The omnipresence of smiley evaluations, rankings, scores, key performance indicators and school grades hardly surprise us anymore. We take their presence and value for granted. But these quantified measures of performance come at a cost, I argue in a recent commentary in Business & Society.
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Na zo’n tien jaar onderzoek, honderden schrijfuren en duizenden espresso’s, ligt De Meetmaatschappij nu in de boekhandels als paperback, ebook en luisterboek! In het boek ga ik in op de vraag waarom we toch alles in cijfers willen uitdrukken – van schoolprestaties tot patiënttevredenheid, en van SMART doelen op het werk tot ranglijsten van de beste universiteiten. Daarbij bespreek ik wat deze cijferobsessie met ons en onze maatschappij doet. In deze blog houd ik bij wat er in de media verschijnt over De Meetmaatschappij.
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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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Organizations are frequently confronted with environmental shifts and change. In our recent publication (Toldbod and Van der Kolk, forthcoming in the European Accounting Review), we examine how environmental shifts can trigger cascades of management control changes, how this creates incoherence, and how managers can use the incoherence to stimulate organizational dialogue.
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This week, the paper that Thomas Toldbod (Aalborg University) and I wrote on control changes in a multinational organization was accepted for publication in the European Accounting Review. Continue reading
Last week, on July 15th, IE University organized the 14th edition of the IE Case Contest. Continue reading
Which moral choices does an autonomous car face? And what are the strategic implications for companies that offer products relying on artificial intelligence? My colleague Maya Kumar and I recently published a teaching case at IVEY Publishing about the Audi A8: The world’s first level 3 autonomous vehicle, addressing these and other questions. Continue reading
What are the combined effects of different management tools on individuals in an organization? This week, our study addressing this question was published in the academic journal Management Accounting Research. Continue reading
I am honored (and still a bit overwhelmed) by the decision of Thinkers50 to include me in the Thinkers50 RADAR 2020. Continue reading
Berend van der Kolk 