All your time, all the time: a critical ethnography in a knowledge-intensive firm

Abstract

All Your Time, All The Time: A Critical Ethnography in a Knowledge-intensive Firm This thesis is a study of management control change within one department of a knowledge-intensive firm (KnowCo). Using a critical ethnography, I examine a management initiative to change the time recording practices of staff. Within knowledge-intensive firms, time charging is the main financial control through which projects are costed and clients charged commensurable fees. Whilst time/cost data is vital to the success of these firms, employees routinely undercharge their time, making it difficult to cost projects and set fees. When fees are fixed, undercharging artificially inflates the profitability of projects making it a widely accepted practice amongst staff. To address the undercharging of time, and the inflation of profitability, KnowCo embarked on a mission (‘All Your Time, All The Time’ (AYTATT)) to change how staff charged their time so that they charged all of the time they worked. This initiative attempted to change time recording practices to improve the reliability of cost information, and therefore, financial control. AYTATT held the potential to impact negatively project profitability and thus the perceived performance of staff. This study explores the implementation of AYTATT and its impact on employees. Through telling the story of AYTATT, this thesis offers new insights into the undercharging of time and management control change. For AYTATT to be effective, it had to challenge the ways management controls associated with time charging functioned. My research suggests that the relationships between management controls and the undercharging of time within the firm were poorly understood and so were largely ignored by management as they implemented AYTATT. Instead, the project focused on shaping employees’ perceptions of the undercharging of time through rhetoric. Whilst the use of rhetorical strategies resulted in management control change within KnowCo, there was significant deviation from the aims of AYTATT and the outcomes observed in this study.