دانلود رایگان مقاله صنعت، مقررات و انفورماتیک در حسابداری مدیریت

Abstract

This commentary is based on the remarks I made as the chair of the panel on “the future of management accounting research” on the occasion of the Management Accounting Research 25th Anniversary Conference at the London School of Economics in April 2015. The three panelists’ contributions are published in this issue immediately following this commentary, and cover perspectives on management accounting research “in context” related to the panelists’ chosen applications of industry, regulation or regulatory “shocks”, and informatics or, especially, “big data”. The audience at the conference also wanted to hear my views on the future direction of the journal as the then-incoming Editor-in-Chief of Management Accounting Research. I offer a few thoughts on this in the second part of my commentary.

2. The journal

Following thepaneldiscussion,I openedthe sessionto questions from the floor. Because I had just become the Editor-in-Chief, and thus perhaps not surprisingly, the room wanted to hear my views 2 The source ofthis adage is ambiguous, but according to Wikipedia, Ronald Coase (of The Nature of the Firm (1937) fame) used a variation of this phrase in a talk at the University of Virginia in the early 1960s (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald Coase, accessed on 20 February 2016). The phrase also appears, inter alia, in an article of The Economist (2010). on the future direction of Management Accounting Research—that is, the future of the journal instead of the panelist’s views on the future ofthe field. I emphatically replied that Management Accounting Research will continue to be committed to diversity across all relevant dimensions of topics, settings, methods, and disciplinary lenses that one can envisage to rigorously examine all manner of relevant management accounting issues broadly conceived (see also Van der Stede, 2015b). On the question of which articles Management Accounting Research “accepts”, I responded that in the realm of the broad scope I set out in my reply to the earlier question, studies are assessed on their incremental contribution based on a robust execution through the chosen method. I hastened to add, though, that every study has weaknesses. Short of these weaknesses being fundamental, that is, short of these being flaws rather than merely weaknesses, we expect that authors carefully discuss their studies’ limitations so that the findings can be properly interpreted. But we should not let perfect be the enemy of good. Better to have a diamond with some imperfections than a pebble without. A study does not have to be perfect—indeed none is or can be; instead we are looking for compelling incremental contributions to knowledge with sufficient rigor, one study at a time.