For decades, collaboration has been promoted in the public sector to address complex societal issues and overcome the limitations of single-purpose organizations (Almqvist, 2004). To that effect, multiple organizations collaborate towards a common objective and attempt to tackle problems from various perspectives, a feat that might be challenging, if not impossible, for a single organization to achieve on its own (Grossi and Argento, 2022). Collective efforts, however, are not always rewarded, as public sector organizations are primarily evaluated based on performance—typically defined by what is easily measured and monitored (Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2013)—while activities conducted in collaborative settings are challenging to measure and difficult to attribute to specific organizations. This discourages participation in collaborative efforts (Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015; Kraus, 2012).

To foster stability and establish durable collaborations, management accounting tools have been introduced. The underlying argument is that collaboration becomes more sustainable when accounting procedures are established and formalized in advance because they help to counterbalance vertical forces and promote horizontal collaboration (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015). In effect, as previous research shows, collaboration can be made more resilient when management accounting techniques help shape and facilitate relations (Kastberg, 2014), cultivate trust (van der Meer-Koistra and Vosselman, 2000; Vosselman and van der Meer-Kooistra, 2009; Tomkins, 2001), and establish a sense of stability (Håkansson and Lind, 2007).

However, research has also shown that accounting technologies may hinder inter-organizational efforts (Cäker and Nyland, 2017; Kraus, 2012; Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015), acting as sources of instability (Kastberg, 2014), forcing collaborations to oversimplify complex issues (Kastberg and Lagström, 2019), overshadowing the primary goals of collaboration (Cäker and Siverbo, 2011), and even driving collaborations to collapse, making them unable to accomplish their tasks (Kastberg and Lagström, 2019). For example, studies indicate that accounting technologies often simplify complexity, which consequently restricts the scope of collaborative practices, confining them to isolated projects (Forssell, Fred, and Hall, 2013). Additionally, hierarchical vertical accountability can result in fragmentation, fundamentally opposing the core principles of collaboration (Andersson and Wikström, 2014).

In sum, while management accounting is often touted as a source of stability, research has shown that it can also contribute to instability. This is not particularly surprising, considering that social systems are perpetually evolving, inevitably encompassing both stability and instability at different times. While the existing literature provides valuable insights, the role of management accounting within inter-organizational contexts remains unclear. Hence, to contribute to the literature on management accounting in collaborations, we aim not only to understand how management accounting fosters stability or contributes to instability in collaborative settings, but also how it is enabled to function as genuinely collaborative or inter-organizational.

To do so, we draw on Durkheim (1933/2012), who suggests that social stability and instability are intricately interrelated; understanding one requires close attention to the other. For instance, collective consciousness partially emerges as a response to instability, serving as an adaptive mechanism that promotes stability and social order. Such order remains perpetually vulnerable to disruption, and the weakening of collective norms can result in instability or, as Durkheim terms it, anomie, meaning breakdowns in collective consciousness and solidarity. Conversely, as Durkheim (1933/2012) articulates, anomie can be mitigated through organic solidarity, which entails individuals acknowledging their essential role and forming a group that shares collective responsibility (Hausner, 2019; Smith, 2014). In our case, a pooled budget is in focus and we use Durkheim’s theory to analyse the workings of organic solidarity and anomic formations in a collaborative setting. Therefore, in the following, we delve into the complexities involved in formalizing management accounting within a collaboration, inquiring into the ways in which it produces a collective consciousness and solidarity, yet remains fragile and susceptible to anomie. We ask not only how collaboration is enabled by management accounting and how anomie disrupts it, but also how anomie is counteracted to enable the achievement of the collaboration’s objectives. We base our analysis on 29 interviews concerning a coordination association formed by public organizations, which jointly fund rehabilitation measures through a pooled budget aimed at reducing long-term unemployment.

We find that collaboration is initially enabled through the formalization of a pooled budget that fosters solidarity among the participating actors. However, regulation and political directives also imbue the pooled budget with anomic tendencies that pose constraints on cooperation and undermine efforts to reach the collaboration’s objectives. To enable cooperation further, counteractions must be undertaken to foster solidarity, which require that the collaborating actors succeed in establishing relative independence from the funding organizations to facilitate effective planning, resource allocation and monitoring of activities. In short, from the vantage point of this study, management accounting in collaborations requires support not only from external sources—such as regulation, funding partners and hierarchical mandates—but also from within. That is, for management accounting to be genuinely collaborative, it must be enabled internally, arising from the collaboration itself and reflecting its inter-organizational nature.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The next section offers a more detailed literature review, followed by a presentation of the conceptual framework, specifically Durkheim’s notions of organic solidarity and anomie. Section 4 outlines the study’s methodology, while section 5 presents the findings and analysis. The paper closes with a discussion of our findings and a conclusion.

The increasing prevalence of inter-organizational arrangements within the public sector is undeniable, marking a departure from the strong focus on streamlining that New Public Management (NPM) emphasizes for public sector organizations (Almqvist and Wällstedt, 2013). Within accounting research, this has led to the recognition that “the scope of the activity of management control is enlarged and is no longer confined within the legal boundaries of the organization” (Otley, 1994:293). Research on inter-organizational accounting has thus focused on identifying optimal designs for accounting control (Mahama and Chua, 2016) to establish stability and improve information flows between collaborating parties (Kajüter and Kulmala, 2005; Agndal and Nilsson, 2010; Mouritsen et al., 2001). To that end, several accounting techniques have been proposed, i.e. open-book accounting (Agndal and Nilsson, 2010; Kajüter and Kulmala, 2010; Mouritsen, Hansen and Hansen, 2001), target costing (Carlsson-Wall and Kraus, 2010), customer accounting (Cäker and Strömsten, 2010; Lind and Strömsten, 2006), and inter-organizational cost management (Coad and Cullen, 2006).

Research shows that accounting plays a crucial role in stabilizing collaborative relationships (Ahlgren and Lind, 2023). Accounting can have profound effects on both the relationships and the organizations involved (Burchell et al., 1980; Håkansson and Lind, 2004; Mahama and Chua, 2016; Mouritsen et al., 2001; Mouritsen and Thrane, 2006; Thrane and Hald, 2006; Kastberg, 2014) as it mediates, shapes and constructs inter-organizational relations. In network settings, it also plays a role in establishing a stable network enterprise (Håkansson and Lind, 2004; Mouritsen and Thrane, 2006). This formalization process involves strengthening the durability and stability of collaboration by employing specific management accounting techniques, foster trust, facilitate relationships, and serve as safeguards against opportunistic behaviour (Håkansson and Lind, 2007).

However, formalizing collaboration through management accounting can also result in unintended consequences that lead to instability (Kastberg, 2014), compartmentalization (Kastberg and Lagström, 2019), and the instigation of intra-organizational transformations (Mouritsen, Hansen and Hansen, 2001). Cäker and Siverbo (2011) demonstrate that relational factors, particularly trust, have a significant impact on the control packages of joint ventures. They note that the desire to preserve trust can hinder the achievement of economies of scale, as efforts to maintain trust may lead to avoiding the challenges of cooperation in favour of political correctness and other interests (Cäker and Siverbo, 2011). Cäker and Nyland (2017) find that smaller municipalities in a joint venture face disadvantages in setting the agenda. This is because larger municipalities, with their more specialized knowledge and greater share in the venture, tend to dominate the collaboration. We pose that such marginalization could jeopardize the entire partnership. In a similar vein, Kastberg (2014) illustrates how a new governance model, which introduced roles such as purchaser, provider, and cost centre, was developed and applied to a shared IT system within a municipality. The transition to a shared system necessitated the disentanglement of an IT infrastructure that was deeply embedded across various units. However, excessive disentanglement resulted in an unstable environment, raising concerns about the entire collaboration process. Kastberg and Lagström (2019) demonstrate how costbenefit calculations ultimately lead to the division of collaboration into two entities, serving as a means to compartmentalize complexity. In sum, research indicates that while accounting formalization provides stability in collaborations, it also produces repercussions on collaborative dynamics that can lead to instability.

Research on the role of budgets in inter-organizational settings highlights the necessity of formalizing collaboration. Kraus (2012), for example, argues in a study of caregivers that cooperation involves sharing information and coordinating visits. These activities, Kraus (2012) notes, require flexibility and deviation from rigid schedules in order to meet the needs of other organizations. Loyalty to the employer and efforts to maintain a strict organizational budget constrain flexibility and thus overshadow collaborative efforts (Kraus, 2012). Similarly, Wällstedt and Almqvist (2015) argue that budget constraints influence collaboration. They illustrate that social care services were reluctant to initiate “cases” out of concern for receiving negative audit results within their organizations. As demonstrated by Wällstedt and Almqvist (2015) and Kraus (2012), the demand to maintain individual budgets often clashes with the imperative to collaborate. Therefore, it is considered crucial to establish structures that support collaboration and enable focus on achieving collaborative outcomes. To this end, Kurunmäki and Miller (2011) suggest the use of pooled budgets, which enable organizations to merge their resources into a shared fund for joint utilization. They argue that pooled budgets are underutilized, primarily due to a lack of trust and engagement among participants, and that collaboration can only be sustained if formal structures, such as accounting procedures, are established. Furthermore, they emphasize that these formal structures should ideally be established before the collaboration begins.

However, the formalization of collaboration by way of pooled budgets does not necessarily imply success. In spite of pooled budgets, Cäker and Siverbo (2011) write that trust issues eclipse collaboration. Similarly, Cäker and Nyland (2017) show that domination tendencies stifle collaboration. Within coordination associations, Andersson and Wikström (2014) examine performance management and the creation of accountability, finding that accountability is primarily constructed with a narrow focus on intra-organizational performance. Consequently, inter-organizational performance is only addressed anecdotally and is thus excluded from the accountability framework. While Andersson and Wikström (2014) focus on formalization, their empirical cases, which among other elements included pooled budgets, indicate that pooled budgets do not necessarily promote collaboration or result in shared accountability.

Forssell et al. (2013) illustrate that the project form is employed not to establish a formal structure that facilitates collaboration, but rather as a response to external funding sources that impose standardized solutions. As a result, the project form, which includes a [pooled] budget, serves more as a legitimizing tool than as a means to enhance collaboration. Moreover, research suggests that short-term projects are seldom integrated into regular activities, leading the “projectification” of collaboration to push collaborative efforts and their activities to a marginal position.

In conclusion, the conflicting demands placed on public-sector officials—balancing accountability to one’s own organizations with the desire to foster collaboration to address complex problems—have led to challenges and constraints in collaborative efforts. Focusing on intra-organizational control contradicts the imperative for collaboration (Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015; Kraus, 2012), because an emphasis on budgets tends to reinforce hierarchical structures and undermine horizontal aspirations (Grossi and Argento, 2022). To overcome these challenges, accounting practices should be pooled and established before initiating collaboration (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015). Kurunmäki and Miller (2011) further argue that controlling devices must be in place before the cooperation can start, due to their capacity to enable stand-alone performance and accountability of the cooperating organizations. However, research indicates that while formal collaboration structures offer stability, they can also become sources of instability, potentially leading to adverse effects on collaboration (Andersson and Wikström, 2014; Cäker and Nyland, 2017; Cäker and Siverbo, 2011). This contradiction warrants further elaboration. In the following section, we turn to Durkheim’s notions of organic solidarity and anomie to further explore the dynamic role of accounting on inter-organizational collaborations as a source of stability and instability.

Durkheim (1933/2012)¹ described modern societies as characterized by a pronounced level of social cohesion, wherein members of society are interdependent and rely on one another to perform specialized tasks. Durkheim termed this form of social cohesion “organic solidarity”, explaining that it replaces the “mechanical solidarity” of traditional society, where individuals largely thought and acted alike. Organic solidarity arises from the differences and interdependencies among specialized actors, fostering social cohesion through mutual reliance. This dynamic is reflected in the collaboration we study, where different parties assume different roles in coordinating rehabilitation efforts.

Specifically, according to Llewellyn (2014, p. 303), Durkheim suggests that moral values, which are internalized through the process of socialization, serve to constrain both the goals people pursue and the means they consider acceptable. This leads to social cohesion, which is achieved through the establishment of a core set of values within institutions. However, as Durkheim asserts “the collective conscience becomes smaller as labour is divided” (1933/2012, p. 364). This suggests that while specialization fosters cohesion, organic solidarity, efficiency and innovation, it also risks weakening the shared norms and values that bind groups together. Durkheim uses the term “anomie” to describe such a state of normlessness, a breakdown of norms or collective purpose that emerges when interdependence is unrecognized or unregulated.

According to Smith (2014, p. 395), anomie results from individualistic utility maximization, which is distinct from happiness. To exemplify, Smith notes that individuals wealthy enough to hire others to manage their children’s care tend to have strong ties to their workplace. These ties foster solidarity at work and “animate them to give their all” (Smith, 2014, p. 397). At the same time, Smith notes that “weak ties strengthen while strong ties weaken” (Smith, 2014, p. 397), meaning that while life in the workplace is reinforced, the collective conscience of families weakens into anomie—a condition where there is a diminished sense of shared values among individuals, leading to a sense of disconnectedness that undermines not only individuals but also social order as a whole. Hilbert (1986), who also interprets Durkheim’s concept of anomie, argues that it is not only a question of normlessness, but a breakdown in the social construction of reality. Hilbert argues that anomie is not just about the absence of norms but represents a withdrawal of moral reality, leading to a sense of anxiety and groundlessness. He contends that Durkheim saw society as not only regulating behaviour through norms but also as providing the very categories of thought that allow individuals to experience an orderly, objective world. When society’s regulating power weakens—what Durkheim calls anomie—it affects individuals’ ability to make sense of reality, causing a feeling of disorientation and meaninglessness. Hilbert (1986) emphasizes that although Durkheim’s work is often interpreted as focusing on norms and their internalization, a more profound reading reveals his concern with how society shapes the very experience of reality itself. Moreover, the breakdown of this “moral regulation of reality” is identified as the essence of anomie. Hilbert (1986) contends that anomie arises when individuals’ interpretive frameworks are systematically disrupted, resulting in anxiety and confusion. This disruption leads to a loss of social validation for personal experiences, causing isolation and a breakdown of meaning, which escalates to the collapse of social accountability and objective experience.

To overcome anomic conditions, individuals require social resources to effectively make sense of or communicate their experiences. Anomie can be addressed through organic solidarity, which involves individuals recognizing their essential role in society as a whole, particularly in the context of “a high natural division of labour” (Smith, 2014, p. 402). Such organic solidarity can arise through the formation of professional groups (Durkheim called them corporations), who share a collective responsibility (Hausner, 2019).

In line with Durkheim (1933/2012), we consider organic solidarity and anomie to be inherently connected, reflecting two aspects of the same concept: social cohesion. This pertains to the strength of the ties that connect individuals within a social group to one another and to the group as a whole, as well as the group’s inclination to remain united while pursuing a common objective. Although specialization enhances cohesion and fosters organic solidarity, it can also erode the shared norms and values that unify groups, thereby producing anomic conditions that may lead to division. The very conditions that enable collaboration, through a pooled budget in this case, also plant the seeds of division if not carefully managed. It is this duality that we seek to explore in a collaborative setting where a pooled budget—imposed from outside the collaboration—initially serves as both a source of stability and a catalyst for cooperation. However, its very construction can also disrupt collaboration (Cäker and Siverbo, 2011; Cäker and Nyland, 2017; Kastberg and Lagström, 2019). We further investigate how anomie is counteracted from within the collaboration, revealing how the budget is internally complemented and reconstituted, rather than merely a pooled resource externally imposed.

This study investigates the pooling of a budget by four public organizations in a coordination association (henceforth CA, in Swedish samordningsförbund). Within CAs, multiple organizations collaborate by contributing to a pooled budget and carry out rehabilitation measures aimed at reducing long-term unemployment. The organizations that are included in the studied CA are the Public Employment Services (henceforth PES), the Social Insurance Agency (henceforth SIA), the participating regional governments and municipalities. These actors are brought together by the Act on financial coordination of rehabilitation efforts (FINSAM), which aims to enhance and facilitate cooperation by pooling resources into a shared budget to finance measures that help individuals return to work or education.

This study draws on 29 interviews conducted between 2020 and 2022. Author 1 carried out all the interviews, each lasting approximately one hour. Of these, 11 interviews were conducted in person, six were conducted over the telephone, and the remaining 12 were video calls conducted via Zoom (see table 1 in the Appendix).

Interviews were conducted with representatives from all participating organizations, including the manager and two employees at the coordination association. The interviewees included individuals from both the preparatory level, such as case managers and unit managers, and the board level, including heads of departments and politicians. Some interviewees held collaborative responsibilities and were designated as “collaborations officers”. While most of the interviews were conducted remotely, the first author has met almost all interviewees in person, with the exception of three, while observing meetings. Observations at the CA occurred on six different occasions, with durations ranging from one hour to a full-day workshop lasting six hours. Among them, two were at a preparatory level, two at the board level, and two were board level workshops. The meetings and workshop served as opportunities to witness collaborative work in action. They were sites where decisions were made regarding which rehabilitation measures to initiate, how to implement the suggested measures, and to discuss the outcomes of completed measures. Thus, observing the interactions between representatives of the collaborating organizations served as a complement to the interviews, offering a more indepth reflection from each interviewee’s perspective. Interviewees were selected using the snowball method. After conducting the first twelve interviews, further selection was based on their roles within various working groups in the CA and their membership in their respective home organizations. With the interviewees’ consent, all interviews were recorded using either a mobile phone app or Zoom’s recording feature. All interviews were transcribed verbatim. In order to ensure anonymity, names and other traces of the interviewees’ identity have, in accordance with GDPR, been omitted from the transcripts. These transcripts are securely stored on a cloud-based repository.

The interviews were semi-structured in nature, and open-ended questions were asked. A listening approach was applied in order not to interrupt the interviewee. The approach taken to the interviews is that an interview is a socially constructed situation and that the interview is a “complex social event” (Alvesson 2003:14), entirely produced through the interaction between the interviewee and the researcher. Thus, the interviews could be seen as opportunities for impression management and showcasing their achievements, while also serving as outlets for expressing frustration and dissatisfaction. Oftentimes, the interview could be seen as a site for identity work, where the interviewee confirmed their own work to themselves (Alvesson, 2003). For a fuller comprehension of the regulatory setup of the collaboration, documents such as appropriation letters, as well as the instructions for the participating collaborators, have been studied.

The analysis of the empirical material, interviews and documents, was performed in several steps. First, a thorough analysis of all interview transcripts was executed out of which the theme for further analysis arose: sharedness in relation to budgets. Then coding and categorizing using Charmaz (2006) was performed with an initial coding in NVivo using codes such as budget, resources, economy, control, money, numbers, finances, need, plan, contracts, support, count, and payment. While reading the sections in the transcripts around the NVivo codes, further coding was done line-by-line. We achieved 79 unique codes, which we used to synthesize our data further. In this way, we made sense of our data in the form of four different categories: 1) Regulatory directives for collaboration: missions and funding, 2) Practical understandings about collaboration among the collaborating parties, 3) How the collaboration works, and 4) The role and function of the budget collaboration. In the final analytical step, the results of the focused coding were aligned with the conceptual framework, leading to a theoretical interpretation of the categories. This was achieved by applying Durkheim’s (1933/2012) notions of organic solidarity and anomie to analyse our findings of formalization through a pooled budget.

In order to investigate how a pooled budget is involved in fostering stability and mitigating instability within a public sector collaboration, we here provide the findings from our analysis of the 29 semi-structured interviews with actors from the organizations partaking in the coordination association for reducing long-term unemployment, as well as secondary data pertaining to governmental regulations that govern such collaboration. This section first describes the regulatory directives and setup of the CA.

Based on 29 interviews with representatives from the participating organizations of a Coordination Association (including the manager and two employees of the CA) and drawing from Durkheim’s (1933/2012) notions of solidarity and anomie, we set out to study how collaboration is enabled by management accounting, how anomic tendencies disrupt it, and how they are in turn counteracted to enable the collaboration to achieve its objectives. In doing so, our aim has been to understand not only how management accounting fosters stability and contributes to instability in collaborative settings, but also how it is enabled to function as genuinely collaborative or inter-organizational.

Our study contributes to previous research in several ways. As previous research argues, management control devices, such as pooled budgets, are essential for holding organizations accountable for their performance and use of resources. Such devices also need to be in place before the cooperation starts, due to their capacity to enable stand-alone performance and accountability in the cooperating organizations (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015). However, previous literature also indicates that while formal collaboration structures offer stability, they can also become sources of instability, potentially leading to adverse effects on collaboration (Cäker and Nyland, 2017; Cäker and Siverbo, 2011; Andersson and Wikström, 2014; Kastberg and Lagström, 2019). Our study provides depth and nuance to these studies, by delineating the ways in which management accounting, a pooled budget in our case, functions as a ground that fosters organic solidarity, the ways in which such ground is nevertheless riddled with anomic tendencies, and how these anomic tendencies are counteracted not only to promote solidarity in the collaboration, but also to enable management accounting within the collaboration. In other words, on top of being formalized to enable management accounting of the collaboration, management accounting also needs to be enabled from within a collaboration itself as management accounting by and for the collaboration.

In effect, as Kastberg and Lagström (2019), who show that substantial simplification of the collaboration task is required for successful collaboration, we find that the focus that the pooled budget provides, although it serves as a foundation for collaboration, is reductive and shortsighted. In terms of our empirical example, such reduction enables success in quantitative terms but results in failure in qualitative terms, because although it enables higher numbers, it neglects the complex cases it was originally intended to address. This harkens back to the need for a collaboration to enable its management accounting to work effectively by counteracting the anomic tendencies that are inherent to a collaboration, i.e. the self-interest of its members, outside regulation and political change. Without such counteracting activities, the CA would have been compelled to simplify their operations and targets to comply with formal requirements from outside itself and thereby exclude more relevant targets.

Our study extends the research on budgeting within inter-organizational settings, which highlights the necessity of formalizing collaboration. Where Kraus (2012) finds that loyalty to the employer, and efforts on the part of members of inter-organizational collaborations to maintain a strict organizational budget, constrain flexibility and overshadow collaborative efforts, our study illustrates instead the work being done to counteract similar tendencies. It shows that the pooled budget does provide a ground for collaboration, albeit one that is riddled with anomic tendencies and, therefore, as Andersson and Wikström (2014) note, does not necessarily promote collaboration or shared accountability. More importantly, we show that the pooled budget in a collaboration can be actively shaped and its anomic tendencies counteracted to allow it to function effectively as a tool for collaboration and shared accountability in line with the goals of the collaboration and not those of the member organizations.

Similarly, in relation to trust in collaborations, we show that while management accounting may be a source of trust, such trust may be fraught with anomic tendencies that hinder collaborators from embracing the challenges of collaboration. This resonates with Cäker and Siverbo (2011) who argue that the willingness to maintain trust may make participants of a collaboration opt for political correctness or let themselves be dominated by bigger and stronger counterparts, as Cäker and Nyland (2017) write. From that perspective, our study highlights the efforts undertaken to maintain solidarity and trust among collaborative actors in order to uphold the collaboration as a collaboration and its management accounting as management accounting by and for the collaboration.

Our study further offers different insights from those presented by Forssell et al. (2013). They argue that the project form is utilized not to establish a formal structure conducive to collaboration, but rather as a reaction to external funding sources that mandate standardized solutions. Consequently, the project form, which includes a budget, functions more as a legitimizing instrument than as a mechanism to enhance collaboration. Similarly, our study reveals that a pooled budget, in which projects are included as activities, needs more than formalization imposed from the outside, as proposed by Kurunmäki and Miller (2011) and Wällstedt and Almqvist (2015). Management accounting, the pooled budget in our case, and the project form in Forssell et al (2013), need not be reduced to serve a legitimizing role, but can be made to fulfil a meaningful control function if enabled to do so from within the collaboration. By keeping the focus on the inter-organizational goal, promoting dialogue and mutual understanding, management accounting can be developed to serve inter-organizational management control.

This study contributes to the existing literature by elucidating the complexities inherent in inter-organizational collaboration involving a pooled budget. It demonstrates that merely establishing a pooled budget prior to the commencement of collaboration, which is argued to be necessary to ensure the independent performance and accountability of the participating organizations (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015), is insufficient to sustain collaboration. In this context, the pooled budget is a mandatory mechanism for participants in the collaboration that provides a basis for collaboration. Such foundation, however, is riddled with problems. For example, some collaborators may regard the pooled budget as an imperative that must always be valued, while others view it as a secondary consideration to the participants self-interest or other responsibilities. The pooled budget, then, enables collaboration in one sense; however it also needs to be actively shaped from within the collaboration to become not only external management accounting imposed by outsiders, but also management accounting developed by and for the collaboration. In this sense, our findings open up the discussion of management accounting in collaborations to be more nuanced, distinguishing between management accounting in collaborations that is externally imposed, standardized, compliance driven and potentially burdensome to the collaboration and management accounting developed from within collaborations that is reflective of joint goals and used as a tool for coordination.

Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at IRSPM 2024, 13th International EIASM Public Sector Conference and the 27th NFF Conference. We thank the attendees for valuable comments and feedback. We also kindly thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments in developing this paper. This work was supported by Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser; Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius stiftelse, Tore Browaldhs stiftelse (P22-0015).