lack of relevant employees skills and the lack of a perceived need by senior managers or the management
accounting function to develop more sophisticated systems.
Case study research may be a more appropriate research method for examining how organizational
factors influence cost system design and also for providing greater insights into how the contextual
variables relating to cost structure and product diversity affect the level of cost system sophistication.
The case study research by Abernethy et al. (2001) provides some insights as to why the measures of
product diversity and cost structure used in this survey may not have captured the complexities relating
to their potential impact on cost system design. They found that in one of the organizations studied that
high product diversity was accompanied with investment in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT)
in order to cope with this diversity. The effect of this investment was to convert the costs associated with
offering greater diversity into facility sustaining costs, thus reducing the significance of batch or product
sustaining costs. Facility sustaining costs cannot be specifically identified with the individual products.
In these circumstances high levels of product diversity may not be associated with more sophisticated
costing systems. Conversely, if high product diversity is not accompanied by investment in AMT product
diversity will be reflected in high levels of batch-related and product-level costs and sophisticated costing
systems have the potential to more accurately measure the consumption of these costs by products. Thus,
more appropriate measures of product diversity should attempt to capture specific aspects of diversity that
focus on the consumption of batch and product-related activities rather than focusing on product diversity
as a whole. Similarly the impact of cost structure on cost system sophistication may be related to the
level of batch-related and product-level overhead costs rather than total overhead costs (that incorporate
facility-sustaining costs) that was used in this study.
Case studies could be undertaken in different firms that have varying levels of sophistication. Such
studies should describe and assess the levels of sophistication drawing off the four dimensions described
in Section 2 of this paper and seek to explain the factors determining the differences in the observed levels
of sophistication. Case study research thus has the potential to provide a richer insight into explaining
why, and under what circumstances, some organizations adopt simplistic systems and others do not. The
precise factors identified by case study research could be then tested by means of a mail survey to ascertain
whether they are generalizable to a large number of firms.
There is the potential for future product costing contingency research to adopt the interaction approach
to fit by incorporating an appropriate outcome measure as the dependent variable. Using measures of
organizational performance may prove to be problematic because of the difficulty in extracting the effects
of adopting different product costing systems on performance from other events that may be associated
with performance. Instead, outcome measures relating to satisfaction or usefulness might be used as proxy
measures of desired organizational performance. Thus, future research could seek to identify the extent
to which the fit between the contextual factors and the level of cost system sophistication is related to
satisfaction with the costing system.31
The questionnaire did include a measure of satisfaction relating to the respondents’ satisfaction with the
accuracy of assigning indirect costs to products/services. The ABC adopters had a significantly higher
satisfaction score than the non-adopters (p < .01, two-tailed) with 69% of the former and 35% of the
latter scoring above the neutral score of 4 on the 7-point scale. There was also a positive significant