Dr Paola Madini

Paola has a PhD in business administration and management from Bocconi University, with a specialisation in accounting and control. She holds a PGCHE from the University of Kent and is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Previously, she has been Assistant Professor in management accounting and control at ESADE, researcher at SDA Bocconi School of Management and visiting PhD candidate at RSM, Erasmus University.

Paola is member of many academic associations, including the European Accounting Association and the Eurasian Economics and Business Society.

Paola is actively involved in the accounting academic community. She is active as:

• Reviewer for conferences and journals (i.e. in the Journal of Management Control)
• Invited discussant and chair in conferences (i.e. AAA Annual Meeting and EAA Annual Meetings)
• Scientific committee member for conferences (i.e. Socialising Business Research conference) Organisational committee member for conferences (i.e. for a conference sponsored by AOS).
• Paola is member of Mc Graw Hill Higher Education Advisory Board. She has acted as invited reviewer for multiple internationally used accounting textbooks from publishers. She has been participating in research studies advising publishers about new portfolio development in management accounting. 
• Paola has received two awards for her excellent contribution as reviewer from the Journal of Management Control: Distinguished Reviewer Award 2017 and Runner up reviewer 2015.

Paola’s research interests include the design and the use of management control systems (MCS) and their organisational and behavioural implications; budgeting; MCS in inter-organisational relationships, performance measurement and corporate governance aspects.

She does field-based research involving finance and accounting professionals using case study and survey research designs. Her aim is to conduct research that advances academic knowledge and helps accounting and finance managers to improve their professional life.

Paola's projects focus on the design of budgetary processes. Using a cross-sectional analysis, she is investigating which procedures companies adopt for structuring the process and what are the determinants of this adoption. She has also been studying the behavioural effects of using a negotiated budgetary process that spans multiple managerial levels. Currently, she is supervising a project on the impact of the pandemic on the design and use of MCS by U.K. healthcare organizations.

Paola’s research interests also include management accounting education, with a focus on teaching effectiveness in using participative teaching methodologies in module design and delivery.

Paola's teaching interests include management control systems, management accounting, performance measurement and field-based research methods. At Kent, she has been teaching management accounting in multiple modules to UG and PG students.

Before joining Kent, she taught a variety of audiences at Esade, RSM Erasmus University and Bocconi University.

To foster students' learning, she uses participative-centred learning methods, as case studies, role-plays, presentations and discussions. She likes to use a flipped learning approach in course design. 

Paola has been supervising postgraduate students in Accounting and International Business on master thesis and in-company projects. She has also been supervising PhD students in Accounting. She welcomes application for supervising projects on the following topics:

Supervision Topics

• Design and use of management control systems in service or retail companies 
• Design and use of performance measurement systems in family businesses or start-up companies
• Top management team and management control systems' design
• Target setting and managerial performance evaluation 
• Management accounting education 

Past Supervisees

• C. Sacchetti: Design and implementation of a managerial reporting system in an acquired subsidiary: the case of Sunglasshut Iberia.
  
• S. Emberger: Design and implementation of the budgeting and managerial reporting system in a fashion retail company in Germany.
  
• G. Hynson: Design and implementation of a financial accounting system in a US-based start-up company.
  
• M. Mocanu: Managing the costs of training your clients: the case of the Professional Products Division of L'Oreal Spain. 
• W. Awais: Accounting education and neo-colonialism: a Gramscian analysis of higher education in Pakistan. 
• C. Robson: Strategizing international expansion: a comprehensive analysis of McKenzie Intelligence Services' entry into the US market.

Paola is an Italian certified accountant and member of The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) and of The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). She has been a Research Advisor for the UK for the ‘Diversifying accounting talent in Europe 2022 IMA-IFAC report’.

Before joining Kent, she worked as assistant to the Head of planning and control at Kone Italy.

She has been involved in ad-hoc consulting activities on management control systems' design and implementation. For example, she participated in a research project sponsored by IBM Italy on the role of the integrative finance organisation in Benetton. She was also involved in a project sponsored by DocFlow on implementing a document management system at their clients, and in a project sponsored by CIMA, on fashion companies' implementation of accounting information systems to exchange information with suppliers.