Editorial and Forum Introduction

Abstract

Management accounting research published under American Accounting Association (AAA) auspices has grown remarkably in quantity, scholarly quality, and practical relevance in recent decades. If the word ‘‘remarkable’’ seems too strong, look back 25 years, to the year before the proposal was put forward that created the Management Accounting Section of the AAA. In 1980, the four issues of The Accounting Review (TAR) included one main article and one ‘‘Note’’ on management accounting topics. Both were analytic studies of the Shapley value as a basis for joint cost allocation, and neither contained any mention of practice, from which Shapley-based allocations were and are largely absent. Twenty-five years later (amid a proliferation of other journals), the most recent four issues of The Accounting Review include eight research articles on management accounting; and seven more, plus a commentary by Jerry Feltham, appear in this issue of Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR). This simple count suggests that the field is producing significantly more of both the general-interest papers that TAR aims to publish, as well as the more specialized papers that are characteristic of JMAR. An examination of the articles themselves reinforces the impression of increased quality, breadth, and relevance. For example, in recent issues of TAR, an analytical study models the integration of managerial and tax objectives in transfer pricing (Baldenius et al. 2004), a problem that is central to managers’ transfer pricing decisions in practice, as documented by case and survey research (Haka et al. 1994; Tang 2002). An archival study shows how hospitals’ spending on accounting systems has changed in response to changes in the type and intensity of competition (Krishnan 2005). An experimental study compares settings in which employers can commit to determining bonuses by a formula or retain discretion over the size of the employee bonus pool, the allocation of the pool to individual employees, or both, and examines which of these choices lead to the highest outputs and employee compensation (Fisher et al. 2005). Articles in this issue of JMAR examine topics like the implementation of management accounting innovations (Matejka and De Waegenaere 2005), the use of customized versus standardized performance measures (Arya et al. 2005), and the effectiveness of full-cost-based heuristics as a way of including hard-to-measure opportunity costs in important business decisions (Leitch et al. 2005). We have come a long way from the Shapley value!