor discernable from the institutional realm.

This paper examines how management philosophy and management accounting are linked to each other through practice. We argue in this paper that management philosophy and management accounting are mutually constitutive to each other in a dialectic manner. We base these findings on a detailed field study of management accounting practices in a research site, a consulting arm offshoot of the planning office in a manufacturing company, that is staffed by highly reflexive practitioners. Drawing upon Giddens’ structuration theory and new institutional theory, we analyzed the way that intrinsic contradictions at the institutional realm are reflected upon and handled in practice. This in turn creates routines that mediate the fundamental contradictions. In particular, we examined the impacts of two fundamental contradictions that exist at the level of management philosophy: romanticism vs realism, and familism vs marketism.These contradictory philosophies influence the way in which formal management accounting systems (hereafter FMAS) are designed. These contradictions result in the structures of responsibility and accountability being fused with a seemingly incompatible mix of management philosophy. Even with these inconsistencies the FMAS is a part of the taken-for-granted reality of management accounting practice. At the practice level the conflicts and tensions within management accounting practice are coped with and in turn become routines when they are replicated over time and space. Our study suggests that dialectic tensions are ubiquitous in organizations. This gives an organization many opportunities to evolve their own sets of coping mechanisms that in turn result in the organization having a unique character. Thus no one organization will conform to a prescribed set of characteristics.

This article deals with the influence exercised by the efficient market hypothesis on standard setting and, consequently, its normative consequences. It shows this influence through the analysis of a particular case: the design and implementation of the International Accounting Standard on financial instruments. In this case it is clear that the efficient market hypothesis was used as the main theoretical reference to justify the use of fair values for financial instruments. By implementing such a standard the users of this standard are educated to believe that the efficient market hypothesis is the correct theoretical reference for accounting valuations. Hence an axiom of a positive research programme acquires a normative aspect. Users will take it for granted that accounting should be interpreted with reference to the efficient market hypothesis.