Managing the Stock, Not the Capability: Means Ends Decoupling in A Public Organization After a Legislated Revenue Shock
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35870/ijmsit.v6i2.8595Keywords:
Means ends decoupling, Organizational capability, Symbolic response, Public organizations, Performance indicators, Institutional shockAbstract
When an organization cannot contest a resource loss, what determines whether its response builds capability or merely improves the reported indicator? This study examines Central Java Province, Indonesia, whose two largest tax instruments were statutorily reassigned to lower tier jurisdictions in January 2025, cutting provincial tax revenue by 19.51% in a single year. The province responded with a tax amnesty and reported a 15.96% reduction in its receivables stock. Reconciling the disclosed movements in the allowance for doubtful receivables implies write-offs of approximately IDR 656.91 billion against a reported stock reduction of IDR 480.34 billion, which would mean that receivables excluding derecognition grew by roughly IDR 176.57 billion. The reconciliation is a derived estimate rather than a reported figure, and the paper states the conditions under which it would not hold. The ratio that measures collection capability, which is not sensitive to those conditions, deteriorated from 20.39% to 21.29% of annual tax revenue. A within case comparison sharpens the interpretation: in the same organization and the same year, user charges reached 123.05% of target while taxes reached 91.81%, indicating that the shortfall was instrument-specific rather than organization wide. The study theorizes this as means ends decoupling under an uncontestable shock and proposes, for subsequent testing, three conditions that should make an indicator directed response more likely than a capability-directed one.
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