Management Accounting and Strategy – A Review and Reflections on Future Research

Abstract

In this paper, we review extant research examining the relationship between management accounting and strategy. This relationship is not unidirectional as developments in strategic processes can also have strong ramifications for accounting systems, leading to their refinement and possible innovations. In addition to previous, valuable overviews focusing on the rational approach to examining the relationship between management accounting and strategy (e.g. Chenhall, 2003; Langfield-Smith, 1997, 2008), this paper also addresses interpretive and the poststructuralist studies. Although the three approaches have little cross-reference to each other, they collectively offer a rich tapestry of the relationship between accounting and strategy. Our review of the contributions made by these three streams of research suggest that, instead of treating those theoretical approaches as competitors, they should be considered complementary to each other. Such complementary perspective, we suggest, can provide many perceptive insights into ongoing research in this area. The paper concludes with some reflections on future research.