Abstract
Recent developments in digital technology have revitalized interest in the relationship between technology and management accounting. Yet, few empirical in-depth studies have assessed how digital technologies influence the roles of management accountants. This paper builds on the concept of jurisdiction to illuminate the relationship between management accountants, expert knowledge and digital technology. The study identifies and describes competition over jurisdiction between management accountants and other groups of employees. The study describes a shift for divisional management accountants towards narrower roles in their tasks and expectations, while business-oriented roles at group level are found to entail expanding tasks and expectations. In doing so, management accountants are divided into two divergent categories facing different expectations: divisional and group level management accountants. Through a case study in the technology-oriented finance sector, the paper contributes to the debate on the roles of management accountants in a number of ways. First, it describes how digital technology can contribute to narrower and more specialized roles. Second, it describes how digital technology can contribute to competition between professions. Third, it elucidates how digital technology contributes to changes in the behaviour of decision makers, and in their expectations toward, and the involvement of, management accountants. Fourth, it details how the changes contributed by digital technology in the roles of management accountants can act as mediators in the identity-work of management accountants. Finally, it empirically describes the relationships between digital technology and management accountants’ roles.
Highlights
To illuminate the interaction between digital technology and the role of management accountants, the paper addresses the following research question: How do digital technologies contribute to changes in the roles and jurisdiction of management accountants? To explore such role changes, this paper investigates InsuranceCo,1 a Nordic insurance company operating in the technologically advanced finance sector
The Analytics, Product and price division and the Customer Relationships Management (CRM) department have become more sophisticated in how they use data and computer power to model the pricing elements and customer behaviour: You can think of car insurance consisting of glass, rescue and liability and so forth, today we model on the low level [calculating a premium for each individual element]
The findings illustrate that the roles of management accountants are changing in InsuranceCo, and digital technology in the form of big data, machine learning, and integrated information systems contributes to facilitating these changes
Summary
Among practitioners there is increasing interest in how digital technology contributes to changing the roles of management accountants (Accenture 2018; Eklund et al 2018; McCorkell and Shapiro 2016). The literature has predicted that automation and increased use of digital technology will have major consequences for a number of professions (Frey and Osborne 2017); in addition, the roles of management accountants are expected to be impacted by these consequences (Appelbaum et al 2017; Bhimani and Willcocks 2014; Moll and Yigitbasioglu 2019; Quattrone 2016). The present study explores this important yet understudied relationship between digital technology and the roles of management accountants
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