Sajay Samuel

Changes in the institutional environment and the institutions of governance: extending the contributions of transaction cost economics within the management control literature

Abstract Transaction cost economics (TCE) has been proposed as a useful approach for examining management control (MC) issues. The purpose of this paper is to explore the articulation of TCE and MC through the use of the work of early institutional economist John R. Commons. In keeping with Commons’ work, we incorporate institutional change as important to considerations of the viability of alternative forms of governance including various management control practices. Also consistent with Commons’ work, our paper elaborates upon the significance of the concepts of “asset specificity” and “opportunism” through an illustrative analysis of contemporary efforts to de-regulate the utilities industry in the State of California, and the related role of Enron Corporation in those de-regulatory efforts. This context provides a rich backdrop to highlight the joint articulation of TCE and MC issues.

A Strategic Deconstruction of John R. Commons’s Regulatory Discourse

The relevance of the postmodern perspective to extending economic thought has been increasingly recognized within the institutional economics literature [illustrative works include Mirowski 1988, 1989; Samuels 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1991; Dugger and Wailer 1992; Waller and Robertson 1991; Brown 1991; Tool 1979; Mayhew 1987]. Prominent within this emerging stream of research is the theme that there exists no unitary truth concerning an objective economic reality, but rather economic narratives based upon particular theoretical perspectives [Hoksbergen 1994] in which notions of economic reality are rhetorically constituted [Jennings and Waller 1994; Sebberson 1990; Waller and Robertson 1990, 1991]. This focus on narrative and rhetoric in important, according to Waller and Robertson [1990, 1038] because

A Thematic Deconstruction of Formalist and Expertise Voices in Big Five (Four) Public Accounting Firms.

Research has increasingly recognized the importance of rhetoric to organizational functioning. However, there remains a paucity of detailed analyses probing its nature, particularly in such contexts as public accounting. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct two forms of rhetoric, which are prominent within international public accounting firms and are emblematic of two modes of governance that are dominant in contemporary society-bureaucracy and expertise. The first is the formalist voice, that focuses on the objectivity with which firms are managed by administrative partners; the second is the expertise voice, that focuses on the subjectivity of practice partners which is necessary for exercising professional judgment. It is concluded that the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is inherently contentious as each is enlisted to supplement the shortcomings of the other in these firms. Instead they may be seen as involved in a relationship in which they are inexorably intertwined.

Mikael Holmqvist: The Institutionalization of Social Welfare: A Study of Medicalizing Management

Academic productions of knowledge are often haunted by a pervasive anxiety about its irrelevance. Holmqvist’s (2005) previous monograph on how social welfare organizations transform people into the “occupationally disabled” and how people are made individually responsible for social problems, suffered no such fate. It fomented a stir in Sweden, in response to which he has written this book. In it, he tries to expose the general mechanisms through which social welfare has become institutionalized in many advanced industrialized countries. It is not surprising that his earlier study became the subject of intense debate for, as he notes, welfare is something of a sacred cow: society’s responsibility to take care of its infirm, sick, and poor is rarely explicitly disavowed. Nevertheless, it is perhaps his location in Sweden— which occupies an almost iconic position among welfare states—that allows him to overlook the wave of neo-liberalism that has washed out the logic of social welfare in many nations. At least in North America, the notion of the “welfare state” is quaint, at best.