Firm Attributes Count and Management Accounting Practices in an Emerging Market

Abstract

The birth of globalization has brought about the introduction of new technologies and means of production which exposes developing countries to greater competition. This has resulted in the alteration of the business environment, thereby changing the dynamics of firm characteristics. In view of the foregoing, this paper examines whether or not attributes count of a firm (FAC) influences the Management Accounting Practices (MAPs) adopted. This effort is hinged on the manufacturing sphere, using primary data sourced through the issuance of structured questionnaires. Firm attributes count was discriminated on the basis of; size, intensity of market competition, grade of accounting staff and technology deployed. A sample size of 80 firms was adopted, with the Spearman correlation coefficient method employed to analyse the data. The empirical outcome of this effort unveils that, all the firm attributes count deployed in this study significantly influence MAPs. Therefore, the study concludes that the type of management accounting tool deployed in any firm, is firm size, intensity of market competition, quality of accounting staff and the level and nature of tech dependent, and that domain differences does tinker with the nature of the effect of these variables. On the basis of the foregoing, it is recommended that smaller firms should deploy outsourcing of management accounting services to augment the lack of quality accounting staff, explore opportunities of alternatives of improved, but cheaper, technology to deploy towards improving the competitiveness, and deploy firm-clustering paradigm to take advantage of combined resource utilisation.