دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی اطمینان و شایعات در مورد اداره کردن حسابداران مدیریت انتظارات دوگانه و محدودیت های MCS - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

The article shows how secrecy – defined as the purposeful revelation of information to some and not others – is used by management accountants to pursue their roles as independent business controllers and nurture the social proximity required to be sought-after business advisers. The paper examines management accountants’ retentive and communicative strategies in reporting practices in a subset of a large multinational company. It conceptualizes systems of secrecy as the purposeful articulation between two types of revelations (confidences and gossip). It shows how confidences and gossip can be successive steps that structure informal reporting information flows and close social interactions helpful in dealing with tensions arising from attempts to manage interdependencies and to achieve individually specified targets. The article contributes to the literature on the dynamics of management accountants’ dual role by showing how they overcome the tensions between conflicting expectations through tactful and judicious distribution of information. It shows how the articulation of confidence and gossip creates a specific format of accounting talk which facilitates compromise through the succession of private one-on-one discursive spaces. It also complements the literature on management control systems (MCS) by giving a nuanced account of the virtues of secrecy in order to mitigate some of the unanticipated adverse effects of performance evaluations.

Conclusion

This article presents empirical evidence about the existence of systems of secrecy. It refines the theorization of the closure/disclosure tension by articulating two forms of revelations (confidences and gossip) into a process that supports the transfer of information about sensitive issues (events impacting future performances) when it is much needed (before their consequences are officially recorded). This study contributes to the management control literature by disclosing how management accountants can play both the role of watchdog and of business partner. It also shows how the articulation of confidence and gossip allows management accountants to mitigate some of the limitations associated with the use of MCS by diffusing non-written information required for coordination while preserving its ‘secret’ quality so important for encouraging open communication. Lastly, this article builds on existing research on the virtues of secrecy (e.g. Dufresne and Offstein, 2008) and complements it by observing the effect of secrecy beyond a single professional community. Secrecy has been shown to structure cohesiveness between scientific colleagues (Nelson, 2016), consultants (Costas and Grey, 2016) or lawyers (Brivot and Gendron, 2011), but the present article shows that it can also mediate communication across occupations such as between management accountants, operational workers and executive managers. It thus confirms the importance of pursuing current research efforts into “invisible” managerial systems (Parker, 2016) which hardly leave any material traces of their activities while being central to the work of organizing large corporations.