The Rhetoric and Reality of Budget Participation

Abstract

In recent years, the business literature has heralded the rise of the team-based, network-centered adaptive organisation as a response to dynamic competitive market forces and emerging technology. Corporate budgeting presents a salient context in which to study managerial networks because it is a routine, widely used, high-profile process that incorporates and impacts all organisational functions. Participatory or ‘bottom-up’ budgeting is an example of a mechanism adopted by firms to promote employee empowerment and cross-functional interaction. Firms adopt participatory budgeting programs to ‘empower’ employees by allowing the workforce to set performance targets and allocate resources, as documented as long as 50 years ago (Argyris, 1952).