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While companies worldwide are largely comprised of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), a significant amount of management accounting (MA) research focuses on larger organisations, thus leaving MA practice in SMEs relatively under-researched. This paper aims to examine MA adoption (MAA) and its interfaces with MA challenges and business performance from a small business perspective.

A sample of 502 small businesses is investigated with an embedded mixed methods research design comprised of qualitative content analysis, factor analysis and analysis of variance.

Up to 78% of small businesses are facing MA challenges that stem from organisation, systems, personnel and/or resources. Based on the present findings, MA challenges do motivate small businesses to at least consider investing in MAA as small businesses facing challenges are more likely to acquire systems and services than those reporting no issues at all. Hence, small business managers seem to not only recognise where their challenges lie, but also seek ways to improve the situation through MAA. The analysis also reveals that companies with the highest MA know-how have the best average solvency, suggesting that small businesses indeed benefit from MAA. Interestingly, the performance at medium levels of know-how declines while investments increase, revealing a “decreasing solvency phenomenon”. Potential explanations are, e.g. the MA not fitting the company’s exact needs, or information usability and use being limited by poor MA understanding.

The originality of the research lies in exploring the interfaces between MA challenges, MAA and small business performance using distinctive embedded mixed methods research design.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that casting actors with similar facial features in a movie can pose challenges in foreign markets, hindering the audience's ability to recognize and remember characters. Extending developments in the literature on the cross-race effect, we hypothesize that facial similarity – the extent to which the actors starring in a movie share similar facial features – will reduce the country-level box-office performance of US movies in East and South-East Asia (ESEA) countries.

We assembled data from various secondary data sources on US non-animation movies (2012–2021) and their releases in ESEA countries. Combining the data resulted in a cross-section of 2,616 movie-country observations.

Actors' facial similarity in a US movie's cast reduces its box-office performance in ESEA countries. This effect is weakened as immigration in the country, internet penetration in the country and star power increase and strengthened as cast size increases.

This first study on the effects of cast's facial similarity on box-office performance represents a novel extension to the growing literature on the antecedents of movies' box-office performance by being at the intersection of the two literature streams on (1) the box-office effects of cast characteristics and (2) the antecedents, in general, of box-office performance in the ESEA region.