Introduction

The reasons, processes and outcomes relating to changes to accounting in the public sector have been a near constant topic of inquiry since at least the 1990s (Broadbent & Guthrie, 2008; Cooper, Ezzamel, & Qu, 2017; Järvenpää & Länsiluoto, 2016). Many researchers associate these changes with reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM), which introduced management accounting and control practices from the private sector to enhance efficiency, effectiveness and public accountability (Bracci, Maran, & Inglis, 2017; Dunleavy & Hood, 1994; English & Skellern, 2005; Hood, 1991; Lapsley, 2008). The literature on changes to management accounting has emerged in different and partly overlapping clusters (Lukka, 2007). For instance, these changes to accounting practices have been studied from a number of perspectives, including environmental contingencies, change management approaches (e.g. Carlin & Guthrie, 2003; Christensen & Lægreid, 2007; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004; Scapens & Roberts, 1993), and institutional-based views (e.g. Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002; Ho, 2011; Scapens, 2006; Ter Bogt, 2008). However, very few management accounting studies (Granlund & Lukka, 1998; Granlund, 2001; Lukka, 2007) pay explicit attention to the flipside of change, namely stability. Siti-Nabiha and Scapens (2005) show that stability and change are not necessarily contradictory or opposing forces, but can coexist in an evolutionary process (see also Aroles & McLean, 2016). Furthermore, studies of management accounting change tend to examine whether and why a certain management accounting technology was implemented, focusing on change within formal systems (Arnaboldi, Lapsley, & Steccolini, 2015; Cooper & Kaplan, 1988; Kaplan & Norton, 1996). The informal domain of participants’ actions and their everyday behavior in the organization has received much less attention (Aroles & McLean, 2016; Lukka, 2007). This study draws on Englund, Gerdin, and Burns’s (2011) review of the empirical accounting literature on stability (p. 501) to provide an account of how macro (external pressures) and micro (organizational) factors can explain the preference for stability over a change. Our primary research question is: how and why do factors at the macro (external pressures) and micro (organizational) levels influence the preference for stability over a change? Diverse studies have conceived organizational actors’ behavior to be a consequence of external pressures. This acknowledges a continuous relationship between external and organizational levels that is often deterministic or “taken for granted” (Englund et al., 2011, p. 501; Giddens, 1984, p. 60). In our study, the analysis of the external context is especially appropriate given the political nature and implications of regulatory change in the Italian public sector. These external pressures are also subject to the reflexivity of organizational agents and their conscious decisions, which are interconnected with the micro-organizational level (Englund & Gerdin, 2014; Englund et al., 2011; Greenhalgh & Stones, 2010; Liguori & Steccolini, 2012; Pina, Torres, & Yetano, 2009).