An Overview of the Development of Management Accounting Research

Siti Nabiha Abdul Khalid

doi:10.32890/mmj.7.1.2003.8600

Abstract

There has been significant changes in the direction of management accounting research since the 1980’s and 1990’s, from the prescriptive and normative research of the late 1950’s and 1960’s to the positivistic research in the 1970’s and 1980’s. As such, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of this development. First, the paper discusses the characteristics of traditional management accounting research. Then, a reflection is given on the debate, which started in the 1980’s regarding the limitations of traditional management accounting research. It could be said that the 1980’s was a decade of re-evaluation for management accounting, both in terms of the research undertaken and in terms of techniques and practices. Now, various theoretical frameworks are used by researchers and new and innovative techniques are being implemented in organisations. The scope of management accounting has also been broadened from those based on economics perspective to a broader based approach.

Highlights

There has been significant changes in the direction of management accounting research over the last forty or fifty years
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overviewi of the development in management accounting research
What have we learned from nearly sixty years of management accounting research? This paper concludes with four main points

Summary

Introduction

There has been significant changes in the direction of management accounting research over the last forty or fifty years. Such changes have been influenced by a number of interrelated factors. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overviewi of the development in management accounting research. It discusses the development of traditional management accounting research. Both the economics and behavioural branch of accounting is emphasised. Traditional accounting research as is used here encompasses those research or approaches that have objectivist orientations, within the functionalist paradigm and largely ignore the social and organisational context in which accounting operates. There are some similar unifying assumptions of these research and they can be used to cluster these types of research together

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion