Research in Management Accounting by North Americans in the 1990s

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Abstract:

This article reviews the state of research in management accounting as evidenced by 152 articles published by North Americans during the first seven years of the 1990s in six leading journals: Accounting, Organizations and Society; The Accounting Review; Contemporary Accounting Research; Journal of Accounting and Economics; Journal of Accounting Research; and Journal of Management Accounting Research. The review is structured by the articles' topics, settings, theories, research methods and results. Based in part on this review, the next section discusses some dilemmas facing management accounting researchers and identifies six areas for research: changes in management accounting, horizontal accounting, strategic accounting, organizational accounting, virtual accounting and integrative research.

The two purposes of this article are to review the state of research in management accounting, as evidenced in publications by North Americans in the 1990s, and to identify opportunities for research in management accounting, in part based on the literature review.1 The remainder of this article is organized as follows: the next five sections review 152 articles published in six journals in the 1990s in terms of their topics, settings, theories, research methods and results. Based in part on this review, the final section provides suggestions for future research.

This review is of management accounting research published by North Americans2 in six leading journals during the seven-year period 1990-96 inclusive-Accounting, Organizations and Society; The Accounting Review; Contemporary Accounting Research; Journal of Accounting and Economics; Journal of Accounting Research; and Journal of Management Accounting Research.3 Articles are excluded which have topics dealing with managers' choices of financial accounting methods, executive compensation, and all types of audits. Also excluded are book reviews, editorials and commentaries, comments and replies, panel reports, and articles limited to illustrating the use of various techniques. The inclusion of articles based on the above criteria resulted in a relatively large body of research and its homogeneity facilitated the development and application of a classification framework. The 152 articles that are included are classified by their topics, settings, theories, research methods and results. The appendix has this five-part classification of these articles organized by journal and date, of which 53 are in JMAR, 36 in TAR, 25 in AOS, 16 in JAR, 11 in CAR and 11 in JAE.

TOPICS

Table 1 provides...