Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine how organisational experimenting with total quality management (TQM) and the balanced scorecard affects the bundling of design characteristics associated with these innovations in a Swedish central government agency. Design/methodology/approach...

Recent public sector reforms have increasingly tended to re-cast citizens as ‘customers’. This paper explores the implications of such customer orientation efforts for management control based on a field study in a Swedish central government agency. We extend prior research on this topic,...

This article examines whether the control practices associated with public sector consumerism, such as devolved performance management and accountability, enhance organizations' responsiveness to customer needs and preferences. The research highlighted the need for trade-offs between resource...

This essay introduces the special issue of <italic>Accounting and Business Research</italic> exploring the societal relevance of management accounting and locates the individual contributions within this research agenda. In contrast to prevailing, managerialist conceptions of relevance, the discussion is guided...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the relevance of management accounting. In doing so, we widen the definition of 'relevance' from the largely managerialist focus dominating this debate to examine how management accounting innovations get imbued with a broader range of societal...

Purpose: This is a reply to the commentaries by Baxter and Chua (2020) and Andrew and Baker (2020) on a paper previously published in this journal. Design/methodology/approach: This is a conceptual discussion that further clarifies the differences between critical realism (CR), actor–network...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contrast actor-network theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) as two contemporary approaches to critical accounting research and advance a critique centred on the neglect of social structures in the former perspective. Design/methodology/approach: This...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to advance a critical realist perspective on performativity and use it to examine how novel conceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have performative effects. Design/methodology/approach: To illustrate how the authors’ critical realist...