Josep Maria Rosanas

Publications

• Economics-based models typically overlook management acts and capability development. We propose a model that analyzes the aggregate behavior of a population of firms resulting from both specific management decisions and learning processes, that induce changes in companies' capabilities. Decisions are made under imperfect information and bounded rationality, and managers may sacrifice short-term performance in exchange for qualitative variables that affect their firm's future potential. The proposed model provides a structured setting in which these issues - often discussed only informally - can be systematically analyzed through simulation producing a variety of hard-to-anticipate emergent behaviors. Economic performance is quite sensitive to managers' estimates of their firms' capabilities and companies willing to sacrifice short-run results for future potential appear to be more stable than the rest. Also, bounded rationality can produce chaotic dynamics reminiscent of real life situations.

• The last two decades have seen a great deal of scandals in the business world. Many of them have to do with accounting and management control, but in substantially different ways. This paper focuses on the dysfunctional effects of systems of measurement and incentives, and the possible ways to overcome those dysfunctional effects, achieving a stable state of goal congruence through the introduction of justice in the design and use of management control systems, by contributing to the ethical development within the organization. We first analyze how the discipline of control systems came into being, and show how, in the last decades, both in theory and practice, has gone in a direction of becoming more `automatic,? and then, we provide some case studies of how they are at the origin of many of the scandals. Borrowing from Rosanas and Velilla (J Bus Eth 57:83-96, 2005) and from Cugueró-Escofet and Rosanas (Manag Account Res 24:23?40, 2013), we develop a model of control systems based on justice, where we make the distinction between formal and informal justice. We are then able to show how informal justice is the key element in the dynamics of a control system: to preserve formal justice, or to evolve toward formal justice. In any case, it is a necessary condition to reach a state of maximum goal congruence, stable through time, as a consequence of the ethical development that this type of systems are able to generate. Bibliographic citation: Cugueró-Escofet, Natàlia; Rosanas, Josep Maria, "The Ethics of Metrics: Overcoming the Dysfunctional Effects of Performance Measurements Through Justice", Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 140, No. 4, 2017, pp 615 - 631

• In light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks, it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency, as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice, fairness and enhanced understanding, and to improving their personal integrity. This article, written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior, misbehaviors in finances and accounting, professionalism in accounting, ethical investing and corporate reporting. We conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity-human activity actually-and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules, but as a mutual and interdependent system of values (human goods), virtues, and principles.

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