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Essay
Essay
INTRODUCTION
It will be my contention today that much management accounting research
has lost its way. In particular, I will argue that it has concentrated too much
on accounting and not enough on management. One of the consequences
of this misplaced emphasis is that much management accounting research
has become detached from real issues and problems facing managers in
organizations. For management accounting research to regain its relevance,
I will propose that it should widen its boundaries and become concerned
once again with the issues involved in designing and operating systems of
managing performance. In short, the sub-title of this address might well be
putting the management back into management accounting.
MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING PRACTICE
So, where shall we begin? I will first consider the practice of management accounting and go back to the mid-1980s when it was becoming
recognized that the practice of management accounting, even within those
AngloAmerican organizations where it had taken deepest root, was in
decline. There had been little by way of new developments in management accounting practices for decades. Not only was it argued that
management accounting was therefore becoming irrelevant to contemporary organizations, but worse that it was often actually counter-productive
to good management decision-making. By using inadequate management
This paper is the text of a plenary address given to the 2nd Globalization Conference, jointly organized
by the American Accounting Association and the British Accounting Association on 1517 July 2000 in
Cambridge, England.
08908389/01/030243+19 $35.00/0
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accounting data, managers were running a serious danger of taking inappropriate decisions. Worse, the use of inappropriate performance measures
in organizations encouraged junior managers to behave in stupid ways so as
to report apparently good performance. The use of management accounting information was thus inimical with good management practice. Or so
argued Johnson & Kaplan in their famous 1987 book Relevance Lost: The
Rise and Fall of Management Accounting.
It is interesting to note how each of the two authors responded to their own
highly influential critique. Johnson clearly gave up on accounting altogether,
and in his book Relevance Re-gained moved towards emphasizing the
softer side of things, such as employee training and empowerment. Kaplan,
by contrast, has become a leader in the re-invention of management accounting practices, beginning with Activity-Based Costing (which spawned many
offspring, such as Activity-Based Budgeting, Activity-Based Cost Management, and ultimately Activity-Based Management!). Perhaps it is in the
Cost Management process itself that the biggest adaptation has taken place.
Building on roots which had actually been developing over the previous
decade, one of the major contributions of the Cost Management movement
was to recognize that effective cost control could no longer take place if one
waited for cost accounting systems to produce the information required.
This was not a defect of the operation of the cost accounting system itself,
but a recognition that real-time cost control was out-dated in the context of a
manufacturing operation that involved relatively little direct labour expense
in contrast to a great deal of investment in plant, machinery and employee
skills. Under such conditions, cost management could only be effective if
it occurred at the planning stage of operations (product design, production
process planning etc.), before routine cost reports could be generated.
Kaplans work can be seen as part of a more general movement to change
practice which rejoiced in the title of Strategic Management Accounting.
Although the term was coined by Simmonds around 1980, he is the first to
admit that it was not taken seriously until the late 1980s. Perhaps this was, in
part at least, caused by the fact that there were very few specific techniques
that could be attributed to the label. It represents a change in emphasis
in the use and application of management accounting information, rather
than in very many specific new techniques. But the change in emphasis was
quite pronounced; management accounting was to develop its traditional
strengths with complementary emphases:
Now this clearly overstates the impact of SMA. Previous practice was not
quite as bad as the initial statement suggests, nor are the new practices
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What I have found fascinating over the past five years has been the
movement from head-to-head competition in the mid-1990s when the
proponents of EVA dismissed Balanced Scorecard approaches as being
mechanisms that distracted line managers and took their eye off the ball,
and proponents of the Balanced Scorecard claimed that the technique
was not a stakeholder model, but clearly designed to generate shareholder
value, albeit with little empirical evidence to back either statement. This
conflict has been clearly influenced by the Value-Based movement which
has become increasingly influential over the past decade, with each set of
management consultants marketing their own variant (invariably containing
the letter V in their TLA). But, more recently, a more collaborative
attitude has prevailed, with Stern Stewart recognising the value of Balanced
Scorecard type approaches at lower management levels where profit centres
cannot sensibly be established, and EVA figuring as a major performance
measure in the Financial box of the Balanced Scorecard.
The point of this brief summary has been to indicate that management
accounting practices have changed radically over the past fifteen or so years.
Indeed, one could argue that many of the developments are not strictly
management accounting as the underlying techniques are often not wellspecified and many of the performance measures are of a non-financial
nature. But, by contrast to more traditional accounting techniques, these
developments appear to have been of considerable use in practice and, at
the very least, have preserved the role and career prospects of management
accountants within Anglo-Saxon organizations. But what of management
accounting research? How has it adapted to the changing world within
which the management accountant appears to live?
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model of the hard sciences are also those which are most reluctant to
publish replication work! Of course, there is alternative view that can be
taken of this evidence. That is that our subject matter is not amenable to
the methods of the hard sciences; our facts are social facts generated by
the perceptions and attitudes of the participants themselves, and coloured
by the social and cultural context within which they are set. Further, these
conditions change (quite rapidly) over time, and the methods used to study
such social phenomena therefore need to be different to those used in the
hard sciences.
I would tend towards the latter position, but am happy to hear a
debate on the issue. What worries me is that we seem to have taken
an extant position for quite the wrong reasons. An emphasis on rigour
and statistical significance has tended to lead us towards studying a very
restricted set of issues. The areas most suited to the hard science approach
are those which focus on individual behaviour isolated from its social
and organizational context (i.e. psychological, individualistic approaches or
agency theory models). The methods most easily applied are those of the
laboratory experiment and arms-length questionnaire survey. We train our
PhD students in these methods, because it is the quickest and most reliable
way of obtaining the qualification, and they continue to adopt the approach
in which they were trained so as to make the necessary progress along
their tenure track. Finally, this is the work that is published in our journals
because this is the sort of work our journals have submitted to them! So,
if there is any element of truth in this line of argument, is it surprising
that much management accounting research has failed to address issues
of current relevance and concern to organizations which are attempting to
grapple with the problems of adapting to the modern business (and public)
environment?
No doubt I overstate the case. Not all management accounting
research has the characteristics I describe. But I do believe that much
management accounting research has lost its relevance, in much the same
way as management accounting practice became disconnected from real
organizational issues two decades ago. How then can we make management
accounting research more relevant?
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Rather than attempting to give a global answer to this question (which
would be presumptuous, and beyond my competence), I will restrict my
attention to just one line of enquiry, that of performance management. Why
do I choose this focus, apart from the fact that it is an area in which I have
been personally interested for many years?
First, it has been the focus of many of the new techniques of management
accounting that have been developed over the past twenty years. Even
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language used. All three words are problematic! Control has always been
a word with a multitude of meanings and connotations. Back in 1957,
Rathe catalogued 57 varieties of meaning for it, ranging from dominate
(perhaps the Anglo-Saxon usage) through to feedback (perhaps the French
connotation). When combined with management a range of possibilities
come to mind, ranging from the domination of the management class over
the workers (at the Marxist end of the spectrum) through to the adaptation
of organizational activities to meet environmental exigencies (from a systems
theory approach). Lastly, the term system is probably too strong, implying
a degree of co-ordination and integration that is likely lacking in most
real organizations. Back in 1980, I recollect heading a box in a diagram I
was constructing as the organizational control system which I eventually
changed to the organizational control package as being more descriptive
of the extant state of affairs! I have recently taken to enquiring from my
MBA students what they believe the content of my option on management
control systems is likely to contain; the three terms most often mentioned
are quantitative, accounting and boring. When offered the alternatives
of strategy implementation of performance management their interest
increased significantly. Perhaps, Bob Simons has got it about right in the
title of his new text (2000): Performance Measurement: Designing Control
Systems for Implementing Strategy. I would only add that I believe we need
to look beyond measurement to the use of the information in decisionmaking and control, so would personally have preferred to use performance
management.
My second concern with Anthonys approach is more fundamental. One
of the clear purposes of his original work and textbook was to focus on
the use made of management accounting (and other) information, and
to emphasise the behavioural dimension of management control. Indeed,
he cites social psychology as an underlying core discipline. Despite this
intention, however, it has never received the prominence it deserves. I
believe this largely stems from Anthonys deliberate intent to avoid the areas
of strategic planning and operational control, which he deliberately uses to
define the area of management control. Undoubtedly, this was a reasonable
limitation as he began his endeavour, and avoided a number of troublesome
issues. However, by seeking a set of universal control practices, defined in
isolation from both strategic intent and from operational practices, it now
seems rather inevitable that the approach led to an excessive concentration
on traditional management accounting practices. This is too narrow a
focus, for reason which I have explored in greater depth elsewhere (Otley,
1994). For my purpose performance management provides an umbrella
under which we can study the more formal processes that organizations
use in attempting to implement their strategic intent, and to adapt to the
circumstances in which they have to operate.
The hostage to fortune that the term performance management contains,
however, lies in the word performance which also seems to have a wide
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needed and vice-versa. More recently, Bunce et al. (1995) have made a most
cogent critique of the usefulness of budgeting as a means of management
control in contemporary organizations, due mainly to the increased rate of
change most organizations now have to cope with.
The somewhat depressing conclusion for management accounting
researchers is that, having put in much work coming to a fuller understanding
of how budgetary control systems are deployed in practice, and the impact
of different patterns of use of such systems, organizations are giving up
budgetary as a primary means of effecting overall control and are having
to resort to other techniques. It is not clear what those techniques should
be. Despite Kaplan and Nortons claims in some of the more ambitious
diagrams in their 1996 book, the BS does not completely replace all other
control techniques. The challenge is perhaps how to combine some of
the new approaches with the more tried and tested schemes of yesteryear.
However, there is also good news, I believe. The various approaches to
studying budgetary control systems can often be adapted to study the use
and impact of the newer techniques without too much difficulty. Moreover,
many of the fundamental issues remain unchanged. Performance measures
concentrate attention on the short-term; how can adequate weight be placed
on longer-term aspects? What is measured gets done; how do we control
important aspects of performance that are more difficult to measure? How
should targets be set to maximise their motivational potential? How can
the multiple purposes served by any performance management system be
resolved?
However, I cannot leave this topic without a passing reference to reward
systems. Clearly, motivation is affected by rewards, both financial and nonfinancial. Much work in the US has been based on studying the impact of
performance-related financial rewards, and a deal has been learned about
the effect of such systems on managerial behaviour. We are now seeing
many of the same systems being applied in the UK and in continental
Europe, but it is not clear that they impact in the same way. In the
UK, performance-related pay for middle managers is a relatively recent
phenomenon; in the late 1980s virtually no middle managers received any
such remuneration; a fixed salary was all but universal. Today, around
two-thirds of such managers receive some element of PRR, although the
amounts of money involved are typically much smaller than in the US.
However, there is evidence that such schemes work differently here; one
potential reason is the secrecy surrounding pay in the UK compared with
the relative openness with regard to pay in the US. In one scheme we
monitored here, many managers who had received above average bonuses
for their area of work, believed that they had received below average bonuses.
This was possible because there was no public information concerning the
size of bonus payments other than an overall company average figure.
Thus rewards are clearly an area where cultural differences are of great
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significance, and where research results are not easily transferable across
national boundaries.
My conclusions are therefore quite stark. Management accounting
research has, in a number of respects, lost touch with management accounting practices. Where contact has remained, it has been more at the level
of accounting techniques, rather than at the level of managerial uses of
management accounting and other information. In short, we need to put
the management back into management accounting. Moreover, organizational needs have changed. Whereas previously much reliance was placed
on systems of budgetary control to act as the foundation stone for systems
of overall management control, the budgetary control system can no longer
meet the pressures being put upon it. Organizations have been developing
other systems of performance management, and management accountants have been changing their role into performance measurement experts.
This clearly affects the subject matter of relevant management accounting
research. What I will finally argue is that it also affects the practice and
methodology of management accounting research.
IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH
So far, I have argued that management accounting research is not as closely
connected with management accounting practice as might be desirable. In
particular, there are control practices being developed academics, consultants and practitioners, and which are being implemented in organizations
that we have yet to study in any depth. I believe that this is true across
a whole range of management accounting topics, but I will concentrate
upon the area that has traditionally been described as management control
systems, although my preference is now to describe this as the area of
performance management packages. Clearly, this topic encompasses not
only traditional and new management accounting, but casts its net into a
wider range of control practices that may well extend beyond the boundaries
of management accounting as traditionally defined. However, accounting
measures and non-financial performance measures are increasingly being
integrated in real-world control practices, so it would be foolish to maintain
an artificial distinction that no longer represents the reality of practice.
How, then, might we best study the operation of performance management and control systems? I should make it clear at this point that I do
not wish to be prescriptively narrow; there is undoubtedly scope for the
deployment of a wide range of research methods, all of which have the
potential to throw some light on this topic. Nevertheless, I would also wish
to argue that the methods which seem to me most likely to give some
of the necessary insight are those which have been relatively neglected. I
will therefore concentrate on these methods in order to redress the balance which I see as unhelpful in current research. My general position on
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research methods is that there are not good or poor research methods of
themselves, but rather that it is a matter of horses for courses and that it is
research problems that need to be matched with appropriate methods.
Thus, if we wish to study the operation of systems as complex as systems
of organizational performance management, we need to deploy research
methods that are capable of picking up a wide range of organizational
phenomena. Control practices are pervasive across a wide range of
organizational activities and it would be foolish to assume that particular
control techniques can be easily associated with performance outcomes.
For example, we know some deal about budgetary control practices and
their deployment, such that we might well be able to hypothesize about the
likely effects of different practices in a given set of circumstances. But I also
know that I can point to organizations in the same industry, with similar
characteristics including generally good performance, some of which make
extensive use of budgetary control techniques and others which make little
or no use of them. Arguably, the latter deploy other control mechanisms
that fill the gap not now filled by budgetary control. But if I focussed
solely on the study of budgetary controls, I would be unlikely to pick
this up.
My preference for research method is now becoming clear. In my view,
intensive, field-based methods are much more likely to pick up on the
wide variety of control mechanisms deployed by organizations in practice
and to ground theoretical development firmly in empirically observed
practice. This is not to uncritically accept all practice as appropriate,
but to carefully document the observed effects of different practices in
different circumstances. What would hopefully emerge from such work is
inductively generated theory that could be subjected to further testing and
development.
Now this agenda could be developed from a variety of epistemological
points of view, although again this is a debate in which I do not wish to
become too embroiled today. Suffice it to say that it is not inconsistent with
the model of scientific development implicit in most extant accounting
research, that is, what I have described as the hard science model.
However, it also sits happily with more interpretative approaches to theory
development and understanding of organizational activities that are more
generally found in the social sciences. I think we have a lot to learn from
organizational theorists, sociologists and anthropologists, in addition to
what we have taken on board from psychologists and social psychologists.
Indeed, some of my more critical theory oriented colleagues might believe
they are witnessing my conversion to their point of view! Let me make it
clear that I have no doubt that critical approaches can give us a great deal
of insight into organizational activities. My main reservation about much
critical work is that it sometimes tends to regard organizational behaviour
only as an interesting phenomenon that shows the falsity of the simplistic
assumptions made in practices they would regard as managerialist. In my
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view they pay too little attention to the issue of designing organizations
as sustainable entities which need to reach accommodations with a wide
range of interested parties in order to survive. This is probably seen as a
functionalist stance, but I would argue that the integration of these two
points of view might well yield some important insights.
But the reasons why we do not engage in the type of work that I am
suggesting are generally not theoretical or epistemological, but practical.
There are considerable pressures, particularly on young researchers, to
publish or perish, both in the US and the UK. And here, even traditional
management accounting research is at a disadvantage because of the lack
of publicly available data. The availability of large databases for research in
finance, and to some extent in financial accounting, may make management
accounting researchers feel disadvantaged because we generally have to
collect our own data. There is thus a tendency to choose those research
methods that allow this data to be obtained as easily as possible, leading
us into the realm of experiments and arms-length mail surveys (despite the
increasingly poor response rates associated with the latter). Perhaps we also
yearn for a degree of generalisability that is probably unrealistic. But this
approach leads us into a self-defeating loop; our data is both small-scale and
superficial. A more whole-hearted embrace of more intensive studies would
turn the issue into an advantage, in that we could use the very rich data that
more intensive studies generate to yield much more insightful theories.
But this leads us directly into the issue of research training. Here I part
company with the often expressed view of my late friend and colleague, Peter
Brownell. Peters later position (for his training was basically experimental
and psychological) was that he saw the benefits that could be obtained
from a more field-based set of research methods, but that PhD students
should first be trained in more rigorous methods (as he saw them), and only
more established academics could afford the luxury of dabbling in the more
esoteric methods. Tempting though that argument may be, it is unlikely to
be too successful. Having trained a researcher in one set of methods, is it
not likely that they will see their comparative advantage in continuing to do
more of what they are already good at? I would argue that the seeds of better
management accounting research have to be sown in more appropriate
research training for our PhD students.
I sometimes encounter the argument that it is impossible to train students
in inductive methods and for them to conduct empirical fieldwork of an
intensive and longitudinal nature within the normal three year timespan
of doctoral training. I would dispute this. Although I agree that if we
precede fieldwork with a year or more of coursework, and try to confine
the empirical data collection to a short, often six month, period, then
this rules out field-based work. But by making a relatively early start into
negotiating organizational access, and running coursework in parallel with
fieldwork, it is quite feasible to complete an inductive PhD within a three
year period. I have supervised students who have successfully done this,
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to find many opportunities for longitudinal field studies and even action
research.
Accounting systems are often implicated in the wider processes of
organizational change, providing both a vehicle through which some changes
can be promoted but also a potential rigidity and barrier to change.
Increasingly organizations appear to be recognising the importance of
performance measurement systems as both a tool which can be mobilised in
support of more wide-ranging changes, and as a mechanism which must be
adapted if other change initiatives are to be successful. So there are important
connections to be made with those who study the processes of change
management within organizations. Equally, performance management
systems can be seen as a major plank in the process of implementing
strategic intent. I still find it strange that those involved with the study of
strategy pay so much attention to strategy formation, and relatively little to
the processes involved in making the strategy become real. So links with
those who study corporate strategy might well provide a fruitful two-way
interaction.
I have tried to give some indication of both the topics and the methods
that might be built upon in re-vitalising the study of management accounting
and its more general extension into the realm of performance management
more generally. Accounting has long been described as the language of
business, and those who speak this language can often gain privileged
access into key areas of organizations to study how it is deployed in
attempting to adapt organizational practices to the needs of a rapidly
changing environment. I therefore believe that as management accounting
researchers we have a wealth of exciting opportunities open to us; let us
seize these opportunities enthusiastically to make a real contribution to the
study of vital organizational issues.
REFERENCES
Anthony, R.N. (1965). Management Planning and Control Systems: A Framework for Research.
Boston, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Business.
Argyris, C. (1952). The Impact of Budgets on People. Ithaca, NY: The Controllership
Foundation.
Briers, M. & Hirst, M. (1990). The role of budgetary information in performance evaluation,
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 15(4), pp. 373398.
Bromwich, M. & Bhimani, A. (1989). Management Accounting: Evolution not Revolution.
London: CIMA.
Brownell, P. (1995). Research Methods in Management Accounting. Melbourne, Australia:
Coopers and Lybrand.
Bunce, P., Fraser, R. & Woodcock, L. (1995). Advanced budgeting: a journey to advanced
management systems, Management Accounting Research, 6(3), pp. 253265.
Emmanuel, C.R. & Otley, D.T. (1985). Accounting for Management Control (1st edition).
England: Van Nostrand Reinhold, Wokingham.
Epstein, M. & Birchard, B. (2000). Counting What Counts: Turning Corporate Accountability
into Competitive Advantage. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
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