Shareholder orientation and the framing of management control practices: A field study in a Chinese state-owned enterprise

This paper explores how notions of enhanced shareholder orientation influenced the evolution of management control practices in a Chinese state-owned enterprise over a ten-year period. Drawing on the social movement literature and adopting a historically informed field study approach we examine how this took the form of a protracted framing process where an emerging, shareholder-focused frame interacted with the extant work unit frame embedded in Maoist ideology and the broader cultural system of Confucianism and imbued control practices with context-specific meanings. Particular attention is paid to how this interplay fostered varying degrees of frame alignment, denoting the extent to which particular frames are congruent with those enacted by various social actors, and how this affected organisational action. We illustrate how the shareholder-focused frame challenged extant control practices but was also complemented and ultimately replaced by the work unit frame to address an escalating performance crisis. These findings lead us to reflect on how resistance to shareholder-focused control practices is brought about and what roles alternative and more deeply embedded frames play in constraining as well as enabling collective action. We also discuss how the approach to framing informing our analysis may complement cognate accounting research drawing on notions of performativity and social psychology.