Rod Coombs

Fabricating Budgets: A Study of the Production of Management Budgeting in the National Health Service

This paper examines the processes by which a form of responsibility accounting system emerges in an organizational context. The paper utilizes recent approaches to the understanding of how science and technology is created (Latour, Science in Action, Harvard University Press, 1987) to investigate the processes by which a management budgeting initiative in the U.K. hospital system takes hold (or not) in specific hospitals. The approach is critical of the notion that accounting systems are well-defined technologies which are designed and then implemented (or face resistance). Instead, the study shows that management budgeting is fabricated, put together in a changing and fragile manner. Emerging accounting systems are not fixed technologies with well-defined purposes which reflect patterns of responsibility but changing constructions. Management budgeting systems are initiated with loose characteristics, purposes and uses. In the process of their design and implementation, new possibilities for decision making and definitions of responsibility emerge. Through this study of accounting in action, the paper explores the processes by which accounting and budgeting systems bring economic logic into hospital management. It is also relevant to debates about the role of budgeting and accounting in health care organizations in many countries.

'Knowledge management practices' and path-dependency in innovation

This groundbreaking paper has now been re-printed twice in international reference collections on the management of technology and knowledge:- in  Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Three Volumes, Edited by William H Starbuck, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar (2008), The International Library of Critical Writings on Business and Management series; and in  The Management of Technology and Innovation, Two Volumes, Edited by John Storey, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar (2004), Critical Writings in Management, Reference Series.

Machines and Manoeuvres: Responsibility Accounting and the Construction of Hospital Information Systems

This paper analyses an episode in the development of management information systems in NHS hospitals in the UK. These systems (called Resource Management Systems) are designed to reveal the costs of medical activity, and thus open up new scope for management of that activity. The paper accepts that notions such as “responsibility accounting” and the “constitutive role of accounting systems” can substantially help in the analysis of how such systems are used. However, it argues that such approaches are less successful in revealing how such systems come to be created. To address this problem, the “actor-network” approach of Callon and Latour is employed in the analysis of fieldwork data collected by the authors in three health authorities over a three-year period. The analysis reveals considerable interpretative flexibility surrounding the understandings of the nature and purpose of resource management, and of the technologies that might be used to implement it. This diversity, the paper argues, cannot be adequately explained without recourse to a framework such as that contained in the actor-network approach.

ACCOUNTING FOR THE CONTROL OF DOCTORS: MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN HOSPITALS.

Abstract The paper describes some current and proposed innovations in the activity accounting and cost accounting systems in two Swedish hospitals. Results are reported of interviews with administrators and senior doctors which reveal their attitudes and intensions with respect to the new control information generated by the accounting innovations. The fundamental differences between the professional ethos of the doctor and the managerial ambitions of the administrator are found to remain robust. Nevertheless there is evidence that the new control information may be the focus of some genuine convergence in the outlook of some administrators and some “doctors managers” with some consequent reduction in goal-uncertainty in the organisation. This paper argues that this calls for some revision of existing accounts of the interaction of doctors and administrators in hospital management.

Strategic control of technology in diversified companies with decentralized R&D

This paper analyzes current trends in the strategic management of technology in a sample of 25 companies. It is particularly concerned with the balance of responsibility between the corporate level and the business unit level for accumulation of technological assets. It is argued that preuious tendencies to decentralize these issues, along with K & D operations, to the business unit level are being partially rtversed. A new paradigm of corporate management of technological assets is identified. This analysis is then used in conjunction with existing taxonomies of innovation strategy and corporate strategy to propose a new taxonomy of corporate technology strategies.

Toward the development of benchmarking tools for R&D project management

This paper presents an audit model for the process of R&D project management that can be used to check the robustness and repeatability of processes and provide a template for internal and external benchmarking. The intention is to offer a ‘fine-grained’ model focusing rather closely on the R&D activities within the broader innovation process, thus complementing the more widely based innovation audit models that already exist. Based on field-work in six business units in ICI and five companies from other industries, the paper sets out three major variants of the R&D project management process. These variants reflect the fact that R&D projects take place in different circumstances and have different objectives.

Innovation and technical change: A case study of the U.K. tractor industry, 1957 1977

Abstract In previous work it was established that the U.K. tractor industry was characterised by a high degree of technical change and that this was brought about by a process of more or less continuous incremental innovation. What was lacking was an analysis of how much technical change had been introduced and an indication of the role played by technical change in determining the performance of the U.K. tractor industry internationally. This paper concludes that on the average technical change in the industry had increased by as much as 150 percent during the years 1959–1977, though there is some indication that the rate of change might now be slowing somewhat. In order to determine the relative importance of technical change a method was developed to operationalise the distinction between price and non-price competition as well as the idea of intrinsic (technical) and associative (non-technical) factors as constituents of the latter. Based on cross-sectional data for the year 1978, it has been possible to show that British manufacturers tend to produce moderately priced tractors of low to medium technical sophistication: that German manufacturers produced the most technically sophisticated tractors; that the Italian manufacturers are not generally more sophisticated, technically, than the British producers except with respect to their development of four-wheel drive; and that COMECON -based producers combine a very low price with some degree of technical sophistication. Finally, it has been possible to show that the tractors with the highest sales are among the less sophisticated in each of the power ranges investigated and that new entrants used technical sophistication as an element of their entry strategy. The answer to the question of what allows the market leader to be market leader required the development of measures for associative non-price factors, such as the availability of a dealer network brand loyalty, resale prices of tractor models, etc. By performing a regression analysis on these measures along with previously derived measures of quality-adjusted price and relative technical sophistication it has been possible to show that market leadership is achieved as a result of a balance of a number of factors, the most important of which are the size of the dealer network, warrants cost, advertising, technical sophistication and price.

Patterns in UK company innovation styles: New evidence from the CBI innovation trends survey

This paper reports on the results of an analysis at Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC) of the data from the 1996 and 1997 Survey of Innovation Trends conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in conjunction with the NatWest Bank in the UK. This is one of the few, direct surveys of innovation activity, as opposed to R&D and patenting actvity, which is conducted in the UK It is characterized by the fact that it asks responding firms to report on trends in a wide variety of aspects of their innovative behaviour. The central feature of the analysis in this paper is a factor analysis of the answers to a set of 15 questions on different aspects of innovative behaviour. This results in a three-factor solution which reveals three distinct ‘styles’ of innovation in the behaviour of respondents. These three styles are shown to be broadly applicable to both manufacturing industry firms and service industry firms in the sample, thus revealing a dimension of innovation in the servi...

Technologies, products and firms' strategies part 1—a framework for .analysis

This article examines, the character and significance of ‘strategies’ formulated within the RD secondly, that of patterns of innovation within discrete industrial sectors; thirdly, that of the innovating firms and their strategies. The discussion focuses on the third topic nad explores two aspects of the tehnological components of innovation strategies. First, the shape of the prorgolio of products under development, the technical and market specificities they possess, and secondly, the structure of the portfolios of technologies required and used in those products. These dimensions of strategy combine both firm-specific and public-domain tecnoligical...

New technology‐based firm formation in a less advanced country: a learning process

Based on an empirical study of Portuguese firms, addresses the creation of new technology‐based firms (NBTFs) in small, less developed countries. Assuming that technology‐related inputs ‐ at the level of supply and demand ‐ are predominant in NTBF creation, analyses the process through which the founders and other actors identify a technological opportunity and obtain the inputs ‐ technology, funds and market demand ‐ necessary to exploit it. Emphasizes the conditions surrounding the start‐up and early survival of these firms that differ significantly from those found in more advanced countries, uncovering the difficulties confronted by NBTF founders in a relatively unfavourable environment and describing their proactive responses. Concludes that NTBF formation in Portugal has been a learning process, through which the organizational innovation introduced by early pioneer founders, based on foreign role models, become better adjusted to Portuguese conditions.