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Institutional and negotiated order perspectives on cost allocations: The case of the Swedish university sector

Abstract A growing number of studies of the issue of cost allocations based on different institutional theories have recently emerged in the management accounting literature. These provide an alternative to efficiency-centred explanations of the evolution of cost allocation practices and have increasingly drawn attention to the roles of competing interests, power, agency and politics in the more or less continuous (re-)construction of cost allocation rules. This paper extends this literature by combining an institutional perspective with insights gleaned from the negotiated order (NO) literature, using recent developments in the Swedish university sector as an empirical illustration. This draws attention to the role of negotiations in the political regulation of costing in a highly institutionalised environment. Adopting a comparative, embedded case study design we contrast three recent attempts to re-negotiate cost allocation rules with varying outcomes. It is concluded that the role of institutional factors as well as socio-political negotiations in framing the ambiguity associated with cost allocations is important in explaining why and how change in cost allocation rules is mobilised or diverted. Especially, the NO perspective enriches institutional explanations of the stabilising role of power in this respect by drawing attention to how power relationships and coalitions of interests are formed around the specific issues at stake. This leads to a more dynamic and less atomistic conceptualisation of power and agency than in much prior research on the institutionalisation of accounting.