Teemu Malmi

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Verified

Teemu verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• D.Sc
• Professor at Aalto University

Management control systems (MCS) have been known to produce unintended, dysfunctional consequences. However, relatively little is known about how MCS can contribute to the inertia and even decline of a firm. Our analysis in the abductive mode was triggered by a surprising case study observation that although Nokia Mobile Phones (NMP) certainly had...

Purpose Interest has grown in how management controls operate together as a package of interrelated mechanisms. This study aims to contribute to the topic by focusing on a single industry in one country, addressing controls in medium-sized enterprises (MEs). It explores how accounting and other forms of control commonly combine and the associations...

Most cross-cultural studies on management control have compared Anglo-Saxon firms to Asian firms, leaving us with limited understanding of potential variations between developed Western societies. This study addresses differences and similarities in a wide variety of management control practices in Anglo-Saxon (Australia, English Canada), Germanic...

This study examines the influence of cultural regions on the interdependence between delegation of authority and other management control (MC) practices. In particular, we assess whether one of the central contentions of agency theory, that incentive contracting and delegation are jointly determined, holds in different cultural regions. Drawing on...

The aim of this study is to investigate whether certain configurations of management controls dominate in certain societies (socio-cultural contexts) and whether the effectiveness of a given archetype of management control systems (MCSs) varies depending on the socio-cultural setting—the society—in which it operates. The study focuses on three soci...

This article provides a review of managerialist studies in management accounting, as presented in ten leading accounting journals over the past 25 years. The review covers both interventionist and non-interventionist studies in which at least one of the aims is to directly support or help organizational decision-making and control. Non-intervention...

A significant amount of attention has been devoted to understanding the relationship between strategy and control. While much progress has been made a number of important questions have so far received little attention: (1) how do management controls combine to achieve effective control outcomes for different firm strategies? and (2) are there mult...

Why has accounting, one of the eldest disciplines in business, only recently started to consider family business, the prevalent form of economic organization in the world, as a relevant research context? What is the role of accounting in family business? Which accounting issues are relevant in family business? How are different accounting practices...

This chapter examines the issue of how management control systems (MCS) can be designed and used to address environmental concerns within organisations. This issue is motivated by the developing awareness of the environmental and social issues caused by industrial activity, as spawned by a scientific consensus that human activities are affecting th...

In recent years there has been growing interest in how controls operate together as a system of interrelated mechanisms. While theoretical debate dates back to the seminal paper of Otley 1980, there has been little empirical analysis of how controls combine as a package, with the majority of quantitative studies in accounting literature examining e...

This paper starts by shortly summarizing some of the pros and cons of paradigms. It then provides three personal accounts on paradigms at work. The purpose is to challenge the management accounting academy to think how “healthy” its current condition is, if these experiences represent reality for those trying to do something they find valuable and...

Budgets are used widely but criticized, mainly for performance evaluation reasons. We find that organizations regard budgets as more important for planning and control than evaluation, thus proposing a rationale for their continued use irrespective of evaluation-based criticisms. This finding is also important, because most extant budget research f...

In this article we discuss the motivation for and role of theory in management accounting. We argue that theories in an applied field such as management accounting research should provide explanations that are useful for those we study - managers, organizations and society. We evaluate the nature of theories currently used and developed. Those theo...

It seems that Paolo Quattrone (PQ) shares in his interesting commentary some of the concerns we expressed in our manuscript. In a good post-modernist spirit, he criticizes our work, which of course is far from being beyond critics. But does he provide any solutions or insights on how to overcome those concerns we all seem to share? He credits us fo...

There has been very little explicit theoretical and empirical research on the concept of management control systems (MCS) as a package despite the existence of the idea in management accounting literature for decades. In this editorial we discuss a range of ways researchers have defined MCS and the problems this has created. We provide a new typolo...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of adopting a strategic approach to human resource management (HRM) in professional service firms (PSFs). It provides the empirical evidence by comparing and contrasting the adoption of a strategic approach to HRM in two Australian PSFs. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative case study...

Academic literature is giving increased consideration to the use of performance measurement systems, notably the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). However, there has been limited empirical investigation into the particular benefits that result from the use of the BSC (Ittner and Larcker, 1998). This study empirically examines how the BSC has been applied i...

This paper presents a construct - a collaborative approach for managing project cost of poor quality. Changing project constraints makes it difficult or even impossible to utilize traditional cost of poor quality methodology in managing quality costs in project environments. The construct presented here modifies the root-cause analysis type of appr...

Customer relationship management (CRM) literature argues that to enhance corporate profitability marketing and sales emphasis should foremost be directed to the most profitable customers. Today, however, we have little empirical evidence on how organizations assess customer profitability, and what are the performance implications of customer profit...

Value Based Management (VBM), and especially Economic Value Added (EVA™),1 has attracted considerable interest among organisations in recent years. These concepts can be applied to capital budgeting, valuation, management control, and incentive compensation. Despite the growing number of applications, we have only limited independent research-based...

The currently most advanced administrative corporate IT solutions have emerged in the form of enterprise resource planning systems (ERPS). The number of adopters of this new integrated information technology is increasing rapidly. Still, we know very little about the practical consequences these new systems have for managerial accounting and contro...

The balanced scorecard (BSC) seems to be the latest management fashion to sweep the organizational world. Despite its apparent popularity, we have only limited systematic, research-based evidence on BSC applications. This study aims to find out how BSCs are applied in Finland and why companies adopt them. The study comprised a series of semi-struct...

This study aims to explain what drives innovation diffusion in management accounting during its various phases. Based on Abrahamson [Abrahamson, E. (1991). Managerial fads and fashions: the diffusion and rejection of innovations. Academy of Management Review, 16, 586–612], four perspectives with potential to explain the diffusion of accounting inno...

Many of the activity-based costing (ABC) systems introduced in recent years are said to fail (e.g. Cooperet al., 1992; Argyris and Kaplan, 1994; Shields, 1995; Roberts and Silvester, 1996). The use of ABC for surveillance by the group management, with no consequent actions, leads us to propose that claims on ABC failure result, in part, from assess...

Just as Europe consists of countries with different languages, cultures, histories, wealth levels and systems of jurispridence, and exhibits a mosaic of different tastes and preferences, so do accounting's roles and functions differ widely across European countries. Differences in management accounting practices and control approaches abound. the q...

There seems to be a wide variety of methods in how organizations apply the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) concept in practice and how it is interpreted in the literature. Consequently, it is not quite clear what the core features of BSC, or its variants, are and if all its variants are equally effective in producing expected outcomes. Moreover, the usefu...