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|b The subject of accountability in organizations is originally and widely understood within the framework of economic rationalization. In particular, accountability in mainstream accounting literature has assumed to be related to the stewardship function and analyzed within the confines of Principal-Agent theory (Stevens and Thevaranjan, 2010; Laughlin, 1996). The framework assumes that the transfer of economic resources by the Principal to the Agent gives the Princiapl rights to demand and get accounts and explanations from the Agent (Gray, 1988). Within the same framework, management accounting is seen as a technically oriented and objective practice through which accountability is reinforced. This approach has recently been subjected to critiques from a small but growing amount of literature. In general, the critiques are levelled at the approach's apparent over-emphasis of economics as an overriding influence in the construction of accountability in organizations. In particular, the critiques (e.g. Willmot, 1996) called for alternative approaches that explore the role played by culture, ethnicity and other social practices. However, there have been few case studies exploring the roles of theses alternative influences with Sinclair (1995) and Chew and Greer (1997) providing notable contributions. \ This research pursues these alternative propositions further and uses two longitudinal case studies conducted in Egypt. Egypt, a developing country is characterized by social practices and culture that are different from the Anglo-Saxon Western social practices and cultures on which the bulk of the research reported in literature is based. Conducting the research in Egypt thus provided the opportunity to explore the influence of wider social values and practices on organizational practices of accountability (Ezzamel et al., 2007). A middle range thinking methodology is used to gather, analyze, interpret and make sense of the case data (Brown and Brignall, 2007). This research developed a skeletal model and used it as a guiding framework and analytical tool for studying the construction of accountability practices in the two case organizations. The research used Laughlin's (1996) skeletal models of organizational change to explore the processes of change in accountability practices (Ezzarnel et al., 2007) at the two case organizations. This research developed and proposed two extensions to Laughlin's (1991) original models pf "second order" colonization type organizational change model.
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