Content area
Full Text
INTRODUCTION
In the last 10 years, management accounting research (MAR) has made dramatic strides in relevance and rigor. The challenges now facing this research area include: (1) maintaining this momentum; (2) finding new, relatively unexplored areas that offer the promise of further substantive contributions to knowledge; and (3) meeting the first two challenges while maintaining and increasing scientific rigor.
This paper examines future directions for MAR. Emphasis is given to promoting efforts that will identify relatively unexplored areas that could make a substantive contribution to knowledge. Specifically, we are interested in research topics that would be of high priority to general managers, management accountants and management accounting researchers. We believe that the interaction and interests of these stakeholders has increased substantially in recent years, and the potential for producing research of mutual interest is very high. To maximize their contribution, however, researchers must make careful initial choices that match areas of high general interest with those that exploit their core academic competencies.
The paper proceeds as follows. To avoid ambiguity, in the next section we define management accounting, management accounting research and its boundaries. Next, we discuss the sources of ideas for MAR and specifically address the role of practicing managers in helping to generate research ideas. The ties between what practitioners think are important business topics and those that have been studied by academic researchers are illustrated next in a comparison of survey results and a literature review by Shields (1997). One under-discussed issue related to the linkages between practice and research is how to determine whether new management accounting systems and practices are better than existing ones. This issue is addressed in the following section. The subsequent section discusses issues related to how academic researchers can use ideas generated from managers to advance theory and practice, and the final section summarizes and concludes the paper.
DEFINING MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
In order to define management accounting research (MAR) it is necessary to define management accounting. While definitions of management accounting abound, we follow the Institute of Management Accountant's (1997) draft definition, "Management accounting is a value adding, continuous improvement process of planning, designing, measuring, and operating nonfinancial and financial information systems that guides management action, motivates behavior, and supports and creates the cultural...