Plural stakeholder engagement in a Brazilian public university: a complex and critical issue for management control model

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Tassiani Aparecida dos
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12136/tde-06112023-185822/
• topic: Conflict; Conflito; Contabilidade plural; Engajamento de stakeholders; Management control model; Modelo de controle gerencial; Plural dialogic accounting; Stakeholder engagement; Universidades; Universities

This research draws on the broad problem of democratising accounting, organisations and society. Stakeholder engagement is at the forefront of scholars, practitioners, and policy- makers initiatives to address such problems. Stakeholder engagement has been conceptualised with two main dimensions: inclusiveness (stakeholder representativeness) and participation (influence on the decisions). From a multi-stakeholder perspective, I focus on the \"momentum of decision\", which means plural participation within the organisation. Therefore, information and accounting are key concepts to unveil such a process. However, I claimed that there is a lack of empirical studies on stakeholder engagement practices, shedding light on accounting technologies, conflict and dispute, which is a feature of plural constituted settings. Based on these assumptions and in studying the University of São Paulo\'s participatory budgeting, this thesis focuses on the following research problem: the role played by accounting and its technologies from multiple stakeholders\' perspectives on stakeholder engagement practices. Thus, the primary objective of this research is (1) to analyse the engagement practices within the budget dispute at the University of São Paulo and (2) to analyse the role played by accounting and its technologies in stakeholder engagement practices. The research strategy adopted is qualitative-inductive from the critical accounting research tradition. The study was carried out at a Brazilian public university. Therefore, a set of budgetary events was selected to understand how multi-stakeholder engagement practices are socio-historically constructed. The period selected for collecting and analysing documents was 2018-2021, a period of management of only one dean. After data collection, the data were organised in the MAXQDA2022 software. In phase 1 of the research, a set of 184 text documents were analysed, totalising more than 2800 pages, and 25 videos, totalising more than 100 hours. The second phase was based on 20 interviews, around 1 hour each. For data analysis, the MAXQDA2022 supported the construction of the narratives around engagement practices from multi-stakeholders perspectives. The data were coded in an iterative way, and some categories emerged from the field. Besides, drawing on the framework proposed by Tregdiga and Milne (2020) and adapted, the data were reorganised into five engagement practices categories: budgetary events, stakeholders and groups, spaces for engagement, distribution of power, and role of managerial information/budget. The main finding of this research is that the empirical data shows a gap between theory and practice. The USP case brings to the fore that stakeholders\' relationship with the organisation can be defined as engagement or participation. Depending on a set of features, stakeholders will decide to participate and \"have a seat on the table\" and influence the momentum of the decision. However, depending on legitimacy, power, social interests and knowledge, stakeholders can strategically choose to engage in formal and (mainly) informal spaces with more power to influence decision-making. Besides, this thesis contributes to prior literature on stakeholder engagement and participatory budgeting and articulates practical implications.