Professor Sven Modell, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester

"Bringing Culture Back In: An Institutional Analysis of Budgeting and Power in an Emerging Economy Context"
Wednesday, 06 November 2024. 12:00-13:30
Room 356, Gilbert Scott Building

Abstract

This paper responds to recent calls for a cultural-cognitive turn in institutional research on accounting while simultaneously nurturing a critical analysis of how accounting practices are implicated in the exercise of power. In doing so, we examine how local, national cultures can be a source of structural, or systemic, power and how this interacts with actor-centric, or episodic, forms of power in an emerging economy context. Adopting a dynamic and relational, yet institutionally embedded, view of power, we examine how this interplay manifests itself in the budgetary practices of a public sector organisation in Bangladesh. Our findings underline the need for a situated, contingent view of how the interplay between episodic and systemic power gives rise to variations in subjugation and marginalisation in what may, at first sight, appear to be a highly constraining, cultural context that exacerbates the re-negotiation of extant power relations and resistance to oppressive states of affairs. In addition, they nuance extant, institutionalist conceptions of culture as a source of mainly systemic power by illustrating how cultural norms also condition the ways in which the episodic power that is implicated in resisting such norms is being exercised. In contrast to prior institutional research, which has mainly conceived of episodic power as being exercised in an overt and easily observable manner that entails relatively radical dis-embedding of agents from extant cultural norms, we demonstrate how it is sometimes exercised in covert ways that are more difficult to observe and that signal continued compliance with such norms. At a more general level, our findings underline the need for greater attention to national culture as an under-researched, macro-level phenomenon, originating at the societal level of analysis, in institutional theory while adopting a carefully contextualised approach in examining how it interacts with the micro-level dynamics involved in the exercise of power. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional research on accounting.

Bio

Sven Modell is Professor of Management Accounting at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He also holds visiting professorships at NHH _ Norwegian School of Economics, Norway, and Turku School of Economics, Finland.

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First published: 9 September 2024

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