The influence of institutional pressure on target setting

IF 3.6 2区管理学 Q1 BUSINESS, FINANCE Accounting Organizations and Society Pub Date : 2023-07-01 DOI:10.1016/j.aos.2023.101453

Ramji Balakrishnan , Jizhang Huang , Yang Xuan

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Abstract

We examine whether the desire to maintain sociopolitical legitimacy with critical stakeholders affects sales targets set by Chinese firms. Drawing from institutional theory, we argue that enterprises owned by local government (local-SOEs) feel greater pressure to maintain their legitimacy with the local government relative to private firms (non-SOEs), leading to a stronger association between the provincial GDP target (a legitimate benchmark) and firm-level targets. Results from manually collected data support this conjecture and are robust to alternate measures and samples. Increases in the demand for legitimacy -- measured using exogenous shocks and sample characteristics -- strengthen the association. Finally, changes in the coverage in the official press and changes in target achievement rates document the real effects of this strategy. Our findings demonstrate the effects of institutional pressures on corporate decisions and enrich our understanding on the socially constructed as well as instrumental rationality role of management accounting.

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制度压力对目标设定的影响

我们研究了与关键利益相关者保持社会政治合法性的愿望是否会影响中国公司设定的销售目标。根据制度理论，我们认为，与私营企业（非国有企业）相比，地方政府所有的企业（地方国有企业）在维护其在地方政府的合法性方面感受到更大的压力，导致省级GDP目标（合法基准）与企业级目标之间的关联性更强。人工收集数据的结果支持这一推测，并且对替代测量和样本具有稳健性。对合法性的需求增加——用外部冲击和样本特征来衡量——加强了这种联系。最后，官方媒体报道的变化和目标实现率的变化证明了这一战略的实际效果。我们的研究结果证明了制度压力对企业决策的影响，丰富了我们对管理会计的社会建构和工具理性作用的理解。

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来源期刊

Accounting Organizations and Society BUSINESS, FINANCE-

CiteScore

7.80

自引率

6.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： Accounting, Organizations & Society is a major international journal concerned with all aspects of the relationship between accounting and human behaviour, organizational structures and processes, and the changing social and political environment of the enterprise.