Enterprise Resource Planning systems and accountants: towards hybridization?

This paper aims to examine how the adoption of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system challenges the definition of the expertise and roles of accountants within organizations, leading to new, hybrid positions. By drawing on structuration theory, we propose to conceptualize the potential change in accountants' practices and positions as a structuration process, and ERP systems as modalities of structuration, providing new interpretive schemes, norms and co-ordination and control facilities, which influence the direction of hybridization between accountants and other professional groups. Since the results of this process are neither predictable a priori, nor generalizable, we are convinced that detailed interpretive case studies of ERP implementations are needed to understand their complex impacts on accountants. Hence, we provide one such study in order to explore the 'ambiguous' and often inconsistent consequences for accountants deriving from the adoption of an ERP system.