ABSTRACT
The relevance of management accounting research and practice has received ample attention over the past three decades and continues to generate considerable debate in the academic research literature. This special issue of Accounting and Business Research seeks to contribute to this debate by taking it in a slightly different direction. Earlier and emerging debates about the relevance of management accounting have tended to cast the topic in relatively narrow terms centred on its usefulness for managerial decision-making and control in specific organisational locales. By contrast, the contributions to this issue widen this perspective by illustrating how management accounting can also be implicated in processes that go beyond individual organisations and
Manchester,
managerialist concerns with enhancing their performance. Individually and collectively, they draw attention to how we may conceive of the notion of relevance from a somewhat broader, societal perspective and how this may prompt some rethinking of our research agenda as management accounting scholars. To paraphrase van der Stede (2011), the nurturing of such an agenda implies a need to adopt an “inside out” perspective on management accounting. Rather than confining research to intra-organisational practices and processes, it requires us to explore how management accounting affects and becomes more or less useful to a broader range of interests and constituencies in society. Also, it compels us to examine how management accounting practices take shape beyond individual organisations as an integral part of societal processes where multiple actors with more or less conflicting interests vie for power and influence. Shedding further light on such issues may widen the view of the potential audiences to which management accounting is seen as relevant. It may also open up new or under-explored research opportunities and ways of theorising management accounting.
