The Innovation of Management Accounting Practices and Techniques

This chapter is intended to help us document the innovation, evolution and the adoption of a variety of relatively new management accounting techniques and practices in organisations. In doing so, the chapter first reviews the introduction of management accounting techniques of the past few decades in the literature and then investigates their implementations in practice. Exploring the levels of organizational satisfactions with adopted management accounting innovations in practice, the chapter finally discusses the level of associations between the adoption of management accounting innovations and organisational satisfaction.The main focus of this chapter is on management accounting practices and techniques rather than managerial tools. There is no universal consensus with respect to what techniques constitute management accounting practice and innovations (Cadez & Guilding, 2008). It is argued that many management accounting techniques drawn from other disciplines such as engineering and economics (Miller, 1998; Miller, Kurunmäkii, & O'Leary, 2008). According to Miller, et al. (2008), practices such as standard costing, discounted cash flow (DCF), breakeven analysis, and much more have been drawn from disciplines other than accounting and then adapted, and constituted as the core of accounting. Contributing to our understanding of what techniques constitute management accounting practices and innovations, this chapter reviews the most prevalent management accounting changes introduced in the literature over the past 70 years. It then examines the adoption and diffusion of latest management accounting innovations in organisations. And finally, the chapter discusses the levels of association between organizational satisfactions and adopted management accounting innovations in practice