حسابداری مدیریت استراتژیک Strategic management accounting

Abstract Despite its thirty year history, strategic management accounting has yet to establish itself as a core element of managerial accounting. That it has the capacity to do so is immediately apparent from the term itself, which in turn explains its continuing appeal for those attracted to developing and promoting it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that by reconceptualising strategic management accounting as ‘accounting for strategic management’ it may be possible to better realise its potential. The paper is in very large part a literature review, in the course of which the accounting for strategic management perspective is explicated. A number of precursors in the extant strategic management accounting literature are also revisited. Central to this reformulation of strategic management accounting is the understanding that the accounting aspects of accounting for strategic management will differ radically from those normally associated with that designation. Keywords: accounting; strategy; strategic management; strategic management accounting; interfunctional cooperation.  ۱٫ Introduction In their editorial to a previous special issue of this journal devoted to strategic management accounting (SMA), Tomkins and Carr (1996) observed that there was, as yet, no consensus on the meaning of the term, which had been in use for the previous fifteen years, following its introduction into the literature in Simmonds (1981). Fifteen years later the same observation remains valid. Whereas previously we might have found this lack of consensus somewhat irksome, having had the opportunity to research and contribute to the SMA literature in the interim, we have come to recognise that such an important idea cannot and should not be subject to any such attempts at closure. As the title of the paper intimates, there is a lot of rich meaning that can be attached to SMA. The purpose of this paper therefore is to revisit the SMA and a number of associated literatures in an attempt to provide a more systematic foundation on which to develop this still attractive idea in the coming years. Central to this exercise is the identification of a reformulation of SMA as ‘accounting for strategic management’, a term that has appeared in the SMA literature at various times but remains largely unspecified. As characterised here both accounting and strategic management are mature interdisciplinary practices that cohere in a highly fruitful way. The paper begins by engaging with a recent retrospective on SMA, which we believe incorporates much that is both positive and negative about its evolution since the early 1980s. This is followed by a discussion of the different perspectives on the meaning of the SMA term that have emerged during this time. In section four we begin the process of reconceptualising SMA as accounting for strategic management by means of a discussion of the terms management, strategy and accounting, and continue this by further exploring the idea of strategic management in the fifth section. A number of prescursors of accounting for strategic management present in the extant SMA literature are discussed in section six, while in the seventh section Kaplan and Norton’s strategy map approach is discussed as a mature exemplar of accounting for strategic management. The paper concludes with an attempt to reconcile the meaning that we have hitherto canvassed for SMA with its reconceptualised meaning together with some thoughts on how the fabrication of customer self-accounts might further enhance accounting for strategic management. 2. Strategic management accounting in retrospect In a recent paper Langfield-Smith sought to answer the question: how far has SMA progressed since the term was introduced into the literature by Simmonds in 1981 (Langfield-Smith, 2008)? The paper reviews a wide literature, in no small part as a consequence of Langfield-Smith’s view on what SMA encompasses, concluding that despite much enthusiasm for such developments, including from several influential advocates, progress to date has been modest. SMA has not been extensively adopted, irrespective of whether it is identified with a broad range of techniques or restricted to specific techniques. The term SMA continues to be neither widely current nor widely understood in practice, or among some researchers. There is evidence that particular SMA techniques such as activity-based costing may have been more generally embraced in previous times but these are now in decline. It is unlikely that further surveys on the uptake of SMA will suddenly begin to report an increase in interest in or the adoption of SMA. As Langfield-Smith comments: Twenty-five years down the track it is difficult to continue to argue that it is early days for SMA and that there exists an accounting lag. (Langfield-Smith, 2008: 221). The tone of the paper is partly coloured by the views of the late John Shank, someone Langfield-Smith identifies as among the keenest advocates of the development of SMA. Along with the majority of his North American contemporaries, Shank did not use the term SMA, something that Langfield-Smith acknowledges. In her view, however, there is sufficient about the character of Shank’s strategic cost management contribution to have it qualify as an approach within the SMA tradition. This view was previously commended in Roslender (1995) although subsequently rejected in later paper with Hart in 2003. Roslender and Hart seek to limit the use of the SMA term to those developments that combine managerial accounting and marketing management insights, something Roslender and Hart believe is not the case with strategic cost management irrespective of its reliance on Porterian competitive strategy theory (Porter, 1980, 1985). Shank (2007) recalls how from the mid 1980s he became increasingly excited about the prospects for a new third generation managerial accounting discipline that he identified as strategic cost management in his 1989 Journal of Management Accounting Research paper. In due course he and Robin Cooper were to debate the merits of strategic cost management and activity-based costing as the true manifestation of the new strategic (management) accounting tradition. LangfieldSmith is comfortable to recognise activity-based costing as part of the SMA canon, a view that will be discussed in the following section. In retrospect Shank identifies a mismatch during the 1990s between a very genuine enthusiasm evident among academics, consultants and senior practitioners for developments within strategic accounting such as strategic cost management and the limited impact it had within both the textbook tradition and the broader ranks of management accounting practitioners. While Cooper mused that the limited impact of new developments such as these might be the result of some failings within the ranks of practitioners, Shank continued to believe that strategic cost management and similar innovations would eventually succeed. By the time of his death, however, Shank had recognised that irrespective of their merits, strategic accounting developments were unlikely to prevail in a climate where the broader accountancy profession was increasingly subject to external scrutiny in the wake of a series of spectacular business scandals in which it was implicated and which resulted in a renewed appetite for regulation, inter alia the Sarbanes-Oxley provisions of 2002.