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1. Introduction
Chair in research seminar: Thanks for your presentation, Lee. It was interesting to learn how your case company went about developing their performance measurement system. Now, does anybody have any questions or comments about the presentation? Colleague # 1: I have a question about the theory part. Didn’t you say that the theory you are using here is Actor-Network Theory?Presenter: Yes, that's right.Colleague #1: Okay then, could you tell us how your research actually contributes to ANT? I didn’t get that from your presentation.Presenter: Well, ummm […] ANT is a popular theory for studying how innovations are constructed, and I’m trying to show how different interests affected how the system eventually turned out […] I’m not sure if this answers your question […]
Colleague #1: Actually, what I meant was, what new things did you learn about ANT in this study?Colleague #2: Is the aim in this research really to develop ANT? Aren’t you trying to contribute to the theory on performance measurement?[1]
The purpose and function of theories in research are a constant source of inspiration to scholars of management accounting. New or refined frameworks for characterizing a study's contribution to theory have been presented, such as Keating's (1995) taxonomy that categorizes studies according to whether their purpose is to discover, illustrate, specify, or refute theory. However, as such, is the notion of theory sufficient to cover all relevant aspects? In interdisciplinary management accounting studies, theories often appear in two distinct roles, domain theory and method theory – the categorization introduced by Lukka (2005). A domain theory refers to a particular set of knowledge on a substantive topic area situated in a field or domain[2] such as management accounting, while a method theory can be defined as a meta-level conceptual system for studying the substantive issue(s) of the domain theory at hand. It is important to realize that these definitions of domain theory and method theory are not absolute, but essentially relative; no theory is a domain theory or a method theory per se as the label depends on their role in the study in question. Moreover, these roles are not static categories as they interact with each other over time.
While the application of method theories, or “theoretical lenses” (e.g. Modell,...