In this regard, it is important to recognize that the Handelsbanken
story is much more about promoting and
controlling for radically decentralized employees than it
is about managing without budgets.
Perhaps most importantly, the finding of the frequent
use of subjective considerations and allowances for noncontrollable
events within a budget paradigm would seem
to cast doubt on the validity of the RAPM paradigm that has
dominated management accounting research (Hartmann,
2000). At a minimum, there is a need to better understand
how subjective considerations and other allowances are
used in performance evaluation.