Divergence in Managerial Accounting Practices

After the revolutionary arguments of relevance lost (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987) the traditional management accounting practices have gone through huge debates. Management accounting tools like target costing, kaizen costing, competitor analysis, balanced scorecard, value chain analysis, quality costing, just in time and others got great responses from the academicians. But when the issue of practical applicability came, it was found that, in so many cases, these revolutionary new tools and techniques of management accounting did not get much importance from the part of the practitioners. Another important matter that was found is that the popularity of these tools varied across the countries. The monograph concludes that there is a divergence in the use of management accounting practices among the industries and among the national cultures because of the fact that these contemporary management accounting tools demand some prerequisites to get applied and these prerequisites are not available in the same level in different countries.