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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.

This study aims to take a step toward integrating research regarding the image, role and identity of management accountants by understanding how employers’ perceptions of the ideal management accountant image differ from operational managers’ perceived role expectations, how management accountants perceive their identity and how those factors shape management accountants’ understanding of who they are and want to be.

A qualitative design draws upon the case company’s 100 job advertisements and 31 semi-structured interviews with management accountants and operational managers. Those data are entwined with role theory and its core concepts of expectations and identities and also early recruitment-related theoretical aspects such as image and employer branding.

The findings reveal how employers’ perceptions of the ideal image and operational managers’ role expectations shape and influence the identity of management accountants. However, management accountants distance themselves from a brand image and role expectations. They experience identity conflict between their current and desired identity, the perception of not being able to perform the currently desired role. Although this study presents some possible reasons and explanations, such as employer branding for the misalignment and discrepancy between perceptions of employer (image), expectations of operational managers (role) and management accountants’ self-conception of the role (identity), this study argues that the identity of a management accountant results from organizational aspects of image and role and individual aspects of identity.

Image and external role expectations can challenge identity construction and also serve as a source of conflict and frustration; thus, a more comprehensive approach to studying the identity of management accountants is necessary to understand what contributes to the fragility of their identity.

The results provide an understanding of the dynamics of the image, role and identity to support management accountants and employers and to further address the suggested dissonance and ambiguities.

This study contributes by showing how the dynamics and connections between the image, role and identity influence the identity construction of management accountants. Moreover, this study shows how overpromising as a part of employer branding might not reflect the reality experienced by management accountants but may cause frustration and threaten the management accountants’ identity.

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.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether controllers are willing to and/or general managers are expecting them to act as business partners and, hence, to analyze the related consequences from a manager’s point of view.

This study is based on a dyadic data set gathered from 112 German head controllers and corresponding general managers in the period of March to May 2009. Drawing on the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), the authors examine controllers’ attitude, subjective norm and behavior regarding their participation in managerial decision-making. Further, the authors analyze general managers’ assessment of related outcomes, such as internal efficiency and process improvements and use covariance-based structural equation modeling to test for the theoretical relationships.

Results show that controllers’ behavior is strongly influenced by management’s expectations. Moreover, the results support the notion that business partnering is associated with organizational improvements regarding internal processes, decisions and efficiency, thereby increasing the contribution of the controllers’ department to the competiveness of an organization.

Our study focuses on a limited set of variables and does not incorporate different hierarchy levels, which could be avenues for further research. Still, our findings highlight the importance of management’s expectations as triggers for business-oriented behavior of controllers.

Theory and empirical evidence in the research area of controllers’ business orientation are still underdeveloped and, therefore, knowledge about the micro-processes and determinants on an individual level for becoming a business partner, as well as on the related outcomes of such a behavior is still limited. The results contribute to literature by highlighting the importance of general managers’ expectations as triggers for business orientation of controllers and its related benefits for the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions and lived experiences of Sierra Leonean chartered and aspiring accountants, vis-à-vis their professional identity with a particular focus on two elements of postcolonial theory, hybridity and diaspora.

A qualitative methodological framework was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 participants about their perceptions of their professional identity and their professional experiences both within and outside Sierra Leone.

The current professionalisation process is conceptualised as a postcolonial third space where hybrid professional accountants are constructed. Professional hybridity blurs the local/global praxis being positioned as both local and global accountants. Participants experience difficulty “fitting into” the local accountancy context as a consequence of their hybridisation. As such, a diaspora effect is induced which often culminates in emigration to advanced countries. The paper concludes that although the current model engenders emancipatory social movements for individuals through hybridity and diaspora, it is nonetheless counterproductive for Sierra Leone’s economic development and the local profession in particular.

This study has significant implications for understanding how the intervention of global professional bodies in developing countries shapes the professionalisation process as well as perceptions and lived experiences of chartered and aspiring accountants in these countries.

While extant literature implicates the legacies of colonialism/imperialism on the institutional development of accountancy (represented by recognised professional bodies), this paper employs the critical lens of postcolonial theory to conceptualise the lived experiences of individuals who are directly impacted by such institutional arrangements.

Accountants and the accounting profession have always been users of information technology and the claim for enlarging levels of Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) skills/knowledge in practitioners and accounting graduates is more powerful than ever. The use of Information Technology in support of business is widespread and becoming more so. Indeed, it is no longer possible to meet the expectations of users of financial and other business performance information without using Information Technology tools. Both academics and practitioners have recognised the value and importance of IT/IS in the achievement of success in the competitive business world and IT/IS skills/knowledge as being essential to longterm success for accountants. The challenges facing organisations now require the skills of a special kind of accountant, this research called the “Hybrid Accountant” (combining IT/IS competencies and mainstream accounting capabilities). A “hybrid” accountant blends different skills and knowledge of business management and information management. It is generally felt that today’s accounting education process fails to develop accountants who are able to serve in this type of demanding accountant.

Job advertisements are important means of communicating role expectations for management accountants to the labor market. They provide information about which roles are sought and expected. However, which roles are communicated in job advertisements is unknown so far.

With a text-mining approach on a large sample of 889 job ads, the authors extract information on roles, type of firm and hierarchical position of the management accountant sought.

The results indicate an apparent mix of different role types with a strong focus on a classic watchdog role. However, the business partner role is more often sought for leadership positions or in family businesses and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

The main limitation is the lack of an agreed-upon measurement instrument for roles in job offers. The study results imply that corporate practice is not as theory-driven as is postulated and communicated in the management accounting community. This indicates the existence of a research-practice gap and tensions between different actors in the management accounting field.

The results challenge the current role discussion of professional organizations for management accountants as business partners.

The authors contribute the first study, which explicitly analyzes the communication of roles in job offers for management accountants. It indicates a discrepancy between scholarly discussion on roles and management accountants' work from an employer's perspective.

It is difficult for corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) to provide accountability to stakeholders. This paper assesses whether accountability-based CSR systems can be created through the application of Spotlight Accounting and WikiRate as a hybrid forum.

The current paper explores the utility of Spotlight Accounting for CSR through assessing its application to a hybrid forum, WikiRate. This process involved engaging student researchers to collect CSR data from the United Nations Global Compact's (UNGC) corporate action group (CAG) and recording this information into the WikiRate platform. Aggregate analysis was conducted to assess the limitations and challenges of the data to inform decision-making.

Spotlight Accounting exposes challenges within traditional applications of CSR. These challenges impact comparability, decision usefulness and accountability of CSR data for stakeholders.

This paper provides recommendations to enhance the accessibility and relevance of company information to assist in the provision of Spotlight Accounting. In doing so, it highlights the usefulness of CSR to leverage greater accountability between corporations and society.

This paper applies the emerging practices of Spotlight Accounting and presents it as an alternative way to research and conceptualise external accounts, reporting and accountability. This form of accounting has the potential to enhance communications and partnerships between companies and society as well as challenge dominate power dynamics held by corporations.