Exploring How the Balanced Scorecard Engages and Unfolds: Articulating the Visual Power of Accounting Inscriptions

Abstract

Research on the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has questioned whether its adoption generates greater integration between financial and nonfinancial performance measures, supports strategy implementation, increases performance and improves strategic decision making. This research has also highlighted how the BSC often generates effects other than these. Building on studies that portray Performance Measurement Systems as intrinsically incomplete practices of representation, the purpose of this article is to investigate how the BSC engages users because of the organizing work that it stimulates around this incompleteness. Our findings allow us to further articulate the power of specific visual elements of the BSC, such as hierarchical trees, wheels, causal and strategy maps. The article provides material that contributes to a better understanding of how the BSC performs multiple roles within organizations beyond a simple representational functionality and unfolds continuously. It contributes to the growing literature on accounting inscriptions, that is, signs producing incomplete representations, by developing an analytical theoretical framework that defines the BSC as a rhetorical machine composed of four key features: (i) a visual performable space (i.e., a schema generating creative engagement); (ii) a method of ordering and innovation; (iii) a means of interrogation and mediation; and (iv) a motivating ritual

Management and accounting innovations: reflecting on what they are and why they are adopted

“…Recently, Busco and Quattrone (2014) have built on studies that use ActorNetwork Theory (Latour 2005; in accounting see Briers and Chua 2001;Jones and Dugdale 2002) and combined them with work on rhetoric (Green 2004) to investigate some of the reasons underpinning the adoption of a specific management control practice-the Balanced Scorecard. Going beyond the studies which conceptualise diffusion as a series of steps (e.g., Tolbert and Zucker 1983) and work that blurs the distinction between adoption and implementation (see, for instance, Orlikowski 2000), Busco and Quattrone (2014) conceptualise institutional environments as fragmented and populated by contrasting and competing rationalities which are at work at the same time (Friedland and Alford 1991).…”

“…Going beyond the studies which conceptualise diffusion as a series of steps (e.g., Tolbert and Zucker 1983) and work that blurs the distinction between adoption and implementation (see, for instance, Orlikowski 2000), Busco and Quattrone (2014) conceptualise institutional environments as fragmented and populated by contrasting and competing rationalities which are at work at the same time (Friedland and Alford 1991). As noted by Lounsbury (2007), any such reconceptualization has to accommodate such broad concepts as the translation of rationales and belief systems (Bartel and Garud 2009;Latour 1987;Czarniawska and Sevón 2005) and how the emergence of practices and their diffusion takes place due to the heterogeneity of actors, although it is hidden behind an apparent veil of homogeneity.…”

“…More recently, Busco and Quattrone (2014) have built on studies that use ActorNetwork Theory (Latour 2005; in accounting see Briers and Chua 2001;Jones and Dugdale 2002) and combined them with work on rhetoric (Green 2004) to investigate some of the reasons underpinning the adoption of a specific management control practice-the Balanced Scorecard. Their study focuses on attributes of the control practices as ''objects'', and identifies four major features that characterize the process of adoption.…”

“…Their study focuses on attributes of the control practices as ''objects'', and identifies four major features that characterize the process of adoption. Specifically, Busco and Quattrone (2014) argue that the adoption of the balanced scorecard is facilitated by its ability to create a space where (1) complex issues are translated into clear visual representations (2) order and knowledge can be classified and innovated (3) different interests can be accommodated through a constant process of interrogation and re-invention, and (4) engagement can be sustained through participation in a series of recurrent activities.…”

“…Drawing on insights from two illustrative cases, the first related to the adoption of Six-Sigma within GE Oil&Gas, and the second on the development of an end-to-end (ETE) budget in Nestlé Waters, and using the interpretative framework developed by Busco and Quattrone (2014) we illustrate and discuss the distinguishing features of management and accounting innovations, and reflect on the reasons underpinning, and the process of, their adoption. All of this, together with a brief review of the existing literature, provides the background for introducing the five papers which comprise this Special Issue.…”