MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING RESEARCH 323
that is management accounting to better serve exogenously given organizational
goals and thus somewhat narrow in focus. Designing better costing procedures,
incentive contracts, information systems to account for processing biases, and
so on, are examples of the problem-driven nature of mainstream management
accounting research.
In contrast, the research drawing on organizational and sociological theories, to
different degrees, situate management accounting practice within the context of
social life in general. The problem-driven focus is less apparent since, in part, the
very ways in which problems come to be defined as problems needing solutions,
or indeed how particular calculative techniques come to be called ‘‘accounting,’’
comprise the subject for analysis. From this perspective, managerial accounting
practices are not techniques that can be abstracted from the general milieu of
social life but rather one strand in the complex weave that makes up the social
fabric. Political events and ideologies, cultural norms and forces, social patterns
of interaction and societal presuppositions, technological changes and subjective
meanings that impel people to act in certain ways, all potentially impinge on the
roles and nature of management accounting. It is in this manner that a different
light is shed on the role and nature of management accounting practices by the
research which draws from organizational and sociological theories.
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