The rapidly changing contemporary business
environment is far more complex; product
diversity has increased, cost structures have
become more overhead-intensive driven by
activities rather than volume, the importance
of non-financial indicators have increased and
the rise of the service sector is phenomenal
(Scapens, et al. 2003). The above complexities
and changes make management accounting a
continuously evolving craft. In these
circumstances traditional or conventional
management accounting techniques are of
little value. Conventional management
accounting and control systems (MACS) such
as budgets, standards, performance
measurement and evaluation, overhead
allocation and transfer pricing, among others,
were all more or less fully developed by 1925.
Beyond this period, until 1988, it is argued
that the pace of newer developments in MACS largely stopped, the emphasis being on
refinement of existing practices. This state of
affairs led Johnson and Kaplan (1987:1) to
state in very strong terms that ‘today’s
management accounting information, driven
by the procedures and cycles of the
organisation’s financial reporting systems, is
too late, too aggregated, and too distorted to be
relevant for managers’ planning and control
decisions’. This is commonly referred to as
‘relevance lost’ in the management accounting
literature. There are mixed research results,
some contradicting each other, on whether
management accounting practices are
changing in line with the changing needs of
organisations operating in an increasingly
complex environment (Scapens, et al. 2003).
Quantitative studies such as those based on
questionnaire surveys suggest a slow pace of
growth in management accounting techniques,
while those based on more qualitative
approaches such as case and field-based
studies suggest adoption of more advanced
techniques intertwined with strategy such as
activity-based costing, value chain analysis,
balanced scorecard and other newer
developments (Scapens, 2006).
The year 1988 is quite significant in terms of
newer developments of thoughts in MACS. A
form of costing that was unknown at the time
of the ‘relevance lost’ debate in early 1988,
came to be known as activity–based costing
later in the same year (Jones and Dugdale, 2002). Since then, strategic management
accounting has come to the fore, and in a very
short span of time several new strategic
techniques have evolved as a result of
increased global and domestic competition, advancements in manufacturing sector, rise of
service sector and developments in
communications and information technologies.
These include among others: balanced scorecard which translates strategies into key