PurposeThis paper explores how Buddhist monasteries served as calculative spaces in early medieval China (220–589 CE), facilitating state governance over taxation, land and labor. By applying Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) and Callon and Law’s (2005) calculation framework, the study investigates how religious institutions, conventionally perceived as resistant to enumeration, were actively integrated into the state’s fiscal administration. The research aims to understand the dynamic through which monasteries were transformed from autonomous religious spaces into mechanisms of economic visibility and state control, thereby contributing a historical and religious dimension to calculative practice literature. Design/methodology/approachThe study uses qualitative historical analysis, drawing extensively on primary archival sources, including official dynastic records, legal codes and biographical texts from early medieval China. It systematically interprets these texts through Callon and Muniesa’s (2005) and Callon and Law’s (2005) three-step calculation model, comprising detachment, transformation and extraction. The authors integrate textual evidence with contemporary scholarship to reconstruct how Buddhist monasteries became embedded in fiscal governance practices. By contextualizing these practices within the broader socio-political landscape, the analysis highlights the monasteries’ role in enabling state oversight and resource appropriation through systematic enumeration and management of populations, land and wealth. FindingsThe study reveals monasteries as active agents in the state’s fiscal apparatus. Specifically, monasteries facilitated the detachment of populations from aristocratic control by providing visible and enumerated alternatives. Through state-appointed monastic bureaucracies, they enabled systematic transformation and manipulation of monastic assets within state-controlled calculative frameworks. Periodic persecution served as the state’s extraction mechanism, appropriating monastic resources for the central administration. These findings challenge conventional views of religious institutions as economically autonomous entities, illustrating instead their critical role as structured sites of economic visibility and state control within historical calculative practices. Originality/valueThis study makes a unique contribution by extending the concept of calculative spaces into historical and religious contexts, which remain underexplored in the accounting literature. Unlike prior research primarily focused on modern corporate and environmental calculative practices, this research demonstrates how Buddhist monasteries in early medieval China functioned as strategic instruments of state fiscal governance. It reveals religion’s paradoxical transformation into a calculative mechanism facilitating state oversight, taxation and resource extraction. By integrating religious studies, historical analysis and the sociology of calculation, the study broadens scholarly understanding of how accounting actively shapes power relations beyond conventional economic domains.
PurposeThis study aims to provide an empirically grounded, process-oriented characterization of how dialogic accounting (DA) is enacted over time. Based on a longitudinal multiple case study analysis, it examines the recurring phases and micro-processes through which different organizations operationalize DA for stakeholder engagement, while explicitly recognizing contextual variation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a qualitative research approach, using an abductive, longitudinal multiple case study methodology across 30 projects to illustrate how DA is enacted over time. Data were collected over a nine-year period, from mid-2015 to the first half of 2024, including different sources of information, such as interviews, surveys, direct observations and document analysis. This comprehensive data collection strategy ensures robustness and validity through triangulation.FindingsThe analysis reveals that the DA process is characterized by five distinct phases: stakeholder mapping, dialogic stakeholder engagement, new framework development, DA framework implementation and accessible communication. Each phase encompasses specific micro-processes, such as stakeholder identification and first engagement, recognition of conflictual views and definition of dialogic methods. The study highlights how these phases and their micro-processes interconnect to promote a collaborative and inclusive accounting environment.Originality/valueThe paper offers a holistic longitudinal multiple case study analysis of DA as a process. While prior literature has provided valuable insights into specific dialogic tools, arenas or phases, this study examines how these elements connect across time into five recurring phases and associated micro-processes. By integrating different phases into a unique process, the study provides valuable insights for academics and practitioners on implementing the DA framework, fostering inclusivity, transparency and mutual learning among stakeholders.
PurposeThis study aims to explore how culturally and politically embedded management controls influence innovation transitions of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in a developing economy. Design/methodology/approachThe study relies on the cultural political economy perspective of management controls. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with senior executives from three knowledge-based PPPs operating in telecommunications, power and energy and high-tech research industries in Sri Lanka. FindingsThe authors demonstrate how cultural political economy factors (e.g. semiotic and cultural; political and institutional; economic and structural) have influenced Western-led, formal management controls across various PPP models (e.g. labour, leadership, innovation, operational, market, neoliberal and bureaucratic controls), both enabling and obstructing the shift towards the state’s professed “knowledge-based economy” discourse. Management controls within telecommunications-based PPPs tend to be receptive to political interference, often supported by powerful, party-based trade unions and primarily focus on innovation to cater to the local market. In contrast to traditional norms, both energy- and high-tech PPPs leverage management controls to resist political interference, promoting a strong, market-oriented approach to knowledge-driven innovation. Practical implicationsPPPs with solid professional and managerial backgrounds are more likely to initiate innovation transitions through bottom-up approaches, whereas PPPs with considerable state and political influence tend to be predominantly driven by both top-down and bottom-up approaches. Nevertheless, evidence indicates a dialectical relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches in all PPPs. Originality/valueCultural political economy redefines the complex interplay among the state’s knowledge-based economy discourse, the innovation transition in PPPs, management controls and development priorities as a co-evolving, politically negotiated process rather than a linear policy implementation. The findings suggest that the success or failure of implementing a knowledge-based economy state project through PPPs depends not only on political policy priorities but also on the interaction of political power, professional leadership and management controls in practice.
PurposeDrawing upon Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the purpose of this paper is to explore when and why results control supports and thwarts the basic psychological needs of individuals to feel autonomous, competent and related, in such ways that they only partially internalise the control system and become introjectedly motivated.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on a qualitative interview study of researchers at Swedish universities who were exposed to results control in the sense that there were clear performance targets that were systematically followed up and incentivised.FindingsThis study shows that introjected motivation could be understood as an effect of how results control supported and thwarted the basic psychological needs of researchers to feel competent, related and autonomous by means of a conditional logic. The authors find that researchers dealt with such a conditional logic through a coping strategy referred to as "willing compliance", which allowed them to satisfy some aspects of the needs. However, as the coping strategy at the same time meant that other aspects of their needs were frustrated, it led to feelings of inner pressure and tension, which is a hallmark of introjected motivation.Originality/valueThe findings not only contribute to existing management control literature, where the relationship between results control and introjected motivation has been an underexplored area, but also to the more general SDT literature. Specifically, it adds to the current understanding of how conditioning elements in the environment are experienced and handled by individuals and why this can result in them developing introjected motivation.
PurposeExtending prior research on control and innovation, this study aims to explore the role of control in fostering sustainable innovations (as innovations that support social, environmental and economic performance) within industrial, inter-organisational contexts, examining how different controls are enacted.Design/methodology/approachA multiple case study design is used to examine how controls are enacted in two multinational, private-listed industrial B2B organisations, headquartered in Scandinavia. Drawing on both primary and secondary data, Simons (1995) levers of control (LOC) framework is used to analyse control enactment in the industrial context. Following the firms over 10 years, the study elaborates on the key types of controls and their interactions in supporting different forms of sustainable innovation.FindingsThe study extends the LOC framework to industrial, inter-organisational contexts. It shows how beliefs, boundary and diagnostic controls align behaviours for sustainable innovations, leading to incremental rather than radical sustainable innovations. It also shows that diagnostic controls play a dual role in supporting compliance (exploitation) and facilitating learning (exploration). Meanwhile, interactive controls remain limited in fostering change. The study also highlights the emerging role of social innovation within sustainability control research as important.Originality/valueExtending the LOC framework to industrial, inter-organisational settings, this study offers new insights into how control systems shape sustainable innovation. It challenges traditional views on control by demonstrating that diagnostic controls not only enforce compliance but also foster learning, providing a more nuanced understanding of control dynamics for sustainability.
