title: Accounting and Accountants in Organizational Context: A Case Study of a Voluntary Organization
Creators: name: Booth, Peter James
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 1991
Subjects: subject: Accounting
subject: Voluntary organizations
subject: Budgeting process

description: This thesis is concerned with the study of accounting within its organizational and social context. As such, it seeks to address the problematization of the purposes of accounting within organizations proposed by Hopwood (1978, 1983) and other recent writers on the study of accounting in action. A major problematic under such an approach is; how does accounting obtain and maintain a position of organizational significance? Within this thesis, this problematic is approached theoretically by analysing accounting as having potential effects at both an ideological level, how it influences organizational action as a communication and meaning system, and at an occupational level, how the significance of accounting is related to the actions of accountants. Empirically, these issues are explored within the context of voluntary organizations. Voluntary organizations were chosen because they are a theoretically interesting extreme case, where the conditions for accounting to be significant within organizations should be most open to question. Also, the voluntary sector is an increasingly important part of modern industrial societies and voluntary organizations have been relatively neglected within the accounting literature. The thesis is in two major sections. The first section develops the theoretical framework of the study. The initial arguments specify certain boundary conditions for accounting to be significant within organ'izations; being the specific features of accounting systems, the type of organizations within which they may be most relevant, their relation to the managerial function, and their effects on the actions of managers. It is then proposed that voluntary organizations in general, and churches in particular, are theoretically interesting sites for the study of the significance of accounting as they should test some of the limits of these boundary conditions. From this base, the organizational and accounting literatures on management control issues in churches, particularly the work of Richard Laughlin (1984, 1988, 1990a) on the Church of England, and the writings of Peter Armstrong (1984, 1985, 1986, 1987a, 1989a) on the relationships between the variations in management control strategies in business organizations, the actions of competing occupational groups, and the effects of crises, are used to develop a critical structuralist framework for the analysis of management control and the use of accounting within voluntary organizations in general, and churches more specifically. This framework emphasizes; the interaction of different forms of organizational control problems within voluntary organizations, particularly the tensions between sacred and secular issues in churches; the actions of differing occupational groups, in particular the confrontations between accountants and occupational groups more concerned with the core ends of voluntary organizations; and the impacts of various organizational crises, especially the prioritization of accounting by secular financial crises and the prioritization of core ends by associated relevant crises. The second section presents a case study of the significance of accounting within the Queensland Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia. Accounting is found to be of generally low, but variable, significance within this organization. In particular, the budgeting process is found to be the major arena of contestation over the level of significance of accounting. The critical structuralist framework developed in the fmt section is found to have considerable utility in explaining these findings relative to competing efficiency and diffusion arguments. Tensions between the clergy (and other religious orientated occupational groups) and accountants over the use of accounting, and the prioritization of secular financial control problems by the financial crisis being experienced by the Queensland Synod, were especially relevant to understanding the variable significance of accounting within the Church. The findings are then compared to research on churches and voluntary organizations more generally, From this it is suggested that the theoretical approach of this thesis may provide the basis of a model of the dynamics of management control and the use of accounting in voluntary organizations. It is concluded that further comparative research is needed in this direction to develop such models and further our understanding of accounting as a situated practice.