Management accounting and control systems as devices for public value creation in higher education

This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. Although belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that although the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice, this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.