Accounting for Managers: Interpreting Accounting Information for Decision Making, 4th Edition

Introduction to the Readings

In Part IV, we reproduce four readings from the academic literature to present four different yet complementary perspectives on accounting in organizations. Each reading has several questions that the reader should think about and try to answer in order to help understand the concepts.

Readings

A Cooper and Kaplan (1988). How cost accounting distorts product costs.

B Otley, Broadbent and Berry (1995). Research in management control: an overview of its development.

C Covaleski, Dirsmith and Samuel (1996). Managerial accounting research: the contributions of organizational and sociological theories.

D Dent (1991). Accounting and organizational cultures: a field study of the emergence of a new organizational reality.

A rationale for this book was to provide a theoretical underpinning to accounting, drawn from accounting research, to assist in interpretation and critical questioning. This underpinning provides a critical perspective on the most common accounting techniques and describes the social and organizational context in which accounting exists. This context influences accounting but is also influenced by accounting, as the way we see the world – even if only our small organizational part of the world – is significantly influenced by the ways in which accounting portrays and represents that world.

The article by Cooper and Kaplan is a classic, explaining clearly how traditional management accounting techniques have distorted management information ...