平衡记分卡的概念基础【外文翻译】【整理版】.doc

本科毕业论文（设计）外 文 翻 译原文：Creating and Popularizing a Management Accounting Idea: The Case of the Balanced Scorecard1. IntroductionThis study seeks to understand how management accounting techniques, often created in local practice, are developed, extended and popularized into global management practice. Commonly, the creation and spread of new ideas is depicted as a story of great innovators and the diffusion of ideas, a rationalist story that stresses the pull of fixed ideas. Instead, we concentrate on the fragility and variability of ideas and the importance of ideas being pushed along. We stress the crucial role of customization and translation in converting an idea into a tool that managers can regard as practical, with the potential to be used by thousands of organizations around the world. How does an idea, easily dismissed as impractical, a fad or ambiguous, become an acceptable innovation and even a taken for granted component of good management? We concentrate on the Balanced Scorecard as an example in order to provide an in depth understanding of the processes by which management accounting ideas enter the world of specific organizational practices and technologies. The BSC has been outlined in a series of influential articles and best-selling business books (Kaplan and Norton, 1992, 1996) that now forms the basis of a major consulting industry and set of organizational practices. We focus on the processes by which ideas of a strategic performance measurement system are translated into a multitude of specific practices that today comprise the Balanced Scorecard (BSC).This study is concerned with the implementation of the key ideas of the BSC. However we do not focus on how one or more organizations adopt and adapt the BSC, which would study adopters and users of the BSC (Wenisch, 2003, Tuomela, 2006). While such studies can provide valuable insight on how the BSC has been used and adapted across site, such studies take for granted the idea of the BSC as an established technology, accept organizational boundaries as more or less fixed, and do not problematize its purpose and development. We focus on how new ideas and concepts enter into managerial thinking and thereby have the potential to become widely known, accepted and implemented.1.1. The Balanced Scorecard as a Management InnovationManagerial discourse has seen a shift from financial-oriented management control systems to strategic management accounting systems with a focus on value creation (Ittner and Larker, 2001). A diverse set of managerial accounting techniques have been introduced since the 1990s, including the Balanced Scorecard, economic value added, and target costing etc. The BSC has gained currency, seems to have some durability and has spread rapidly during the past decade. According to the editors of the Harvard Business Review, the BSC is one of the most important management ideas in the last seventy-five years (cited in Meyer, 2002: pp. 2). Kaplan and Nortons BSC, for example, emphasizes non-financial measures to complement financial measures. It emphasizes four perspectives on performance: financial, customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth and stresses a link between performance measures and strategy (Otley, 1999, p.374). The BSC has been prescribed as a technique that can be used to translate an organizations strategy into terms that are understandable, and can be communicated and acted upon. It promotes the use of the language of measurement to define more clearly the meaning of abstract concepts like quality, customer satisfaction, and organizational learning and growth (Kaplan and Norton, 2001). The concept of the BSC developed rapidly after the publication of Kaplan and Norton (1992). The following outlines significant developments: The BSC had its origins in complaints that management accounting was too focused on financial measures (Kaplan, 1984; Hayes and Abernathy, 1980). Revised performance measurement systems were proposed to capture leading indicators of performance. In 1991, Kaplan and Norton began to shape the concept with 12 companies through a research project sponsored by a research arm of KPMG. In 1992, Kaplan and Norton published the results of this initial study in the Harvard Business Review, presenting the BSC as “measures that drive performance”. The BSC was presented as an innovative system which complemented the financial measures with measures on customer satisfaction, internal processes and the organizations innovation, learning and growth (Kaplan and Norton, 1992, p.71).In 1996, Kaplan and Norton published their first book on the BSC, arguing that it is a way of “translating strategy into action”, a methodology for promoting strategic management. In 2001, Kaplan and Norton released their second book, The Strategy Focused Organization, which describes the BSC as an enterprise strategic management system, integral for a strategy focused organization. In 2004, Kaplan and Norton published their third book on “Strategy Mapping” as a way of “Transforming Intangible Assets into Tangible Results”. The concept of strategy map, first articulated in 2000, is proposed as a visual way to communicate an organizations perspectives, objectives, and measures, and the causal linkages between them. The concept of strategy matrix is also proposed as a useful visualization and summarization tool to display objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives. Kaplan and Nortons fourth book, “Alignment: using the BSC to create corporate synergies”, explores one of the elements on strategy focused organizations (SFO). We can expect further books that further develop each element of a SFO. The take up of the idea of the BSC is evidenced by numerous books and articles in academic and professional journals and magazines, seminars and workshops, case studies and public conferences and software applications devoted to the technique. Moreover, surveys (eg., Malmi, 2001; Kald and Nilsson, 2000; Silk, 1998), suggest that the BSC has been adopted and implemented in various countries and industries. For example, recent surveys indicate that approximately 60% of large US companies now use the BSC (Bain 2006). According to a Cranfield University research report, 75% of the companies that have a formal process of performance measurement (46% of all companies surveyed) use the BSC as their main method (cited in Balanced Scorecard Collaborative How-To Training Material, 2006). The BSC has also been incorporated into management accounting teaching, as well as having become a standard service offering within many management consulting firms. Although the BSC has attracted considerable interest as a performance measurement innovation (Ittner and Lacker, 1998), it has also been perceived as a management fad (e.g., Collins, 2000). There have been concerns about its variable success in actual implementation (Malina and Selto, 2001), questions about the logical validity of the idea (Norreklit, 2000), and how its rhetoric obfuscates the weaknesses of the idea (Norreklit, 2003). Others have questioned its universal appeal (Bourgignon et al, 2005; Cooper and Ezzamel, 2007), and cautioned that the BSC needs to adapt to variations in communication, reward structures, strategies, and information characteristics (Luft and Shields, 2003; Otley, 1999). Such concerns, also typical of other management accounting innovations, create skepticism and doubt, and can be the basis for management resistance and barriers to organizational adoption and implementation. Despite (or at times, as a response to) the above criticisms, the BSC has to be turned into a detailed and meaningful set of techniques that managers believe they can use.1.2. Motivation and Objectives of the StudyThere has been little research on how popular management accounting ideas travel across time and space, and how and to what extent, these ideas are given local meaning and relevance. A notable attempt to study the spread of management ideas into practice is, however, (Jones and Dugdale 2002), which traced the emergence of ABC, and illustrated how it permeates the business world. While our research has similarities to their study, we extend their research not just by focusing on the details of the BSC, but also because we examine how the BSC idea gets converted into widely accepted practices, for example, business models and strategic maps, IT and knowledge management systems, performance appraisal techniques, consultation devices etc.Concentrating on one innovation, the BSC, permits an in depth understanding of how new management accounting ideas are not just talked about (whether enthusiastically or skeptically), but how they enter the sphere of organizational practices. The BSC has a relatively long history that is well documented by its popularizers (Kaplan and Norton, 1992, 1996; Kaplan, 1998). Kaplan (1998, 1994) largely repeats this history as an account of a knowledge creation cycle, but, rather improbably, depicts the process as smooth and without conflict. The present study illustrates some of the previously undocumented translations, disruptions, maneuvers and tensions involved in the process of dis-embedding and re-embedding the idea, drawing on Giddens notion of global and local interconnectedness (cf., Jones and Dugdale, 2002). Specifically, we examine how the idea of the BSC emerged from local practice during the late 1980s, and how it was subsequently generalized, thus enabling it to travel as a thinkable, manageable concept. We also illustrate how the construction of processes (of, for example, strategy implementation) and of people, notably the expertise around the idea, enabled it to be seen as operable and even necessary at various times and places, even in the face of skepticism. Translation processes are crucial in converting an abstract idea into a practical technology. Power (2007) focuses on the rise and discursive acceptance of specific ideas and their role in constituting the practices of risk management, and suggests, “all management practices necessarily embody and are constituted by ideas of what they should be”. These ideas which constitute programmatic elements in practice are often linked to larger value systems (Rose and Miller, 1992). In the case of the BSC, the larger value system includes the importance of quantification and the value of strategic management. We examine both the construction of the object of technology, the BSC, and how some actors are constructed as BSC experts. Sturdy et al. (2006) argue that the translation process has emphasized “the activity of inanimate objects such as technological hardware”, but “the transformation of human actors is underplayed”. The making of experts is an important element in the making and un-making of the ideas themselves (Gendron et al, 2007).There are two aspects in the construction of experts: within and outside the organization. The construction of experts within the organizations is realized in part through the assignment of managerial responsibilities and designation of new roles. Power (2007) illustrates how new roles and positions, such as the Chief Risk Officer, are envisaged and made up in the conceptions of enterprise-wide risk management. We illustrate how the conceptualization of the BSC encompasses the creation of a new management positions through assigning managerial responsibilities to the role of the Office of Strategic Management (OSM) and the designation of the Strategic Management Officer (SMO). Similarly, within organizations, BSC champions are often seen as experts in the technology.The other aspect of the transformation of expertise relates to the creation of business experts outside the organization in areas such as business technology and management consulting. In the case of the BSC, we illustrate how various management consulting practices and software companies incorporate the BSC as a specialized line of service and product. For instance, we show how the initial Nolan-Norton research project in 1991 provided the opportunity for those to become the authors of the BSC concept and for those, the managers and executives involved in the study, to become pioneers and earlier adopters of the idea. We also illustrate how the establishment of a professional service firm, the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative (BSCol), and its alliance with numerous technology firms, provided the opportunity for the expansion of experts in management consulting, software and business technology to help organizations implement the BSC.Jones and Dugdale (2002) focus on how Activity-Based Costing became an expert system, but they do not address how experts are themselves made. That study assumes a pre-defined category of experts and elites (such as the Harvard network) that they assume has power. In contrast, our study examines how claims to experts and expertise are mobilized through human-technology interactions. We do not assume a preexisting expert power around the BSC, but analyze how BSC expertise is constructed through the interaction between experience and theoretical knowledge. In so doing, we provide a different type of history, not based on pre-given and powerful agents, but one that is based on taking the technology so seriously that the emergence and development of the technology becomes the object of our history. This is important as it allows us to move away from traditional histories of great men and women, and move towards an analysis that shows how an innovation is rarely one fixed object but its multiplicity is the result of the activities of many people, often with interests quite disconnected from the innovation itself.Source: SandyQu,DavidJ.Cooper,Mahmoud,2010.“Creating and Popularizing a Management Accounting Idea:The case of the Balanced Scorecard”.CAAA Annual Conference,pp.6-13.译文：平衡记分卡的概念基础平衡记分卡保留了财务指标作为公司成功的最终结果指标，但补充了另外三个角度的指标顾客、内部业务流程、学习与成长我们提议作为创造长期股东价值的动因。1.1历史根源：1950-1980当然，平衡记分卡不是最早的主张用非财务指标来激励、衡量和评价公司业绩。在20世纪50年代，一个通用电气公司的员工队伍进行了一个项目用来开发通用的分散业务单位的绩效措施（刘易斯，1955），项目组建议分部业绩由一个财务和七个非财务指标来衡量。1.盈利能力（由剩余收益来衡量）2.市场份额3.生产力4.产品的领导地位5.公众责任（法律和道德的行为，责任利益相关者包括股东，供应商，经销商，分销商和社区）6.人力资源开发7.员工的态度8.短期目标和长期目标之间的平衡人们可以从这八个目标中看到平衡记分卡的根源。第一个通用指标代表了财务角度，第二个是从顾客的角度，第三个指标到第五个指标是从流程的角度，指标六和七代表了学习和成长的角度，第八个指标抓住了平衡记分卡的精髓，鼓励管理人员实现短期和长期目标之间适当的平衡。不幸的是，20世纪50年代通用电气公司项目的崇高目标从来没有根深蒂固到管理体制和网上经营单位的激励机制中去。实际上，尽管指标五和指标八在上列清单中，一些通用电气公司单位其后被裁定有定价的图谋，他们的管理者声称企业短期利润的压力导致他们违背了长期目标和他们的公众责任。 1.2 日本管理运动：1975-1990 在20世纪70年代和80年代，在质量和及时生产中创新的日本公司挑战了西方在许多重要行业的领导地位。一些作者认为西方公司只关注短期财务业绩的狭隘造成他们的自满情绪和对日本造成的威胁的反应迟缓。约翰逊和卡普兰（1987）回顾了管理会计的历史，并得出结论，美国的公司变得痴迷于短期财务指标，并没有调整他们的管理会计和控制系统以适应从成功实施的整体质量和短期时间的管理中得到的业务改进。 1.3 股东价值和委托代理架构 然而，并非所有的学术知识已经显露出在经营管理方面的最新进展。许多仍然聚焦在经济与财政上，特别是从20世纪60年代到70年代初的有效市场理论（法玛，1971）。经济学家还介绍了委托代理理论（詹森-麦克林，1976；哈里斯-雷维夫，1979；霍姆斯特罗姆，1979；格罗斯曼-哈特，1983）以正式确定被雇佣的管理团队和公司的分散股东（业主）之间的内在利益冲突。委托代理的拥护者敦促公司提供更多的财政奖励给高级管理团队，尤其是对基于财务绩效的奖励，是委托代理模型假设的典型的“结果”措施。有效市场研究认为股票价格持续不断反映了所有关于公司业绩的相关公共信息，而管理人员的赔偿金可以更好的通过所有者的利益经过扩大股票期权的利用和其他股权奖励进行均衡（詹森-麦克林，1976；法玛-詹森，1983）。与此类似的，一些人坚决主张对股市走势更好的会计代理人使其赔偿金一致，特别是剩余的收入，在其新名称中称为经济增加值（斯图尔特，1991）。80年代见证了高管薪酬和财务绩效奖励之间的联系的大幅度增加。对于这次运动中的先锋金融经济学家来说，高级管理人员注重非财务指标的观念接近于亵渎。 正如迈克尔詹森（2001），一位领先的金融经济学者所提出的：“平衡记分卡理论是有缺陷的，因为它提出了有评分卡的管理者却没有给出评分也就是没有单位值去衡量他们表现的如何。因此管理人员评价这样的制度没有办法做出具有原则性或目的性的决策。 1.4 不确定性和多阶段优化 由于经济学家和金融学者开发的许多委托代理模型都是在单一时期，公司的产出会在这个时期的结束时显示出来，也不需要进一步采取管理上的行动。在这种情况下，与产出相关，如计量财务绩效，可达到最佳效果。或者，如果财务绩效是由结束时期的股票价格或经济增加值来计量的话，就是一项对于管理人员在这一时期内所创造价值的完整和充足的统计数字，建立在股票价格或经济增加值基础上的激励合同同样也可达到最优。但是，管理人员在一个时期内采取的许多行动如提高员工的技能和积极性，通过研究和开发渠道提升产品，提高质量的流程，并加强客户和供应商的信任关系，都没有透露给公众投资者以至于他们对公司价值的行为没有被纳入期末股票价格。此外，在管理者或许知道他们花了多少金额在加强企业无形资产的同时，他们或许不知道在短期时间内他们创造了多少价值。而且可以肯定的是，这种价值的增加（或减少，如果在超支花费的前提下没有产生未来价值）不会被纳入期末股票价格和剩余价值（经济增加值）的计量中。 1.5 利益相关者理论 利益相关者理论给企业绩效衡量提供了另一种多维度的方法。利益相关者被定义为企业内部或是外部的团体或个人，他们持有股权或是可以影响组织的绩效。该理论一般为一个公司确定了5种利益相关者群体：其中的三个股东、客户和相关利益群体，他们确定了公司业绩的外界期望；另外两个供应商和员工，他们参与了公司的规划、设计和实施，为客户提供公司的产品和服务（阿特金森等，1997，第27页）。运用利益相关者理论去进行业绩评估的管理控制学者相信“绩效评估设计开始于利益相关者”（尼利和亚当斯，2002）。利益相关者进入绩效评估开始于为每一个利益相关者团体定义对该公司的预期目标以及各个团体如何促成该公司的成功。一旦利益相关者的期望，或者更远，那些利益相关者之间隐性和显性的合同得到确定，公司就会确定一个策略以满足这些期望，履行合同。因此，在平衡记分卡的方法开始于策略，然后确定了各个利益相关者之间的相互关系和目标的同时，利益相关者的方式开始于利益相关者的目标，并在第二步定义一个战略以满足利益相关者的期望。1.6综合和总结我和大卫诺顿介绍了平衡记分卡来提供一个缺少的组件，并且在各种明显的已经发展为相