Structuring social and environmental management control and accountability: Behind the hotel doors

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the construction of social and environmental strategies and the related implementation of management control by a key organisation located in a pivotal Asian location in the global hospitality industry. In doing so, it sets out to elucidate the forms and processes of strategic social and environmental control as well their relationship to the traditional financial control system.

The study employs field-based case study of a single case operating in both regional and global context. Drawing upon documentary, survey and interview sources, the study employs structuration theory to inform its design and analysis.

The findings reveal the interaction of top-down global corporate framing and bottom-up local-level staff initiatives that combine to develop a locally focussed and differentiated social and environmental programme and expedite an associated management control and accountability system. The study also reveals the dominance of the traditional financial control system over the social and environmental management control system and the simultaneously enabling and constraining nature of that relationship.

Signification and legitimation structures can be employed in building social and environmental values and programmes which then lay the foundations for related discourse and action at multiple levels of the organisation. This also has the potential to facilitate modes of staff commitment expressed through bottom-up initiatives and control, subject to but also facilitated by the dominating influence of the organisation’s financial control system.

This study reveals the importance of national and regional governmental, cultural and social context as both potential enablers and beneficiaries of organisational, social and environmental strategy and control innovation and implementation.

The paper offers an intra-organisational perspective on social and environmental strategising and control processes and motivations that elucidates forms of action, control and accountability and the relationship between social/environmental control and financial control agendas. It further reveals the interaction between globally developed strategic and control frameworks and locally initiated bottom-up strategic initiatives and control.