The research examines accountants' and managers' perceptions of management accounting roles under conditions of centralisation and decentralisation of the management accounting function. Decentralization was associated with greater interaction between accountants and other managers and with the provision of accounting information perceived as being more pertinent to managerial needs. However, whatever the structural relationship, there were criticisms of the accountants' passivity in management. Contrary to expectations neither interpersonal relationships nor excessive power of accountants were problematical, nor did many accountants show bureaucratic orientations. Their inability to meet service expectations were perhaps, related to ambiguity and stress emanating from the accounting workflows.

Through a detailed critique of Johnson & Kaplan's Relevance Lost, (Johnson, H.T. & Kaplan, R.S., Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1987)), based upon labour histories of control within North American firms, this article identifies major deficiencies in conventional historical studies of cost and management accounting and offers possibilities for their resolution. After noting the limitations of transaction cost theory for the theorisation of organisations and their history, the paper argues that accounting controls were not a consequence of economic or technological imperatives, but rather were rooted in struggles as firms attempted to control labour processes in various epochs of capitalistic development. Cost accounting developments are related to the destruction of internal subcontructing and craft control of production in early factories, the advent of “Scientific” Management and homogenised labour and, post-1930, with an accord between primary sectors of labour and corporations, which led to an increased emphasis on monopoly pricing, smoothing production and hence employment patterns, and a shift of economic pressures to secondary labour and producer markets. The paper concludes by arguing that, in the context of today's globalisation of capital, control associated with the labour and capital accord are being abandoned as corporations experiments with new methods and ideologies of control which are reflected in current fashions in accounting research.

This study explores socio-cultural aspects of management control in a Chinese Indonesian manufacturing company. Ethnographic data collection methods were combined with grounded theory data analysis to explore how cultures, ethnic differences, history, politics, and commercial considerations shaped management controls. A combination of emic and etic methods were used to generate grounded comparisons with nomethetic research on culture and control in a cultural contingency tradition. Chinese Indonesians own most Indonesian private domestic capital despite being an ethnic minority (3–4% of population) and having suffered extensive discrimination. The case links the Chinese businessmen’s values to socialisation during childhood and then examines how their interaction with the Javanese culture of pribumi employees, ethnic tensions between employers and employees, and organisational and economic factors affected management control. Consistent with previous cultural contingency research the Chinese owners’ preferences resided with controlling behaviour through personnel and behavioural controls, low budget participation, centralisation, subjective rather than objective controls, and tentatively, few rewards tied to results and the use of group rewards. Whether Chinese managers exhibited longer term orientations concerning planning and rewards could not be ascertained. However, ethnic tensions and commercial considerations mitigated the owners’ ability to control according to cultural preferences. Based upon these findings reflections on past research and suggestions for further developments are made with respect to methods, methodology, and incorporating a broader range of theories and issues, especially ethnicity, politics, and history.

This paper analyses the effects of implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) upon management control in two multinational organisations. How ERP was configured in each corporation created different forms of distance and relations between headquarters and the scattered subsidiaries. The construction of spatial and temporal separations (i.e. distance) and how they were understood and managed had profound effects on management control. In one organisation the ERP reproduced existing structures and distance which permitted conventional accounting controls based on action at a distance to be maintained. The second organisation used ERP to collapse distance through real-time information in a matrix structure. This did not increase centralisation but rather produced constantly changing loci of control and managerial feelings of ‘minimalist’ control.