دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی انتخاب استراتژیک و حسابداری مدیریت استراتژیک در شرکت های تولیدی بزرگ - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between strategic choices and the use of strategic management accounting (SMA) techniques in large manufacturing companies and investigates whether external factors such as environmental uncertainty and competitive forces afect the SMA system. The survey results show that SMA usage does not depend on strategy type and only marginally depends on geographic orientation. These fndings have been integrated using qualitative data collected in seven large companies through interviews. Although signifcant progress has been made over the last two decades in describing SMA practices in Europe, the contribution of this study to the accounting (SMA) literature involves both the research content and design. Having identifed gaps in previous SMA research, we design a study focused on large manufacturing frms that considers diferent hypotheses and adopts a mixed method approach.

6 Discussion and conclusion

In this section, we discuss the main results of the study according to the four primary objectives: to test the relationship between strategy types and SMA technique usage; to test the relationship between geographic orientation and SMA technique usage; to investigate whether external factors, such as environmental uncertainty and competitive forces, afect the SMA system; to assess corporate accountants’ perception of strategic costing and competitor accounting supporting strategy choices. The descriptive statistics of SMA techniques (Table 4), based on senior corporate accountants’ perceptions, indicate a high SMA importance in large manufacturing companies. The international comparison using the descriptive statistics reveal the common higher orientation towards the usage of competitor position monitoring (see Table  8). In addition, the balanced scorecard appears to be largely used in the US, Italy and Slovenia. Furthermore, the results show a common high orientation towards target costing and quality costing in NZ, the US, Slovenia and Italy. In this study, in contrast with the fndings of descriptive statistics, a result that could appear surprising is the absence of a signifcant association between some strategic choices variables and SMA technique categories. The results of the hypotheses testing, presented in Table 8, provide valuable insights into the practice of large Italian companies. First, the results of the hypothesis testing indicate that SMA usage does not depend on strategy type. While H1a and H1c are rejected, H1b is partially supported. The rejection of H1a is very important because the empirical evidence contrasts with the theoretical accounting literature. In particular, H1a cannot be confrmed because the fndings suggest that cost leaders do not use more SMA strategic costing techniques. This result mainly does not support the idea of Porter (1980) or of Langfeld-Smith (2007), that strong cost controls are (more) appropriate when following a cost leadership positioning.