Organisational Resistance and Operational Complexities in Campus Networks
The primary empirical finding indicates that although activity-based costing generates superior financial functionality, systemic adoption across higher education clusters is constrained by institutional resistance, technical unpreparedness, and centralised administrative coordination rather than institutional scale. Evidence from multi-campus university systems demonstrates that academic stakeholders consistently perceive activity-based costing information as possessing higher functionality than traditional cost accounting frameworks (The Activity-based costing (ABC) in a Public Higher Education Institutions (HEI): Stakeholders perceptions, 2013). Furthermore, investigations across multi-campus clusters reveal that centralised university administration creates uniform operational conditions where information technology must operate effectively as both an administrative support system and a management tool across branch campuses (The importance of IT in the adaption of Activity-based costing (ABC) in Higher Education Institutions (HEI), 2013). Despite these operational advantages, empirical research demonstrates that institutional size, cost structure, and product diversity remain insufficient to guarantee successful accounting transitions without decisive leadership, technical readiness, and resource alignment (Barriers to Implementing Activity-Based Costing (ABC) in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges: Insights from senior finance staff in South African Higher Education Institutions, 2025). Senior finance personnel highlight that behavioural resistance to change and technical deficiencies constitute the most critical barriers to implementation, necessitating leadership-driven change management and specialised professional training (Barriers to Implementing Activity-Based Costing (ABC) in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges: Insights from senior finance staff in South African Higher Education Institutions, 2025). Consequently, the empirical evidence confirms that organizational culture and technical capability represent the decisive determinants of costing reform across distributed campus clusters.