The construction and implementation of a new performance management framework in the Thai public sector: a field study of institutional integration

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Accounting, Business School, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

This thesis reports on a field study that investigated how and why a performance management system was initiated, implemented and used in the Thai public sector. Drawing from Diffusion of Innovation theory combined with Neo-institutional Sociology and using multi-level case studies of different Thai government departments, the study addresses how and why internal and external forces influence change in the performance management system and how different actors respond to these pressures. Data were collected using several qualitative techniques including interviews with people across all levels of the organisations, study of organisational and web-based documents, and observation of practices. The findings highlight both technical rational choice and legitimacy as the main drivers of the adoption of the new performance management system at the central government level. However, at the government agency level coercive institutional pressure drives the implementation of the system. Institutional entrepreneurs, both individual and organisational, used their social skills and rhetoric to induce government agencies to implement the new performance management system. Further, different agencies responded to the same institutional pressures in different ways. When there was a conflict between external pressures and internal values and interests, organisations tended to decouple practice from policy to buffer their core activities and interests. When organisations responded to the external pressure positively, but did not link the implementation and intended outcomes, they tended to decouple means and ends. The thesis contributes to the existing public sector accounting literature by offering useful insight into how both “structural institutionalism” and “agentic institutionalism” can be integrated with decoupling issues and attributes of innovation for a holistic understanding of management accounting practice. More specifically, this thesis suggests that the adoption, implementation and use of a new performance management system in a public sector organisation are not caused by a single driver, but as a result of multiple drivers arising from both internal and external sources.