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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Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.
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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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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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What drives the use of performance measurement (PM) systems in the public sector? And what are the effects of PM use? In a recent study in Financial Accountability & Management (Van der Kolk, 2022, open access), I address these questions. In this blog, I highlight seven observations from the review.
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Recently, my paper “Performance measurement in the public sector: Mapping 20 years of survey research” was published in Financial Accountability and Management, a scientific journal dedicated to study management practices in governments, charities and public services.
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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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The journal Public Money & Management (PMM) has both an academic and a practitioner readership, and called for contributions to a special issue about developing civil servants. A brief note on motivating civil servants that I submitted was published online this week.
This week, our study of the use of performance measurement in hospitals was published in Health Care Management Review – and the best part: it’s open access!
Berend van der Kolk 