Strategic Management Accounting Development during Last 30 Years

Abstract

Strategic management accounting (SMA) has gone through large development at the end of the twelve’s century and it supposed SMA replaces in future traditional cost a management accounting. Now it seems that this presumption has not been realized.\rIn 1981, Simmonds claimed that SMA was “spreading rapidly in practice” and that “management accountants are spending a significant proportion of their time and effort in collecting and estimating cost, volume, and price data on competition and calculating the relative strategic position of a firm and its competitors as a basis for forming business strategy”(Simmonds, 1981). This is a curious claim, as in later years, several writers maintained that such practices have not been adopted widely (Guilding et al., 2000; Lord, 1994, 1996; Shank, 2007). Was Simmonds exaggerating, or was he using the term SMA, or viewing SMA, more loosely that of subsequent researchers and writers?\rIn the years following Simmonds (1981), many papers that promoted SMA appeared in the professional literature and were largely normative papers or descriptive case studies. It was not until the late 1980s that more significant academic writing emerged presenting SMA within a more theoretically-grounded research framework. Prominent were works by Bromwich (1990) and Bromwich and Bhimani (1989, 1994).