دانلود رایگان مقاله ثبات و تغییر در حسابداری مدیریت در طول زمان

ABSTRACT

In recent years, much has been written on the nature of management accounting change, and indeed stability. Many researchers have used concepts such as rules and routines to interpret this change and/or stability. Recent research has provided an increasingly clear picture of what rules and routines are, as well as contributing to our understanding of the processes of change and stability in management accounting. Management accounting research has mainly presented rules and routines as related phenomena, but some conceptual work has suggested they are separable and can (and possibly should) be considered independently when studying processes of change/stability within management accounting. However, empirical support for such work has been scarce to date. This paper uses data from the archival records of the Guinness company in an effort to establish whether rules and routines, at least in management accounting research, are best considered separable concepts or not. The archival records are artefacts of rules and routines and thus can be used to trace the interactions of rules and routines over time. Support for the notion that rules and routines should be considered separately is presented. The findings also portray the stable, but changing, nature of management accounting routines over time; a point worthy of further research.

5. Concluding remarks

The previous section described examples of change and stability in management accounting at the Guinness Cooperage, as conveyed through the interactions of rules and routines. At the outset, the aims of this study were to provide some empirical grounding for the key proposals of Quinn (2011) – namely that rules and routines can be unbundled and that rules need not exist. The unbundling is in particular contrast to Burns and Scapens (2000), who treat rules and routines as a combined unit of analysis in their framework – indeed they note their positioning of rules and routines in their framework as somewhat arbitrary (2000, p. 10). If we reflect on the management accounting rules and routines of the Guinness Cooperage as shown in Table 3, we can see that in most cases written rules (as defined by Quinn, 2011) were formed to bring about change in the existing management accounting practices atthe Cooperage – namely examples 1, 2A, 3 and 4.We can also see from the examples presented in Table 3 that sources of change to rules and/or routines canbe bothinternal and external to the organisation (Burns and Scapens, 2000).