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Abstract:
This paper builds on the 1995 Management Accounting Section research committee's report. We discus three broad areas which researchers might follow to explore new issues in management accounting research, and emphasize the importance of a multi-paradigm, multi-method approach to research.
INTRODUCTION
The Management Accounting section (MAS) research committee1 worked between August 1994 and July 1995 to identify a list of management accounting research topics for the 1990s and beyond. This paper expands on that committee's report.
By design, this committee was geographically (eight different countries) and philosophically (behavioral, economic) diverse. The MAS leadership designed a diverse committee in order to encourage researchers to think about different ways of viewing management accounting and employ different approaches to framing research questions. As intended, the diversity motivated lively discussions about potential new directions for management accounting research.
This paper focuses on three broad topic areas. We chose not to develop a detailed list of issues that researchers could, or should pursue in the future. This choice stems from the diversity in the group. We quickly agreed on broad issues but found less agreement on how to decompose broad issues into smaller issues. We also differed on the best methods to use to study a specific issue.2 Therefore, we only identify paths that researchers might follow to explore new issues in management accounting research, and we highlight the value added from examining the same or similar issue(s) using alternate methods and paradigms. We also caution the reader that the three topics considered reflect the committee's background and interests, and are not intended to be the best or only topics from which management accounting research can or should expand. However, given the committee's composition, we believe that our output provides a good starting point for discussing a wide variety of future research opportunities in management accounting.
We chose to focus our discussion on the following three topic areas3:
* Management accounting's role in organizational change
* The interaction between accounting and organizational structure
* The role of accounting information in supporting decision making
We chose these areas for several reasons. First, we believe that change is a prominent feature of today's environment. Thus, we wish to highlight the importance of studying how management accounting information can help...