Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Readings in Accounting for Management Control pp 149–173Cite as

Designing semi-confusing information systems for organizations in changing environments

  • Chapter

Abstract

Organizations have many stabilizers but quite often lack proper destabilizers. They establish fixed repertoires of behavior programs over time, and many grow too rigid and insensitive to environmental changes. Drifting into changing environments, they react with delayed and improper responses.

Current information — and accounting — systems do more to stabilize organizations than to destabilize them. They filter away conflicts, ambiguities, overlaps, uncertainty etc. and they suppress many relevant change signals and kill initiatives to act on early warnings.

Organizations in changing environments need information systems which enable them to stay alert and to detect problems, changes, and conflicts in time. Accounting information can be used to stimulate organizational curiosity, facilitate dialectical decision processes and increase organizations’ ability to cope with variety in their environments. This paper formulates some principles for design of information systems that can destabilize organizations with planned confusion — in times when they ought to be confused.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Bibliography

  • Beer, Stafford, Platform for Change (London: Wiley, 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  • Boguslaw, Robert, The New Utopians: A Study of Systems Design and Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965).

    Google Scholar 

  • Box, George E.P. & Draper, Norman R., Evolutionary Operation (New York: Wiley, 1969).

    Google Scholar 

  • Briefs, Ulrich, Information Systems and Workers’ Participation in Decision Making, in Enid Mumford and Harold Sackman, (eds.) Human Choice and Computers (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  • Brunsson, Nils, Propensity to change (Gothenburg: Business Administration Studies (BAS) No. 27, 1976).

    Google Scholar 

  • Burns, Tom & Stalker, G.M., The Management of Innovation (London: Tavistock, 1961).

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, Donald T., Reforms as Experiments, American Psychologist (1969), pp. 409-429.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cyert, Richard M. & March, James F., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

    Google Scholar 

  • Dahrendorf, Ralf, Towards a Theory of Social Conflict, in A. and E. Etzioni, (eds.) Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1964).

    Google Scholar 

  • Dill, William R., Environment as an Influence on Managerial Autonomy, Administrative Science Quarterly (1958), pp. 409-443.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emery, Fred E. & Trist, Eric L., The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments, Human Relations (1965), pp. 21-32.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emery, Fred E. & Trist, Eric L., Towards a Social Ecology (London and New York: Plenum Press, 1973).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Galbraith, Jay R., Designing Complex Organizations (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973).

    Google Scholar 

  • Gershefski, George W., Building a Corporate Financial Model, Harvard Business Review (1969), pp. 61-72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glimell, Hans, Designing Interactive Systems for Organizational Change (Göteborg: Business Administration Studies, 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, G., Tanon, C. & Morse, E.V., Hospital Structure, Costs, and Innovation, Working Paper, Cornell University, 1974.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grinyer, Peter H. & Norburn, David, An Empirical Investigation of Some Aspects of Planning for Existing Markets; Perceptions of Executives and Financial Performance, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, (1975).

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, O., Hunt, D. & Schroder, Harold, Conceptual Systems and Personality Organization (New York: Wiley, 1961).

    Google Scholar 

  • Haseman, William D., & Whinston, Andrew B., Design of a Multidimensional Accounting System, The Accounting Review (1976), pp. 65-79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, On Man-Computer Interaction in Organizational Decision-Making: A Behavioral Approach (Göteborg: Business Administration Studies, 1970).

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, Growth Stagnation as a Managerial Discontinuity, in Proceedings of the INSEAD Seminar on Management under Discontinuity (Brussels: European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, 1975), pp. 34–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, Mott ett manövrerbart industrisamhälle, in Birgitta Hambraeus and Emin Tengström, (eds.), Vad kan du och jag göra åt framtiden? (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1976), pp. 131–139.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, How Organizations Learn and Unlearn, in Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck, (eds.), Handbook of Organizational Design, Vol. 1, Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific (in press), 1978).

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, Edström, Olof & Glimell, Hans, Man-Computer Interference? The Development of a Marketing Information Systems, in Sandor Asztély, (ed.), Budgetering och redovisning som instrument för styrning. (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1974), pp. 107–149.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, Nystrom, Paul, C. & Starbuck, William H., Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organization, Administrative Science Quarterly (March 1976), pp. 41-65.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo, Nystrom, Paul C. & Starbuck, William H., Designing Organizations to Match Tomorrow, in Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck, (eds.), Prescriptive Models of Organizations, (North-Holland/TIMS Studies in the Management Sciences, 1977), pp. 171-181.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hedberg, Bo & Jönsson, Sten, Strategy Formulation as a Discontinuous Process, International Studies of Management and Organization (1977).

    Google Scholar 

  • Jönsson, Sten, Decentralisering och utveckling. En fälstudie av utvecklingsbolagens planeringsproblem (Göteborg: Business Administration Studies (BAS) No. 21, 1973).

    Google Scholar 

  • Karlins, M., Conceptual Complexity and Remote Associative Proficiency at Creativity Variables in a Complex Problem Solving Task, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1967), pp. 264-278.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karlins, M. & Lamm, H., Information Search as a Function of Conceptual Structure, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1967), pp. 456-459.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, George Alexander, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vol. 1 and 2, (New York: Norton, 1977).

    Google Scholar 

  • Kolb, David A., On Management and the Learning Process, in David A. Kolb, Irwin M. Rubin, and James M. McIntyre, (eds.), Organizational Psychology: A Book of Readings (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakatos, Imre, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs, in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970).

    Google Scholar 

  • Landau, Martin, Redundancy, Rationality and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap, Public Administration Review (1969), pp. 346-358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landau, Martin, On the Concept of a Self-Correcting Organization, Public Administration Reveiw (1973), pp. 533-542.

    Google Scholar 

  • March, James G. & Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958).

    Google Scholar 

  • Mason, Richard O., A Dialectical Approach to Strategic Planning, Management Science (1969), pp. B403-B414.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mason, Richard O. & Mitroff, Ian I., A Program for Research on Management Information Systems, Management Science (1973), pp. 475-487.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCall, Jr., Morgan, A Systematic Look at Nonsense, The Congruous Side of Incongruity, Working paper, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C., 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Danny & Gordon, Lawrence A., Conceptual Levels and the Design of Accounting Information Systems, Decision Sciences (1975), pp. 259-269.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mintzberg, Henry, Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right, Working paper, Institut d’Administration des Enterprises, Aix-en-Provence, 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitroff, Ian I. & Betz, Fred, Dialectical Decision Theory, A Meta-Theory of Decision Making, Management Science (1972), pp. 11-24.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitroff, Ian I. & Kilmann Ralph H., On the Importance of Qualitative Analysis in Management Science: The Influence of Personality Variables on Organizational Decision Making, Working paper, No. 67, University of Pittsburgh, PH, 1974.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mowshowitz, Abbe, The Conquest of Will: Information Processing in Human Affairs (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1976).

    Google Scholar 

  • Nystrom, Paul C., Hedberg, Bo L.T. & Starbuck, William H., Interacting Processes as Organization Designs, in Ralph H. Kilmann, Louis R. Pondy, and Dennis P. Slevin, (eds.), The Management of Organization Design (New York: Elsevier, 1976), pp. 209–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ornstein, R., The Psychology of Consciousness (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  • Pareto, V., Sociological Writings, selected and introduced by S.E. Finer, (New York: Praeger, 1966).

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroder, Harold, Driver, Michael J. & Streufert, Siegfried, Human Information Processing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Smelser, Neil J., Theory of Collective behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963).

    Google Scholar 

  • Starbuck, William H., Systems Optimization with Unknown Criteria, Proceedings of the 1974 International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1974), pp. 67–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Starbuck, William H., Information Systems for Organizations of the Future, in E. Grochla and N. Szyperski, Information Systems and Organizational Structure (New York: de Gruyter, 1975), pp. 217–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Starbuck, William H. & Hedberg, Bo L.T., Saving an Organization from a Stagnating Environment, in Hans B. Thorelli, ed., Strategy + Structure = Performance: The Strategic Planning Imperative (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1977).

    Google Scholar 

  • Streufert, Susan C., Success and Response Rate in Complex Decision Making, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1972), pp. 389-403.

    Google Scholar 

  • Streufert, Susan C., Effects of Information Relevance on Design Making in Complex Environments, Memory and Cognition (1973), pp. 224-228.

    Google Scholar 

  • Suefeld, P. & Hagen, R., Measurement of Information Complexity, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1966), pp. 233-236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, James D., Organizations in Action (New-York: McGraw Hill Inc., 1967).

    Google Scholar 

  • Ullrich, Robert A., Organizational Design, Employee Motivation and the Support of Strategic Management, in H.I. Ansoff, R.P. Declerk, and R.L. Hayes, (eds.), From Strategic Planning to Strategic Management (New York: Wiley, 1976).

    Google Scholar 

  • Watzlawick, Paul, Weakland, John H. & Fisch, Richard, Change; Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (New York: Norton, 1974).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wildavsky, Aaron, The Self-Evaluating Organization, Public Administration Review (1972), pp. 509-520.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolfe, Joseph, Learning Styles Rewarded in a Complex Simulation with Implications for Business Policy and Organization Behavior Research, Proceedings, 36th Annual National Meeting of the Academy of Management, 1976.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

    Bo Hedberg & Sten Jönsson

Authors
  1. Bo Hedberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Sten Jönsson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, UK

    Clive Emmanuel

  2. University of Lancaster, UK

    David Otley

  3. University of Southern California, USA

    Kenneth Merchant

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1978 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hedberg, B., Jönsson, S. (1978). Designing semi-confusing information systems for organizations in changing environments. In: Emmanuel, C., Otley, D., Merchant, K. (eds) Readings in Accounting for Management Control. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7138-8_8

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7138-8_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-412-41490-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7138-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation