5. Consumer Era—The emergence of activity-based
costing (ABC). This next era arguably led to a transition
from management accounting to managerial economics.
ABC reflected “causal” cost tracing of increasingly diverse
types of products, services, channels, and customers that
resulted in an organization’s relatively greater indirect-to direct expense structure to manage the increase in complexity. In 1987, the book Relevance Lost: The Rise and
Fall of Management Accounting, by H. Thomas Johnson
and Robert S. Kaplan, documented the need for and benefits of upgrading costing practices from a highly aggregated “cost pool” with a single, noncausal cost allocation
factor to using multiple disaggregated cost pools with
causally related factors