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THE BLACKWELL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING
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Accounting practice encompasses a wide variety of organizational activities which include the
recording of financial transactions and events in the firm’s books, the use of financial information
for management decision-making and control purposes, and the preparation and audit of financial
statements prepared for external users such as investors, customers, and employees. There are many
textbooks available which provide introductory, intermediate, and advanced treatments of the technical
and managerial issues raised by such accounting activities. The current volume cannot possibly
aim to provide in depth coverage of the vast range of activities which comprise modern accounting
practice. Instead, it aims to provide a way in to the expanding accounting research literature which in
recent years has come to provide a variety of perspectives on the big issues confronting accounting
practice. I briefly consider some of these perspectives here.
Some of the contributions to the volume focus on particular financial reporting, auditing, or
management accounting topics and outline alternative possible approaches or treatments within
(and perhaps beyond) existing conventions or rules. The information contained in the main financial
statements (the balance sheet, the profit and loss account, and the cash flow statement) is discussed;
important aspects of financial reporting such as the treatment of employee stock options, pensions
accounting, and the treatment of taxation are analyzed; comparative analysis of the use of statistical and
judgmental methods in auditing is provided: and the nature of costing systems required to generate
product cost information in modern production environments are described. While these contributions
to the volume throw important light on important technical developments in the broad accounting
arena, they also draw attention to the choices that must be made by accounting regulators, auditors,
and managers in determining what is an appropriate treatment of a particular item in a company’s
financial statements, an effective audit procedure or the ‘‘optimal’’ approach to product costing. The
fact that these choices can have profound effects on management decision-making and on the fortunes
(and decisions) of important corporate stakeholders or constituencies indicates the fundamental
managerial, economic, and social importance of developing understandings of the broader implications
of accounting practice.
The need to understand the implications of accounting practices for the decisions taken by managers
and investors, and the implications of these decisions for broader economic and social well-being,
provides important motivation for accounting research with economic, organizational, social, and
historical focus. Several of the volume contributions consider the usefulness of accounting from an
economic perspective, for example, by reviewing the large literature on the relationship between share
price performance and financial statement information such as reported profit, dividends, cash flow,
and R&D spending. Much of the empirical work in this area draws on valuation theory, providing
interesting evidence on the extent to which accounting provides (or at least reflects) fundamental
information used by the capital markets to value corporate securities. In addition to valuation theory,
economic perspectives based on agency theory and information economics have been used to provide
insights into the problems of designing performance evaluation systems which encourage ‘‘optimal’’
managerial decision-making and the problems of structuring of audit contracts to provide a high level of audit quality from an investor viewpoint. The volume provides a range of contributions that
Cary L. Cooper - Personal Name
2
ISBN 1-4051-1827-X
NONE
Accounting
English
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
2005
USA
1-454
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