STRATEGICMANAGEMENTACCOUNTINGANDSENSE.docVIP

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING AND SENSE MAKING IN A GERMAN MULTINATIONAL COMPANY INTRODUCTION This paper investigates strategic management accounting in an organisational setting. Its motivation is to obtain an in-depth understanding of strategic management accounting (SMA) as it is lived and perceived by actors in organisations. The paper aims to contribute to this emergent understanding by providing insights from a multinational company in Germany. SMA can broadly be defined as being the use of management accounting systems in supporting strategic decision-making. The survival of companies in today’s highly competitive global markets may depend partly on a management accounting function that allows for the successful assessment of strategic situations. SMA can provide such a function. The research does not aim to investigate SMA techniques as such, but seeks to understand what strategic management accounting means to organisational actors. Scapens and Bromwich (2001) note that the papers published in the previous ten years in ‘Management Accounting Research’ demonstrate that the complexities of management accounting in practice transcend the simple economic decision making approaches portrayed in most textbooks. They further note that a large number of publications seek to understand the organisational setting of management accounting, and that in doing so such studies do not take the nature of management accounting for granted, thus opening its organisational role for debate. This research attempts to address such issues by investigating the complexities of strategic management accounting in an organisational setting. Much of the prior research in SMA has concentrated on which accounting techniques are used and in what circumstances. This paper is more concerned with how SMA is perceived and used in practice. Indeed, the main contribution of this research is to understand that from the participants’ perspectives the way in which accounting is used to make sens