Theoretical discussion of management accounting change

further emphasize the strong influence of human agency that was facilitated by contradictions and conflicts (e.g., among commercial, social, and political forces). This created the space for the actor to maneuver and induce change, which was evident as the actors fought back, thereby creating evolutionary change that affected the organizational development.

illustrates how a combination of both private and public shareholders creates a setup that has thus far been able to support the development of a Greenlandic SOE (Wong, 2004; Gupta, 2005;

Omran, 2009).

Studies on corporate governance have reported a positive relation between organizational change and privatization with regard to the means of development for SOEs. The literature illustrates how SOEs are affected by their external environment and notes that they typically move toward privatization as a means of improving performance compared to private players in the same industry. Both the governance and institutional literature state that privatization might be a faster way to realize organizational change; in contrast, this thesis illustrates how management accounting practices change as a result of professionalization and modernization as well as tools and actors. According to this perspective, change also comes about through actors developing more commercial and profit-oriented mindsets, despite contradictory institutional impetuses. Most literature on governance does not understand development when it is not caused by governance changes like privatization, whereas this thesis establishes a form of development that is more actor-driven and not solely dependent on governance changes and privatization.

8.2.2 Critical literature

When analyzing critical literature, this thesis states that the actors in SOEs operating in Greenland can act and inflict change. Compared to many critical studies, this emphasizes change as something that also comes from within. Many critical studies have viewed organizational change as something that is mainly caused by and is a consequence of the external environment (Hopper et al., 2008). This thesis supports those studies in the critical field that analyze organizational change in developing countries and find it to result from social, cultural, and political structures (Hoque & Hopper, 1997; Uddin & Hopper, 2003; Wickramasinghe et al., 2004; Uddin & Tsamenyi, 2005; Tsamenyi et al., 2010). The findings of this thesis acknowledge the impact of these larger forces and extend previous findings by illustrating the active role of actors. It demonstrates how the unintended consequences of social and commercial forces create a space for an actor to act and create change.

The critical field in developing countries illustrates the importance of understanding how multiple, strong factors affect development. The individual studies document exogenous factors

and their influence on organizational practices and illustrate that bureaucratic control, market forces, and cultural contexts form a much wider spectrum (Wickramasinghe & Hopper, 2005;

Efferin & Hopper, 2007). This literature stream looks at development from a more critical perspective; it shows that actors are less capable of acting toward their environment, and it argues that in many cases, development results from external forces. This thesis acknowledges these multiple factors and understands that the development of Greenlandic SOEs has occurred in an environment in which these factors are neither constant nor dominant. The critical perspective neglects the endogenous perspective of change and places less emphasis on the capabilities of the individual actors.

8.2.3 Institutional literature

The findings of this thesis and its empirical studies are the same as those of institutional studies in developing countries in that organizations react to the external environment. However, as this thesis emphasizes, it is also the internal processes and endogenous roles that create change. In light of the Greenlandic environment, this study states that change needs to be analyzed from a more holistic perspective. Change should be understood as the result of something that is enforced on the organization as well as the consequence of actors that create and develop institutional structures.

Institutional studies focus extensively on change as either a process of decoupling (Hoque &

Hopper, 1994; Nor-Axiah & Scapens, 2007; Xu & Uddin, 2008) or in terms of isomorphism (Alam & Lawerence, 1994; Firth, 1996; Lin & Yu, 2002; Hassan, 2005). They state that either nothing happens or that the organization adapts to the external environment. This thesis recognizes and adds to institutional literature by analyzing individual actors and their role in the organization. This can support the institutional perspective, where the focus is more on the external environment. The aim is to strengthen the existing institutional perspective, because it somehow neglects a more detailed analysis of organizations and the way in which human agency plays an important role in change and development.

This institutional perspective does not sufficiently recognize the capabilities of human agency and how it needs to be seen in the analysis of strategic conduct, how it creates differences within the institutional environment, and the relative power of different institutional actors that are part of organizational change. This thesis adds to the literature by understanding change as a duality,

where both are initiated by the external environment and by internal processes. This thesis argues that change in a Greenlandic context and in SOEs must be analyzed both through an institutional analysis focusing on the structures and through an analysis of strategic conduct that examines how actors draw on these structures (Giddens, 1984).

By contributing to the literature on management accounting change, this thesis emphasizes the ability of actors that are part of a hybridized institutional environment, and how these settings enable actors to maneuver. This thesis shows that actors can play a more active role and affect the current macrolevel social, economic, and political order that inhibit meaningful change in the organization. This illustrates the importance of understanding the micro practices and the role of individual actors and the fact that organizational change has to be understood as a duality.