2. Topics studied
Table 2 summarises the topics and themes which
have been studied in the papers published in Management
Accounting Research, divided into the first and second
decades. This table indicates that there has not been a
major shift in the topics studied over this period, although
there have been some changes. In particular, there has been
a slight decline in the papers studying some of the traditional
topics of management accounting: ABC; capital
budgeting; budgeting, standard costing and variance analysis;
and cost accounting systems and techniques. This has
been compensated to some extent by the increase in the
papers studying various other (sometimes called ‘leading
edge’) techniques—including managing intellectual capital
and intangibles; knowledge management; balanced scorecards;
benchmarking; lean accounting; and world-class
manufacturing.
The number of papers studying the broad areas of management
accounting and control systems has increased
over the two decades—35% in the 1990s to 40% in the
2000s. In the first decade the emphasis was on studying
management accounting practices, with papers which
tended to describe the management accounting systems
and techniques used in practice. During the second decade
there was an increase in the number of papers studying
management accounting change and a doubling of the
proportion of papers dealing with management accounting
and organisational control. However, the proportion
of papers dealing with performance measurement remains
constant, although in the second decade issues of performance
management were probably more important than
performance measurement per se.
There were also several new topics which emerged
during the second decade. Inter-organisational management
control became important; and there were a number
of papers dealing with various aspects of governance. In
addition, there were several papers on risk management
towards the end of the decade—several in a Special Issue
on the topic (see Table 6). These papers were particularly
timely in view of the recent financial crisis.