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).