Ariela Caglio

Implementing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

To say that Information Technologies (IT) are transforming business organisation is trite: it is evident that the “Information Revolution” is changing our economy. But to understand what this transformation entails for professional groups such as financial specialists is less obvious.

To Disclose or Not to Disclose? An Investigation of the Antecedents and Effects of Open Book Accounting

Abstract Open book accounting (OBA) is the regular disclosure of management accounting information beyond corporate borders. Prior contributions have mainly concentrated on identifying its antecedents in individual or small numbers of organizations with exploratory cases. My paper responds to the call to investigate OBA on a wider empirical basis and focuses simultaneously on the explanatory variables of OBA and its influence on both financial and non-financial performance. I thus also explore the mediating role of OBA in linking key antecedents and performance within a unified theoretical framework. I empirically test my model using survey data from a sample of European companies, which are then analyzed through structural equation modeling. My findings indicate that the extent of OBA use is explained by a firm’s willingness to work together with its counterparts in the long run, that is, a relational factor, and the presence of sophisticated cost accounting systems, that is, a technical prerequisite. My evidence also suggests a positive association between OBA and firm performance. Additionally, I find that OBA is a partial mediator that explains how a firm’s long-term commitment to its external partners and the sophistication of its cost accounting system may become associated with performance.

Does Fair Play Matter? UEFA Regulation and Financial Sustainability in the European Football Industry

In 2009 the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) launched its Financial Fair Play Regulations (FFPR) aimed at preventing professional football clubs from overspending in the quest of sporting success to the detriment of their long-run financial sustainability. The rationale and the effectiveness of the FFPR have both been questioned, but only on theoretical grounds. We make a first attempt at bringing empirical evidence to this debate exploiting an original dataset covering 156 clubs playing in the top five European Leagues (those of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) in the period 2006-2015. We address two main questions: whether before 2009 there was indeed a problem of growing financial leverage for European football clubs, and whether after 2009 the financial leverage of European clubs has started decreasing. We find that the introduction of the FFPR is associated with changes in the financial sustainability of European football clubs that are consistent with the regulations’ intended effects. These changes are, however, rather weak and vary substantially across national leagues.

Collaboration between firms

This chapter defines the various forms of collaboration established between firms. More specifically, the purpose is to give an overview of all the forms that collaborative agreements may take. Many firms increasingly cooperate with other firms to coordinate the production of complex products and the provision of composite services in uncertain and competitive environments. This cooperation is widely seen as producing important economic advantages to organizations. Different forms of cooperation have been described. However, little attempt has been made to provide an integrative framework to classify these forms and describe their legal, strategic, and organizational properties. Grandori and Soda classify them according to whether the relationships are formalized or not (due to the support of exchange or associational formal contracts), and whether they are centralized (there is a central coordinating firm) or parity based. Despite the diversity of interfirm relationships forms present some empirical regularities that are normally found in practice. Three elements encapsulate these consistencies: individual autonomy, resource pooling, and contracting.

How to organise firms’ collaboration

This chapter aims at understanding firm collaboration by describing how the underlying interaction is organized. The recognition of the hybrid nature of these organizational forms is another fundamental step towards the clarification of their control peculiarities. The growing importance of interfirm relationships in the last decades has motivated a rethinking of the logic of economic organization, that is, the existence of firms and the determinants of the choice between hierarchical governance, market governance, and hybrid governance. In fact, the organization of economic activities in practice appear to be increasingly moving away from the pure models of markets and firms towards hybrid models. These latter form a specific class of governance structures and are instantiated in a variety of cooperative interfirm arrangements that execute a broad range of activities that were previously completely carried out within organizations or through market exchanges. Notwithstanding the impressive set of organizational studies on hybrids referenced so far, this terrain is still a shifting one and the vocabulary is not well stabilized. Indeed, there is a sense of common knowledge regarding the concepts of both market, centered on the mechanics of supply and demand, and on the role of prices as key to its functioning, and firms, with the importance of hierarchical authority in sustaining activities and decision-making processes. On the contrary, the set of arrangements that rely neither solely on prices nor on authority for organizing transactions is broad and potentially confusing.

‘Fashionable’ control and information sharing practices of collaborating firms

A framework for analyzing case studies and providing some guidelines for designing accounting information networks and control systems is presented in this chapter. Data suggest that the collaborating firms that specialize in a particular function have access to others in the systems performing complementary tasks and this creates a level playing field within the network. Original modes of exchanging information may lead to new ways of doing business together, providing a source of competitive advantage. The availability of information on many aspects of the business facilitates more rapid responses to market opportunities. In contrast, the firms of the sample did not indicate that the sharing of management accounting information led to adversarial consequences, for example, the use of shared information for ones own advantage, without reciprocating, the exploitation to create superior bargaining positions, or, finally, in extreme situations, the utilization of shared information to activate a rival collaboration to the detriment of the original information provider. As a whole, data seem to suggest that collaborating partners activate networks in which a firm plays a central role in coordinating the activities of the counterparts and designs a network structure (the accounting information network) that provides an environment favorable for information to be generated and exchanged. The information exchanged in the network seems to be thicker than that condensed through the brokerage market, but is freer than that in the hierarchy.