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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the strategic management concept of “strategy tools” (STs) can be reinterpreted from an industrial network perspective. It considers how STs are used to influence the substance of relationships and how firms engage in strategic action by using such tools.

Using case study research involving three focal firms, the paper scrutinizes use of selected STs to examine how they are used to systematically relate to others and create benefits and affect development paths in business relationships.

STs can be viewed as an integrated part of a networking pattern of mobilizing resources, linking activities and relating actors. Seen in this manner, use of STs can be interaction-facilitating or interaction-creating.

In an interactive approach, STs must be seen in relation to others as they are used in strategic (co-)action to engage and involve others. In this view, tools are strategic when used to affect the long-term development of important business relationships.

Practitioners should acknowledge that the use of a ST to handle counterparts is emerging, and valuable only in relation to specific others. Because the value of STs is unknowable until it is revealed how they can affect the substance of a specific relationship, there is no best-practice or one-size-fits-all approach.

This paper illuminates the phenomenon of “strategy tools” by considering it from both sides of the business exchange interface.

Reports a study of sales management in UK companies, which explores the relationship between behaviour‐based control systems and outcome‐based control systems. Although conventional theory has suggested that behaviour performance and outcome performance result from different stimuli, we find that behaviour‐based control is positively associated with both behaviour performance and outcome performance. We find also that organizational commitment and sales territory design are significantly related to salesforce performance. This suggests a number of important avenues for improving salesforce performance. These findings and the growing emphasis on building long‐term, collaborative buyer‐seller relationships favour the use of behaviour‐based control systems in many sales management situations, and suggest a new agenda for management attention in improving salesforce effectiveness.

The research goal was to trace behavioural patterns of management accountants, comprising activities and courses of action, in order to enhance understanding of the management accounting profession.

Protoscripts were derived, using interview techniques and a research method called “interpretive interactionism”. These protoscripts depict observable, recurrent activities and patterns of interaction characteristic for a group of persons, and can be used in various types of situations.

The paper describes the procedure and outcome of the collection of behavioural protoscripts used by management accountants and controllers, as well as their possible ordering.

The findings enlarge understanding of the controller profession, but are limited solely to controller activities. The protoscripts collected are stereotypical, at least for the controllers interviewed. Of course, all human experience is interpretation and it should be acknowledged that interpretations are never complete.

The control mechanisms and instruments that emerge in an organisation are the result of several interrelated factors and processes. Of special interest here is the behaviour of management accountants and controllers in shaping, maintaining and exerting control. Behavioural protoscripts can show how management accountants give contents to their role and structure their daily work.

Scripted behaviour of management accountants has received little prior research attention, especially in combination with the research method of interpretive interactionism.

This paper aims to investigate the emergence of the enabling characteristics of new budgetary practices and their implications for the role of controller.

The longitudinal perspective of this qualitative case study is based on interviews of controllers and managers involved in budgetary work. This study monitored the four enabling characteristics of management control, namely, repair, internal transparency, global transparency and flexibility (Adler and Borys, 1996), related to the new budgeting practices in one global paper company.

The findings of the study demonstrate that the implementation of rolling forecasting was a major attempt at “repair” to remedy the incompleteness of accounting information, which made controllers experts in producing and delivering more realistic forward-looking information in the organization. The increasing internal and global transparency of new budgetary practices enabled controllers at various levels of organization to develop new competences, which helped controller network to build a holistic view of the totality of control and supply more relevant information in organization. Moreover, the inherent flexibility of the system was a major condition for improving organizational effectiveness in budgetary work. However, the study shows that the controller’s attitude towards enabling formalization is not necessarily positive if the system is not aligned with professional mindset and competence.

This study adds to the understanding of the complementarity between new developments of budgeting and controller role by addressing the enabling uses of management control systems, which have the potential to enhance the controller role change.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the barriers that prevented the case study organisation, a UK manufacturing and R&D subsidiary of a European transnational company, from improving its spreadsheet‐based financial planning process.

This is an insider action research case study, using qualitative semi‐structured interviews to ask accountants their opinions on budgeting and whether the present spreadsheet‐based budgeting system could be improved. In addition, a quantitative questionnaire was used to ask managers their views on whether budgeting was a help or a hindrance.

Changes to the existing financial planning process were not implemented because they threatened to alter the existing distribution of power within the finance organisation.

The research project could not have proceeded into an implementation of change cycle due to financial constraints and because the manufacturing sites where the study took place were closed down. Further research into the organisational politics and culture of the case study organisation would have been an interesting challenge.

Consistent with previous research that existing power distribution and organisation cultures may stifle creativity and be the cause of resistance, preventing changes to accounting systems being implemented.

Why management systems are resistant to change has occupied researchers in recent times. However, there has been a dearth of action research on budgeting and financial planning, particularly insider action research. This paper contributes to the developing body of action research literature on management accounting systems.

The goal of this paper is to use a coherent conceptual framework to discern variables (triggers) that affect a management accountant's role in an organization, thereby generating a comprehensive empirical picture of the management accountant profession in The Netherlands. Similar research was conducted in 2004, which allows a comparison of the data to see if, and to what extent, developments in the profession have taken place.

Using survey data, groups of management accountants are distinguished based on coherent combinations of activities. Factor and cluster analyses are applied to obtain a segmentation of the data. By doing this, it is established if homogeneous groups of management accountants can be distinguished, how many groups there are and what the characteristics of these groups are in terms of activities.

It was found that controllers either operate as “reporting business analysts” or “business system analysts”. Whether someone is found to be a reporting business analyst or business system analyst is among other things affected by personality traits, a person's experience in finance and accounting, the financial status of an organization and changes in laws and regulations.

The conceptual framework proposed integrates several previous studies on the roles of management accountants. It allows an analysis of their activities, yielding an empirically founded classification of management accountants in groups. In addition, possible factors underlying this classification can be discerned. As this is a generally applicable framework, it can, at a later stage, be used to make a comparison between countries, for instance in Europe.

The resulting picture of the management accountant profession provides information on how to form or even design the financial function in an organization. Apparently, the developments in the profession reflect changes in the business environment and society as a whole, as it seems that internal analysis and risk management have become more fundamental to the profession.

This research uses an original framework covering several previous studies to generate a comprehensive empirical picture of the management accountant profession in The Netherlands. The framework is used to track changes over a three‐year period.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the differences between proactive and reactive market research techniques during the development of new market offerings. The study focused on the financial and innovative performance of traditional market research techniques, such as focus groups and in‐depth interviews, in comparison to more co‐creation‐oriented techniques that are designed to capture customers' value‐in‐use.

The study was a two‐stage process. Study I, an empirical investigation of 195 development projects in European companies, examined how these companies use different market research techniques and how this relates to the profit margins of new products and services. Study II designed an experiment with 50 users of a consumer good and evaluated the contribution of different market research techniques, based on the degree of originality and customer value.

Significant differences were found, in terms of both content and originality, between the technique based on customer co‐creation and the two traditional market research techniques (Study II). These findings can help to explain why the relationship between the use of market research techniques and profit margin (Study I) is stronger for co‐creation techniques than it is for traditional market research techniques.

Despite empirical evidence that the application of market research techniques based on co‐creation can lead to original ideas, there is a lack of valid studies regarding how co‐creation techniques perform in relation to more traditional methods of collaboration with customers.

This paper aims to, with the continuous take-up of sustainability issues by companies and with the growing experience companies gain in dealing with this topic, raise the question of whether accountants are involved in the corporate practice of managing sustainability information, and if yes, what their role is. The actual involvement of accountants in corporate environmental and sustainability management has merely been investigated to date.

Based on 58 in-depth interviews with corporate practitioners, this paper, first, explores the roles in the sustainability accounting practice in companies which are considered to be leading in sustainability reporting in the UK and Germany. Second, the role of accountants is analysed from a power theory perspective.

The main findings suggest that accountants are partially involved in sustainability accounting practice but mainly exert a gate-keeping role between sustainability managers and higher management. The findings raise questions of how to better involve accountants in earlier steps of the sustainability management accounting process.

The explorative research is based on interviews in European companies considered to be among the leaders in sustainability reporting.

Empirically investigating the role of accountants can help improve sustainability accounting practice and education. Should it turn out that the accountants have no other option but to act as gatekeepers, accounting education will play a major role in overcoming this deficiency in the pursuit of improved sustainability knowledge and performance. If, on the other hand, it is the defensive stance of accountants and the fear of losing power in corporate structures which motivates them to act as gatekeepers, mechanisms to motivate them to cooperate should be researched.

The paper empirically investigates and discusses the accountant’s contribution to sustainability information management. This can help overcome organisational challenges impeding companies to successfully implement sustainability measures.

The paper investigates and discusses the accountant’s contribution to sustainability information management. The empirical analysis is based on a framework to identify different roles in sustainability accounting. Two possible development paths for a stronger constructive involvement of accountants are identified – to improve sustainability education for accountants if lack of sustainability knowledge is a major obstacle, and/or to improve incentives and structures motivating accountants to contribute with their information management expertise on all steps of the sustainability accounting process.

The purpose of this study is to provide explanations for the factors affecting sustainability disclosures by a local coastal shire council in Australia. Drawing on the theory of accountability, a further aim is to examine how this information is communicated to stakeholders.

A qualitative and case study approach is adopted for this investigation. The main sources of empirical data are semi‐structured interviews with the senior managers of the council, observation and the use of publicly available documentation.

Significant issues relating specifically to this council were identified as managing population growth, planning for land use, climate change and community engagement. These issues were addressed through various forums such as the annual report, a sustainability report and through community engagement meetings. There was also little evidence to suggest that the global reporting initiative is influencing how the local council was accounting for its social and environmental activities.

Coastal regions are fragile areas that are subjected to varying degrees of pressure on their environment. This study suggests that community demand for information on sustainability is commencing to change the content of the council's annual report.

Much attention has been paid to the role and extent of sustainability reporting in the private sector, however, less research has been devoted to investigating this area in the realm of the government sector.

Management accounting change and the changing roles of management accountants have dominated both the professional and academic accounting literature in recent years. This paper aims to contribute to these debates by providing evidence from a sample of management accountants working in both dependent (group) and independent (non‐group) organizations in the U.K. One thousand (qualified) members of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), U.K., were randomly selected from the association’s database for a postal survey questionnaire. In all, 279 professionally qualified management accountants in both types of organizations responded to a postal survey questionnaire (58 percent from dependent and 42 percent from independent organizations respectively). A Mann‐Whitney analysis of the responses indicates that while some significant differences exist between the views of the two groups, these management accountants agree on several of the management accounting practices and the roles of the management accountant investigated. The study provides further insight into MAS and the changing roles of management accountants. It was earlier hypothesized that significant differences would exist in the perceptions between the two groups. However the weak support for the hypotheses could be explained by the influence of other institutional forces apart from the head office control which is focused on in the paper. Thus, it was recognized that other institutional forces are likely to be at play in shaping the perceptions of the management accountants. This is a limitation of the paper and future research to study the impacts of other institutional factors is recommended.