The strategic governance of the digital accounting environment: insights from virtual museums

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the strategic governance of the digital transformation of the accounting environment in cultural organizations, with a specific focus on practices of social responsibility and stakeholder engagement in virtual museums. Design/Methodology/Approach – By adopting a multiple case study approach, this study investigated five Italian virtual museums and their digitalization processes. Data were collected and triangulated from multiple sources, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with 16 key informants. Findings – Considering the digitalization of the accounting environment as a paradigmatic change, the authors identify three key transitions for its strategic governance: from the static, technical and physical to the relational, emotional and digital; from bureaucratic managerialism to value cocreation; and from traditional CSR to integrated external engagement. Moreover, the authors found that social responsibility and stakeholder engagement practices are used in a limited way, and that the use of social media appears to be increasingly important and to be carried out through an emergent rather than a deliberate strategy. Research Limitations/Implications – The paper draws from a limited sample of case studies in one country and is based on exploratory research. This paper calls for more comparative studies using a longitudinal approach to investigate the impacts of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations. Originality/Value – This study is one of the few studies concentrating on the effects of digitalization on the accounting environment of cultural organizations.