When the supply side of a management accounting innovation fails – the case of beyond budgeting in Sweden

Abstract

Using the management fashion perspective as a theoretical lens, we explicate the limited success of the beyond budgeting (BB) concept in Sweden from a supply-side perspective. The fashion perspective assumes that management concepts do not emerge or diffuse by popular demand, instead viewing the activities of supply-side actors, such as management consultants, professional associations, and academics, as crucial to the success of management concepts in a marketplace of potential users. We conceptualize a management fashion-setting process that enabled us to explore how and why actors have selected or rejected BB, how and why BB has been processed, the channels through which BB has been disseminated, and how and why supply-side actors interact (or do not interact) with other supply-side actors and other parties in these activities. Our findings suggest that a weakly mobilized supply side has produced heavily reduced, heterogeneous packages of rhetoric and design characteristics regarding the BB concept that have reached only a small portion of the target audience of potential adopters. Our study illustrates how barriers to diffusion are created on the supply side in the absence of the localization of BB.