The role of accounting and an intermediate subsidiary in the management control system

This paper exploits Giddens’ [Giddens, A., 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge] notions of disembedding and reembedding to examine the management control system of a multinational corporation. A specific case of an intermediate subsidiary between an accounting-oriented Western parent and subsidiaries in the Baltic countries and Russia is used to discuss how accounting can be used to link the divergent social systems of the different parts of the corporation. The present study extends the sociology-based accounting literature studying the power of expert systems. In particular, the present study contributes to the conceptualization of accounting regime by Jones and Dugdale [Jones, T.C., Dugdale, D., 2001. The concept of an accounting regime. Crit. Perspect. Acc. 12, 35–63.] by showing how the power of accounting can be formed on the local level. Intervening in both disembedding and reembedding processes, the intermediate can use accounting signifiers for different purposes. It shows the parent's domination by locally separating parent's requirements for accounting and operations, at the same time connecting accounting with the operations in concrete operational cooperation between itself and the subsidiaries. The findings thus support the argument that the power of accounting can be blurred, although accounting remains the basis for legitimated behavior and is not decoupled from the local operations. This happens because the intermediate can invoke the tensions between divergent social systems. The results also imply that the intermediate uses accounting signifiers according to its own needs, legitimating its existence despite the inflexibility the multilevel organizational structure may cause.