Today, a new paper appears in the European Accounting Review, written by Bernadette Bullinger, Leon Stam and myself. In the paper, we examine how a family firm professionalized after a private equity fund took over 51% of the shares. Our case illustrates the performative nature of accounting devices like budgets, and highlights how key employees can help render them taken for granted. In this blog, we highlight the key findings from our work.
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From prior research, we know that management control can impact employee motivation and behavior. In our study, recently published in Public Administration Review, we find that sustainability-related management controls can stimulate pro-environmental behavior of employees. Below, we highlight our main findings.
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Growing attention is paid to structural issues in academia, including trust in science and the role of metrics and rankings. In the open-access book Fixing Academia, I focus on another, but related problem: the dominance of a small number of academic publishers, the Big Five: Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Wiley, and SpringerNature.
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Although many may think of accounting as something abstract that happens only in spreadsheets, our new study in BMC Public Health shows that accounting can impact our wellbeing. Based on a large survey in a well-known multinational, we find that participative budgeting practices can yield positive wellbeing effects.
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How are digitalization of finance tasks and a firm’s digitalization strategy related? Does it matter what the finance department’s main objective is? And what happens when firms combine the use of automation and analytics? These and other questions are addressed in a paper that’s now published in Management Accounting Research.
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How to stimulate interpersonal trust in organizations? How can performance management contribute to trust? And, can other types of management control also enhance interpersonal trust? These questions are addressed in our recent study amongst healthcare managers, as published in The British Accounting Review (open access). In this blog (also published on Social Science Space and the European Accounting Association’s blog), we highlight our three key findings.
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How did remote working impact management control practices during the COVID crisis, and how did employees respond to these changes? Gianluca Delfino & I address these questions in a recently published paper in Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, drawing on a field study of Italian professional service firms (PSFs). Below, the context of the study and some key findings are highlighted.
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An auditor’s signature signals to key stakeholders whether a firm’s financial information is to be trusted or not. Their ability to recognize inconsistencies and ethical issues is of paramount importance in this process. But what impacts their ability to identify ethical issues? The study in which we address this question was recently accepted for publication in Managerial Auditing Journal, and below we present our key findings.
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On 20 June 2018, I participated in the Dutch “Vereniging van Registercontrollers” (VRC) conference in The Hague. Continue reading
Based on my doctoral dissertation I recorded a 59 second video, summarizing the findings of one of the chapters.
Berend van der Kolk 