In recent years, much has been written on the nature of management accounting change,
and indeed stability. Many researchers have used concepts such as rules and routines to
interpret this change and/or stability. Recent research has provided an increasingly clear
picture of what rules and routines are, as well as contributing to our understanding of the
processes of change and stability in management accounting.
Management accounting research has mainly presented rules and routines as related
phenomena, but some conceptual work has suggested they are separable and can (and
possibly should) be considered independently when studying processes of change/stability
within management accounting. However, empirical support for such work has been scarce
to date. This paper uses data from the archival records of the Guinness company in an effort
to establish whether rules and routines, at least in management accounting research, are
best considered separable concepts or not. The archival records are artefacts of rules and
routines and thus can be used to trace the interactions of rules and routines over time. Support
for the notion that rules and routines should be considered separately is presented. The
findings also portray the stable, but changing, nature of management accounting routines
over time; a point worthy of further research.