Administrative accounting systems (AAS) thought as systems of social interaction, based on Giddens's theory of structuration

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider the role that the administrative accounting systems (hereinafter AAS) play in the spatio-temporal order of social practices in modern organisations, hence we go over some works by authors related to the critical-interpretive school of thought, such as: Macintosh, Scapens, Boland, Lawrence and Northcott, Lowe, Burns, Englund and Gerdin, synthesising in three thematic axes the uses so far given to Giddens’s theory of structuration in the accounting and management research. Those axes are: 1 the analysis of the three dimensions of the structure 2 how to apply the concepts given by Giddens in the study of the management accounting systems (hereinafter MAS) 3 the diverse conceptions of the rules and routines that compose them. In addition, we intend to look over some new possibilities for studying and extending the comprehension domain of the social character of the MAS, including other analytical categories of the theory still not taken into account and precising such concepts through the proposal of what in this paper is denoted as AAS, interpreted as an interaction system based on the notion of social system provided by Giddens, a notion different from those developed so far in the reviewed literature.