5.9. Business sector
Shields (1997) argues that the design and effectiveness of cost accounting information and systems are
conditional on characteristics of industries. The diffusion of innovation literature (Abrahamson, 1991)
also implies that organizations within an industry sector may imitate other organizations. Therefore, the
imitation process may result in similar accounting systems being adopted within specific business sectors.
ABC was initially introduced in manufacturing organizations. Thus, mimicking behaviour suggests that manufacturing organizations may be more likely to adopt sophisticated costing systems. Kaplan and
Cooper (1998), however, suggest that service firms are ideal candidates for ABC, even more than manufacturing
firms, because most of their costs are fixed and indirect. In contrast, manufacturing firms can
trace important components of costs (i.e. direct costs) to individual products so traditional product costing
systems may report reasonably accurate product costs. Both of the above arguments suggest that the level
of cost system sophistication may differ between business sectors but it is unclear which sectors would
have the more sophisticated systems. The following non-directional hypothesis is therefore formulated:
Hypothesis 9 (H9). The level of cost system sophistication will differ significantly according to the
business sector in which an organization operates.