ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on management accounting and control in supporting managerial work, especially new product development (NPD) management, which has not been adequately examined from a managerial-work viewpoint. It explains how the production and use of NPD project management accounting and control are experienced by NPD project managers through interacting with other manager groups. If the possibilities related to NPD projects include a huge amount of potential business impacts, there can be clear differences between companies in how clearly actors are able to explicate factual possibilities and how much of NPD project managers' active work is required. Attaining NPD project objectives requires acknowledging the differences between different actors' topoi in the NPD context. This means making management accounting and control help define pragmatic truth in a given business context. An NPD project manager himself/herself may have, for instance, a technological or economic orientation and may possess more or less interactive character.
