Seminar (Dept. of Accounting)

Title：Competing Logics, Diverse Organization Actors and Change of Management Control Practices: A Case of SOE

Speaker：Dai lu, Associate Professor, Renmin Business School, Renmin University of China

Time：10:00-11:30, September 20th, 2024 (Friday)

Venue：Room 1007, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese & English

ABSTRACT:

Recent study on the organization destabilization resulting from response to competing institutional logics brings a new insight, which partly contradicts one assumption of institutional logic theory. Given emerging theoretical controversy, this study is aimed to investigate and theorise a process model of interrelated changes of management control elements, including traditional control practices and new managerial accounting reports in an organization in responses to tensions of institutional logics. In contextualizing research motivation into institutional environment, we specifically cast attention on a typical tension between state and market logics and a unique tension within state logic in the largest transitional economy. A case study is designed and conducted on the field sites of a dominating SOE in an important segment in China. The longitudinal case analyses indicate that the tension related to institutional logics at macro-level had partly shaped incoherent frames among executives and middle managers on goal and path of interrelated changes of control elements at micro-level. As a result, the quality control, online managerial reporting and PMS form a selective coupled to build an acceptable balance between competing pursuits of state and market logics. Our research takeaway adds new theoretical and practical implications on how changes of managerial control elements had been interrelated till maintaining the adaptability to tensions of logics.