The societal relevance of management accounting: An introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This essay introduces the special issue of Accounting and Business Research exploring the societal relevance of management accounting and locates the individual contributions within this research agenda. In contrast to prevailing, managerialist conceptions of relevance, the discussion is guided by an over-riding ambition to turn management accounting research “inside out” to examine the effects of management accounting practices on a broader range of constituencies and interests in society and the formation of such practices beyond individual organisations. I start by charting the development of extant and emerging debates on the relevance of management accounting research and practice and then outline some pertinent research themes worthy of further exploration. In doing so, I pay particular attention to emerging research illustrating how management accounting becomes implicated in the external regulation and governance of organisations, the shaping of markets and the wider, societal consequences of such processes. I also discuss some theoretical and methodological implications of exploring such topics.

Keywords:

• governance
• management accounting
• markets
• regulation
• relevance
• research-practice gap
• society

Acknowledgements

The original ideas behind this paper were presented in a panel session at the 6th Workshop on Management Accounting as Social and Organizational Practice (MASOP), Copenhagen, 2013. I thank the workshop organisers and participants for the opportunity to discuss these ideas at an early stage. Helpful comments by Vivien Beattie and the contributors to this special issue on the “Societal Relevance of Management Accounting” are also acknowledged.

Notes

1. As of 5 December 2013, the 1991 paperback edition of Johnson and Kaplan (1987) had generated 3582 Google Scholar citations.

2. Theoretical approaches used to study this phenomenon include inter alia garbage can theory (Wiesel et al. 2011), institutional theory (Modell and Wiesel 2008), sociology of professions (Samuel et al. 2005) and various critical theories (Preston et al. 1997, Lawrence and Sharma 2002).

3. The notion of calculative practices has tended to be rather loosely defined in the accounting literature. Following Vollmer et al. (2009), it is here conceived of as a set of social practices clustered around some calculative techniques such as costing or performance measurement.