Limitations of the research
Our research sample is not random, which reduces the
generalizability of the findings. It is difficult to find a sizable sample of firms that have adapted their management
accounting practices to match their lean production, so we
depended on a single venue for selecting our respondents.
We assume that the respondents were interested in lean
and particularly the principles of lean accounting by their
attendance at Lean Accounting Summits. The sample
respondents would also be more likely to have a better
understanding of the survey questions and related issues
than a random sample. This helps alleviate some of the
usual concerns about data collection in survey research—
that the respondents had sufficient knowledge to answer
the items, and subsequently answered the questions conscientiously and objectively