Concepción Álvarez-Dardet Espejo

Incentives Management During Privatization: An Agency Perspective

This paper explains, through a field study and from an agency perspective, how monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms change to support the interests of a privatized firms new ownership. In this case, privatization led to important changes in the board of directors and to more formal performance evaluation and compensation systems for top managers, as profitability and financial control gained relevancy with the firm ownership change. Our results show that differences in incentives management before and after privatization are due to different agency relations in the two periods. We also argue that in a privatization framework the relation between monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms is complex, not simply substitutive as agency theory would predict, and this finding allows us to refine and extend agency theory for this specific context.

El uso del sistema contable de gestión en la implantación de la estrategia: análisis del ajuste contingente

RESUMEN Este trabajo tiene un doble objetivo, por un lado analiza el efecto en la implantación de la estrategia del tipo de información (financiera y no financiera) proporcionada por el sistema contable de gestión, distinguiendo dos aspectos del uso de dicho sistema: Propósito y Estilo de uso. Por otro lado, este estudio extiende el trabajo de Gerdin y Greve [2004] analizando y comparando dos aproximaciones del concepto de ajuste: Cartesiana y Configuracional. Los datos fueron recogidos a través de una encuesta enviada a los gerentes de 218 hospitales públicos en España. Los resultados señalan el efecto positivo en la implantación de la estrategia que tiene el uso de la información contable de gestión de forma interactiva. Este estudio permite concluir que la aproximación configuracional es más sólida en la predicción de la relación entre el sistema contable de gestión y la implantación de la trategia.

Management Accounting Change and Agency in Embedded Situations

Focusing on internal micro-processes, this study contributes to the management accounting change literature showing what conditions allow agency in embedded situations. We analyse a family company in the period 1904–1969 in that, after more than 50 years of ongoing reproduction of highly institutionalised management practice, the chief executive officer (CEO) fostered a radical institutional transformation in whose process the implementation of a cost accounting system was driven. As main conclusions, first, we argue that management accounting change drivers are strongly influenced by actors’ interests and by the perception and interpretation that actors make about institutional contradictions or external critical events and their effects on the organisation. Second, we shed light about the interrelated influences that institutions and individuals exert on meanings and roles attributed to management accounting in institutional change, even impelling the implementation of a completely new system to support it. Finally, we illustrate that both process and content of accounting change are moulded by normative influences intertwined with the cognitive schemes of actors involved.

The relationship between diversity, gender and accounting

Extensive studies in management literature may be found on the effects of diversity in organizations in general, and in work teams and boards in particular (Milliken and Martins, 1996; Jackson et al, 2003; see Carpenter, Geletkanycz and Sanders, 2004). Among these effects, we may highlight the positive influence of diversity on organizational management and performance, since diversity provides managers with a broader view of problems and a rich portfolio of responses to market demands, which facilitates swift recognition of strategic opportunities (Pitcher and Smith, 2001; Carpenter et al., 2004). Research on the distinction between heterogeneous vs. homogeneous boards has focused on analyzing how organizations face changes; arguing that homogenous boards facilitate rapid decision-making and reduce the risk of conflicts within a team. Furthermore heterogeneous boards also stimulate the search of new alternatives and courses of action that enable organizations to improve corporate performance (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996).