Understanding management accounting practices: A personal journey
Section snippets
Setting off
After qualifying and working for 2 years as a chartered accountant, I joined the University of Manchester in 1970, as a P.D. Leake Teaching Fellow—funded by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). This was at a time when accounting as a university subject in the UK (especially in England1) was still
Understanding management accounting practices
In the early days, when I had just started doing case study research, there was one comment which a manager made that has stuck with me ever since. As I mentioned earlier, in the mid-1980s John Roberts and I were studying the role of accounting and accountability in the organisational control of large companies. In one of the companies we were studying, a large UK-based multinational, a management accountant described how practices had developed in his part of the company; a relatively small
The Burns and Scapens framework
This framework, which is set out in Fig. 1,9 draws on the ideas of OIE described above.10 At the top of the figure there are the institutions which comprise the ways of thinking
Stability and change
In the case of NP, we can see both evolution and revolution. There was a quite revolutionary change, but within it there were also evolutionary processes building on the existing quality-oriented ways of thinking. Thus, there were certain elements of stability within the process of change. So it is important not to regard stability and change as mutually exclusive—there can be elements of stability within change; and change may be necessary if things are to remain stable.12
Extensions and limitations
In this section, I will describe the work of some recent PhD students who have examined management accounting change in different countries, using the Burns and Scapens framework. I will start with a study, which explored the interaction of external and internal institutions in shaping management accounting practices. This study identified trust as one of the issues which needs to be considered in studying management accounting change. The next study will look more explicitly at issues of
Summary
To finish, I would like to summarise my personal journey trying to understand management accounting practices. From a starting point at which I was working with mathematical models and seeking to explore the extent to which they could be used to explain the diversity of practices in the population, I have moved to a position where I am studying the management accounting practices of individual organisations and seeking to explain how they are shaped and how they change (or are resistant to
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☆This paper is a revised and extended version of a plenary address given at the 2005 Annual Conference of the British Accounting Association held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, and was consequent on my receiving the 2004 BAA Distinguished Academic Award.