Stuart Ogden

Corporate Performance and Stakeholder Management: Balancing Shareholder and Customer Interests in The U.K. Privatized Water Industry

This study examined a major contention of stakeholder theory: namely, that a firm can simultaneously enhance the interests of its shareholders and other relevant stakeholders. Financial data relati...

Transforming frameworks of accountability: The case of water privatization

Abstract The U.K. Governments belief in the innate inefficiency of traditional public sector provision of goods and services has inspired a number of initiatives which have resulted in management of public sector enterprises being confronted by an increasingly commercial environment, tighter financial controls, increased competition, and in some cases transfer to the private sector through privatization. This paper is concerned with investigating the ways in which accounting and accounting information has contributed to and shaped processes of organizational change in one area of the public sector, the ten Regional Water Authorities of England and Wales. In the early 1980s, the Water Authorities were subject to pressures from new Government financial controls and performance aims to become more efficient. These pressures intensified when the Government announced its intention to privatize them in 1986, and continued up to 1989 when privatization took effect. Since privatization the Water Authorities have been subject to “yardstick” competition under a new regulatory framework, and comparative judgements by the financial markets. In considering these changes, the paper examines the constitutive role of accounting in articulating changing organizational priorities, and in promoting first a vocabulary of costs and subsequently a vocabulary of profits as languages of organizational motive.

A radical perspective on the disclosure of accounting information to trade unions

Abstract The major aim of this paper is to present an alternative view of the issues which should be raised in the discussion of the managerial disclosure of accounting information to trade unions for collective bargaining. It is an attempt to present a radically different stance as regards the major concerns that need to be confronted in the above debate. Central to our argument is the recognition that different conceptualisations of the management-labour relationship can generate different conclusions with respect to the potentialities for the use of accounting information in industrial relations.

THE APPEARANCE AND DISAPPEARANCE OF ACCOUNTING: WAGE DETERMINATION IN THE U.K. COAL INDUSTRY.

Abstract Histories of accounting have usually concentrated upon its progression and development. This paper focuses instead upon an illustration of the regression and resistance to accounting. The evidence suggest that this cannot be explained by some dissatisfaction with the calculative deficiencies of accounting. Rather, it is only by examining the problems and priorities of the participants actively involved in the situation that the injection and ejection of accounting can be understood.

Profit sharing and organizational change

Senior management in the newly privatized water companies have been keen to secure employee commitment to the new commercial goals they are now pursuing. Considers the use of profit sharing as a rhetorical device for this purpose. The introduction of profit sharing schemes was intended by management not only to assist in the construction of a new version of organizational reality, but more particularly to communicate to organizational members the quite different ideological conceptualization of organizational purposes and activities associated with the change in status from public sector water authority to private sector water company. Reports research based on documentary evidence and interviews with managers from six of the new water companies which provides scope for comparisons between the companies high‐lighting different interpretations of the role profit sharing may play in the processes of organizational change.

Joint Consultation and the Disclosure of Information: an Historical Perspective

Disclosure of accounting information to employees, as has been argued before (Ogden and Bougen, 1985), is most appropriately viewed as a managerial strategy designed to contribute to the managerial task of exercising control over labour. The need to exercise control over labour stems from the fact that contrary to consensual interpretations of the labour-capital relationship, industrial relations is characterised by fundamental and irreconcilable conflicts of interest. This is most visible in the buying and selling of labour power but also continues into the labour process itself. Although in the labour market the wage may be and usually is defined specifically, the amount and quality of work rarely is. Rather than agreeing to expend a given amount of effort, employees ‘surrender’ their capacity to work, their labour power, and it is the function of management to transform this capacity into actual productivity in the labour process. However, while employers usually want to be able to use their labour forces in as flexible a way as possible and as a resource to be manipulated, employees want to exert some control over the way they are used to prevent or minimise their insecurity and exploitation. Consequently, one of management’s major tasks is concerned with attempting to ensure that labour as a factor of production can be rendered as susceptible to control as other factors of production.