Legitimacy and Identity in Germanic Management Accounting Research

Abstract

The notion of ‘Controlling’, as it is commonly used in German-speaking countries, may be regarded as an equivalent term for management accounting. At the same time, there have been considerable efforts to establish Controlling as a discipline on its own, rather than to regard it simply as the German synonym of management accounting. This is reflected in many writings on Controlling which have tried to identify a possible ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the subject. In this paper, we argue that this identity discourse may be interpreted as a strategy of Controlling researchers to achieve cognitive and sociopolitical legitimacy of their discipline. Drawing on interview material as well as publication and citation analyses, we show how various institutional pressures and constraints not only influenced the institutionalization of Controlling as an academic discipline but also impacted the form and substance of Controlling research. This raises some important questions for our understanding of academic disciplines more generally, some of which we address in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge with thanks the various suggestions and comments received at research seminars at HEC School of Management (Department of Accounting and Management Control) and Turku School of Economics (Department of Accounting and Finance) as well as the feedback we received at the Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association 2007, Lisbon, the Controllingtagung 2007, WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar, and the Accounting History International Conference 2007, Banff. Also, we would like to thank the two guest editors, Rihab Khalifa and Paolo Quattrone, the two anonymous reviewers and our colleagues Caroline Lambert, Robert Luther, Eike Perrey, Astrid Saxl and Alfred Wagenhofer for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Eighty-one articles in special issues of ZfB and ZfbF were not included since these issues are not reviewed anonymously.

2. The Controller Magazin is the official journal of the ‘German Controller Association’. It contains different types of contributions (such as interviews, book reviews, etc.) out of which we only considered articles on Controlling practice for our publication analysis.

3. About half of the Controlling chairs that were established in the previous West German federal states and all Controlling chairs that were established in the new East German federal states after 1990 were additional chairs and did not replace other chairs (see Binder and Schäffer, 2005).

4. Despite its name, the German Academic Association for Business Research represents scholars in Germany, Austria and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland.

5. General business administration (‘Allgemeine Betriebswirtschaftslehre’) comprises the theoretical foundations of Betriebswirtschaftslehre, like specific approaches to organization theory and the theory and the firm, as well as topics from the area of management functions (e.g. planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling).

6. In addition to this, Controlling researchers with a predominantly formal–analytical approach started to hold yearly workshops.

7. It should be stressed, as pointed out by one of our reviewers, that surveys and case studies are not the only ways to achieve a better understanding of a field of inquiry. Experimental studies, for example, often allow drawing conclusions with respect to phenomena which may be difficult to observe directly in the field. However, there is no strong tradition of experimental research in German-speaking business administration. Accordingly, no experimental studies have been carried out in Controlling research up until very recently.

8. Our paper is by far not the first attempt to trace the evolution of management accounting research in a particular country. There is, for example, an important body on research that looks at the case of Italy. This research suggests that there may be some interesting parallels between Italy and German-speaking countries with respect to management accounting. In Italy, early writings on the firm in the late 19th and early 20th century focused on the economic aspects of accounting and control, quite similar to the German origins of business administration. From the 1920s on, however, this was challenged by an emerging research tradition known as economia aziendale, which considered organizations from a more holistic standpoint (Viganò, 1998; Zambon and Zan, 2000; Dagnino and Quattrone, 2006). In a sense, the holistic approach taken in economia aziendale is similar to the rather general stance taken in Germanic business administration (Zan, 1994; Zambon, 1996). Moreover, there is a strong focus in economia aziendale on the appropriate conceptual definition of the firm which has resulted in a large body of non-empirical literature (Zambon and Zan, 2000, p. 803). Given the strong role of economia aziendale, a particular discipline of management accounting did not really develop in the Italian academe. This is interesting when compared to the Germanic case where Controlling was more strongly perceived to be a discipline on its own – at least by a considerable part of Controlling researchers.