The Role of the Management Accountant

Local Variations and Global Influences

Lukas Goretzki, Erik Strauss, Lukas Goretzki, Erik Strauss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317377047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

There is considerable national variation in the professionalization and status of the management accountant. Although researchers from different countries have contributed to our knowledge about tasks and roles, we have limited insights into the development, education, and socio-cultural influences in different countries and surprisingly little is known about the local and national contexts in which these roles are learned and performed.

This book bridges this research gap using two complementary perspectives. The first part explores management accountants in a range of different national contexts, providing information about country-specific historical developments and educational standards as well as specific roles and tasks. The second part focusses on important global developments that will increasingly impact management accountants in the future, such as sustainability, the financial crisis, technology and changing roles. By combining local context with a global overview, this insightful volume provides an agenda for future research which will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students in management accounting throughout the world.

1 Introduction

Lukas Goretzki and Erik Strauss

The work of management accountants has attracted wide scholarly attention. Research has mainly focused on the heterogeneity of management accountants’ tasks and roles, the antecedents leading to the often-observed practice variation as well as its consequences (e.g. Burns & Baldvinsdottir, 2005; Järvenpää, 2007; Lambert & Sponem, 2011; Morales & Lambert, 2013; Mouritsen, 1996; Simon, Guetzkow, Kozmetzky & Tyndall, 1954). Studies show that it is difficult to define the role of the management accountant as, empirically, one can basically find management accountants performing different roles ranging from the bean-counter to the business partner, just to mention two ideal types often referred to in the literature. This observed practice variation can, to a certain extent, be explained by internal factors like the organizational structure (centralization vs. decentralization), the internal status or authority of the management accounting function, interaction structures between managers and management accountants, personal characteristics or leadership styles. Additionally, researchers have stressed that country-specific factors have an impact on how management accountants see and interpret their role in the organization and consequently how they interact with managers (Ahrens & Chapman, 2000). An important aspect, hereby, seems to be the degree of professionalization and – associated with this – how management accountants are educated in their countries (e.g. academic education vs. professional training) or how “strong” discursively available social identities are (cf. Down & Reveley, 2009). Furthermore, it appears that the relative status of management accountants (compared to other professional groups) varies between different countries (Lambert & Pezet, 2011) and that even the national culture might have an influence on the role of the management accountant (Granlund & Lukka, 1998).

Furthermore, neither the factors influencing the role of the management accountant nor management accountants’ own endeavors to change their role are static and they develop over time. Scholars have paid particular attention to management accountants’ development toward an increasing business-orientation and contribution to value-creation (e.g. Burns & Baldvinsdottir, 2005; Goretzki, Strauß & Weber, 2013; Järvenpää, 2007). Researchers described developments of management accountants from ‘bean counters’ engaged in gathering and analyzing data as well as preparing standard reports for managers (cf. Bougen, 1994; Friedman & Lyne, 1997, 2001; Järvinen, 2009) to ‘business partners’ who are willing and able to contribute to the management and control of the firm (see, for example, Järvenpää, 2007). One important condition for such developments as emphasized in the literature is technological developments. For example, the introduction of computer-based enterprise resource planning systems unburdened the management accountants from many routine tasks so that they can use their work time for other tasks like more qualitative analyses of variances in the data to provide managers more value-adding information or even concrete suggestions for decision-making (cf. Caglio, 2003; Scapens & Jazayeri, 2003).

In addition to technological aspects as conditions for role change, some studies shed light on management accountants’ endeavors to take influence on their own role within the organization (cf. Horton & de Araujo Wanderley, 2016; Morales & Lambert, 2013), sometimes initiated by actors (e.g. chief financial officers, CFOs) trying to establish a particular role (identity) for ‘their’ subordinates (Goretzki et al., 2013). Efforts of management accountants or financial managers to establish a particular (role) identity for themselves or their subordinates can to a certain extent be considered effects of ‘normative pressure’ to discard traditional role stereotypes and perform ‘innovative’ roles. Important players, hereby, are professional associations of (management) accountants that realized the requirement to ‘reinvent’ the role of management accountants (Picard, Durocher & Gendron, 2014) to, for example, preserve their relevance within the firm. Therefore, professional associations such as the Charted Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) or the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), and also ‘quasi-associations’ like the German-speaking International Controller Association (cf. Schäffer, Schmidt & Strauss, 2014) started to promote an apparently ‘new’ role – the business partner role – for management accountants and for providing management accountants with respective symbolic resources (cf. Down & Reveley, 2009) such as role templates. As the existing literature on the (changing) role of the management accountant is often focused on Anglo-Saxon countries it is, however, rather unknown to what extent these developments regarding the role of the management accountant can be taken for granted from a global perspective. In other words, we know rather little whether endeavors, developments or even the rhetoric around the role of the management accountant (e.g. in professional magazines) are similar in different countries.

Taken together, it can be argued that although academic interest has increased tremendously in the last decade, our knowledge about management accountants’ actual tasks, roles, organizational status in different countries as well as the different country-specific ways in which they are socialized and educated is still rather limited. However, these insights seem to be necessary to build a comprehensive understanding about the management accounting occupation.

Therefore, this book presents a compendium encompassing detailed accounts about management accountants in different countries (Part I) and global factors that already have or will influence the role of the management accountant (Part II). Summarizing the key insights from Part I, we can say that although a core of activities (like budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis etc.) exists that many management accountants share around the world, the management accounting profession seems more multifaceted than prior research might yet have suggested. Starting from very basis aspects like the name of the profession we can see interesting differences between different countries. For example, management accountants are called, apart from “management accountant” (e.g. in China, India or UK), “controller” (e.g. in Brazil, Canada, Finland or Germany) or “business analyst” (e.g. in Italy) in some countries. The differences between management accountants across different countries (see Chapters 2–13) result to a certain extent also from the very diverse pathways to becoming a management accountant as well as the role that professional associations educating management accountants play in these countries. Whereas some countries have strong professional associations that have closure about educating management accountants (like CIMA in the UK or Canada) and hence present rather strong social identities for aspirants of this profession, in other societal contexts universities (e.g. China or Germany) or organizations themselves (like in Japan) are responsible for education. Depending (but not exclusively) on the relevance of the professional association and the legal background (in some countries the development of the role of the management accountant was even facilitated by governmental initiatives) management accountants can have very different organizational but also societal statuses around the globe. While in some countries, management accountants have a certain legal back-up (e.g. in Russia) which makes them a prerequisite for management and fosters their strategic role, the status can be described as more traditional (i.e. taking over routine tasks like data gathering) in countries like India or Japan.

The tasks, educational backgrounds and societal as well as organizational statuses of management accountants are quite heterogeneous across countries and the kaleidoscopic landscape of the management accounting profession might also be enforced in the future as various global trends might influence management accountants’ role, tasks and work environments. Nevertheless, the chapters also show that the so-called business partner role seems to constitute a transcontextual role model with which management accountants in various countries prefer to identity themselves. This fact that business partnering might be associated with very different tasks sheds a rather critical light on those studies that try to identity a distinct or even ‘standard’ set of tasks, activities or skills that characterize business partner management accountants and differentiates them from other stereotypes like the bean-counter (see Chapter 17). It seems that what ‘makes’ business partners is actually the attitude that management accountants have toward their role but also how others (especially managers) perceive them. The chapter on the influence of economic crises on the role of the management accountant shows, for instance, that in such situations management accountants become more important for managers and are therefore more intensively involved in organizational processes (see Chapter 19). To support managers properly, management accountants should in this respect not unlearn their basic calculative tasks (see Chapter 20), which may be challenging because these tasks are more and more handed over to IT systems (see Chapter 14), fall victim to outsourcing initiatives (see Chapter 15) or taken over by financial accountants (see Chapter 16). A further challenge in the context of the business partner role is that management accountants are expected to stay open to emerging topics or developments such as sustainability (see Chapter 18).

What this book also reveals is that when researchers talk about “the management accountant” they – empirically – refer to very different types of actors. We hope that bringing this diversity to the minds of researchers may create a fertile ground for future studies and routes for further research on local variations and global influences that investigates and exploits differences but also commonalities of “the management accountant.”

References

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