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The emerging roles of management accountants as either hybrid accountants or business partners are a cause for much debate in the literature. Of the two characteristics related to these roles, namely information provider and interpreter, and decision-maker, the latter remains under-researched. The present study adds to the decision-maker debate by examining business decision-making involvement. Survey responses from a diverse sample of mostly Institute of Management Accountants (USA) and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK) members were obtained and analysed to examine their current business decision-making involvement, including an investigation guided by role theory into possible contextual factors associated with different levels of decision-making involvement. The business decision-making involvement of management accountants varies significantly, and is less pervasive than widely believed. A significant proportion (53%) of management accountants in traditional management accounting positions report no, or limited, business decision-making involvement. Management accountants employed in smaller firms, and middle-aged professionals, are more likely to be involved in making business decisions. The inverted u-shaped association between age and decision-making involvement identified in this study, requires further investigation. The large cross-sectional analysis of the present study extends prior research which was mostly narrowly focussed due to its case study nature. The varying levels of decision-making involvement, and contextual variables associated with higher level involvement, shed some light on the intricacies of the role of management accountants. Professional associations and educators should note that the roles of today’s management accountants vary greatly between information provider and decision-maker.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of one of accounting practitioners' most widely‐used client relations techniques. By evaluating the effectiveness of the newsletters that accountants provide to small business managers, the paper critically assesses their role in contributing to accountants' overall strategy for developing relations with their substantial small business manager client base.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with ten accountants who have provided newsletters to small business clients. The interviews were motivated by the results of a questionnaire administered to a sample of small business managers. The interview findings offer valuable insights into accountants' rationale for providing newsletters to their small business clients and accountants' assessment of the effectiveness of newsletters as a client relations technique. Analysis of the findings is informed by media richness theory.

The findings indicate that, despite their apparent popularity amongst professional accounting firms, newsletters are an ineffective method for developing relations with accountants' small business manager clients. The effectiveness of accountants' newsletters is diminished by the generic impersonal nature of the newsletter content that managers of small firms cannot relate to their own circumstances and by newsletters' technical accounting and tax content that small business managers have difficulty understanding.

The paper contributes to redressing a gap in research regarding the effectiveness of newsletters in accountants' relations with the economically significant small business sector, while better informing practitioners' development of their advisory relationship with small business managers. Rapidly emerging social media alternatives to the widespread practice of distributing newsletters to facilitate relations with small business clients are introduced as an emergent phenomenon.

South African business organisations operate in an environment that is changing rapidly. One of the key drivers of this change is advances in information technology (IT). Accountants are educated at various tertiary institutions to prepare them to be competent as information and knowledge workers in the South African business environment. This article aims to determine the nature and demands of the South African business and the IT environment in which accountants must function. This analysis identifies the context within which IT skills are applied by accountants by investigating the South African business and IT environment to determine how educational institutions could ensure that the students they deliver possess the critical IT skills they need to be competent in the South African business environment.

This study aims to explore the existence and strength of power through focussing on the manner in which accountants exercise power in their advisory relationship with small business.

Interviews provided insights into accountants’ power-related perceptions, experiences and use of power in the advisory relationship. A questionnaire accessed evidence from small business owner-managers (SBOMs). Power theoretical perspectives informed the analysis of the findings.

Accountants’ expert and information power is a consequence of SBOMs’ dependence on their accountants’ expertise and knowledge. Accountants construct advisor roles and exercise power in a manner indicating that they attempt to manage rather than exploit power imbalances to the detriment of dependent SBOMs. However, outbreaks of frustration and conflict in the relationship illustrate the difficulties in managing the dysfunctional consequences of power imbalances.

While the findings are restricted to the Australian accountant–small business advisory relationship, they offer a basis for research into the effect of power on the relationship in other national contexts. Research which includes the views of managers of failed small businesses would also extend this work.

The study’s focus on accountants’ experiences can assist practitioners endeavouring to develop advisory relationships with small business and designers of professional development programmes seeking to optimise the value of the advisory relationship.

The paper extends the study of power to the under-researched yet important accountant–small business advisory area. Its findings are of interest to accountants and accounting policymakers who envisage a broadening of accountants’ small business advisory role.

Business advisory services are an emerging service category for external accountants in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) environment. The purpose of this study is to investigate determinants of SME demand for business advice, drawing on the agency theory, relational marketing and resource-based literatures.

The study empirically tested theoretical predictions based on an Australia-wide survey of SMEs, in which 485 firms responded to a questionnaire.

The results show that the purchase of business advice is significantly and positively associated with the perceived competence of the external accountant, but significantly and negatively associated with length of the relationship. However, the authors observe a significant positive interaction between tenure of the relationship and competence. A unique contribution of this study is the development of the understanding of the combined role of the external accountant’s competence and the tenure of the relationship. The findings indicate that SMEs require time to verify whether accountants have the competence to provide business advice, suggesting that information asymmetry and uncertainty is minimised only after SMEs have nurtured relationships with their external accountants, and after they have developed some confidence in the competence of their external accountants. At the same time, the negative association with tenure suggests that when accountants are not perceived as competent advisors, SMEs purchase less advice over time.

The paper has important theoretical implications by augmenting agency theory, the relational marketing and the resource-based literature, and it clarifies which antecedent factors are important in explaining demand for business advisory services provided by accountants to their SME clients. In particular, the paper highlights the importance of the combined roles that the external accountant’s competence and tenure play in the SME–accountant relationship, highlighting how these two factors can overcome credence issues and ex ante information problems.

The findings have practical implications for government initiatives targeting support to SMEs, as the findings identify small firms and firms planning to grow as likely to gain the greatest benefit from external advice and support.

This study adds to the limited literature and scant theoretical discussions on the emergence of business advisory services that accountants provide to their SME clients by drawing on several theories to explain the determinants of business advice.

This paper uses a stakeholder approach to examine how the role of accounting and the status of accountants changed over a 30 year period (1970 to 2000) in a major Australian government trading enterprise. Data are gathered from semi‐structured interviews with organizational participants and documentation. The study provides support for the importance of stakeholders in shaping organizational processes and practices, including accounting practices, and for the effects of changes in stakeholder constituency and agenda on such practices. The study also provides evidence of the roles accounting and accountants may play in implementing a stakeholder agenda, including both instrumental and symbolic roles, and how the status of accountants may rise and fall commensurate with those roles.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of small business managers ' objectives and preferred methods of communicating on the communications aspect of accountants ' advisory relationship with small business. Through exploring and reporting on these issues, the paper seeks to contribute to understanding of accounting ' s capacity to satisfy the communication needs of its users.

The study employs a mixed methodology, comprising a questionnaire to access evidence from small business managers and semi-structured interviews with accountants, which provide a complementary perspective to accountant/small business communications. The analysis of the findings is informed by media richness theory.

Small business managers prefer direct forms of contact with their accountants and the richness of verbal communications. This is demonstrated in accountants ' use of visual and audio cues, including reinforcing and adjusting techniques, which enhance the appeal and utility of verbal communications. Accountants ' documents have been relegated to a supplementary reinforcing function in the profession ' s communications with small business. Small firm managers ' objectives influence their interest in and use of accounting information and the communications approach that their accountant implements. The findings indicate that accountants adopt communications approaches with small business managers, which satisfy the communication needs of the economically significant small business sector, a significant user of accounting information and services.

The paper contributes to redressing a gap in the accounting discipline ' s literature regarding accountants ' communications with small business, while offering insights that may be useful to practitioners in their advisory relationships with small business managers.

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.

This paper aims to, using the concept of “modes of mediation”, examine how different roles for accountants are “made present” in an Egyptian manufacturing company. The paper introduces the notion of “modes of mediation” as a different perspective for the opposing popular archetypes of accountants: “bean-counter” versus “business partner”. Modes of mediation emphasise the materiality of artefacts, entities and technologies, as well as organisational space and spatial settings.

The paper draws on a field study in an Egyptian manufacturing company where accountants are engaged as business partners and involved in operations planning and decision-making. The data were collected over a period of four years through participant observation, interviews and ethnographic techniques.

The paper reveals the relational nature of accountants’ calculative agency and shows how roles of accountants are intimately associated with a web of technologies and artefacts, as well as spatial working arrangements that represent particular “modes of mediation”.

The concept of “modes of mediation”, which is still under-explored in the role change literature, is useful in studying the roles of accountants. It enriches our understanding of the wider involvement of accountants in business decision-making that goes beyond the major drivers of role change and deliberate interventions discussed in the existing literature.

The paper contributes to the literature on role change by drawing attention to the way in which different modes of mediation, involving certain material and spatial arrangements, enact different forms of calculative agency. Minor alteration to these arrangements can result in a wider involvement of accountants in business decision-making.