Contemporary Issues in Management Accounting (Rapidshare)

Contemporary Issues in Management Accounting Summary:

  

By Alnoor Bhimani

Publisher:   Oxford University Press, USA

Number Of Pages:   464

Publication Date:   2006-08-17

ISBN-10 / ASIN:   0199283362

ISBN-13 / EAN:   9780199283361

Synopsis

The book comprehensively covers established and emerging areas in the fast changing field of Management Accounting.
Well established accounting practices such as budgeting, costing, responsibility accounting and capital investment analysis are discussed alongside innovative and emerging accounting based approaches to organizational control.

BiographyAlnoor Bhimani is Reader in Accounting and Finance at the London School of Economics. He holds a BSc from King's College London, an MBA from Cornell University and a PhD from LSE. He is also a Certified Management Accountant (Canada). He has co-authored a number of books including Management Accounting: Evolution not Revolution (CIMA, 1989), Management Accounting: Pathways to Progress (CIMA, 1994) and Management and Cost Accounting (Prentice Hall, 2005). Al has also edited Management Accounting: European Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Management Accounting in the Digital Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has written numerous articles in scholarly publications and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has undertaken management accounting related fieldwork in a variety of global enterprises and has presented his research to corporate executives and academic audiences in Europe, Asia and North America. FOREWORD

Michael Bromwich is an exemplar of all that is good about the British tradition of academic

accounting. Serious in intent, he has striven both to illuminate practice and to provide ways

of improving it. Although always appealing to his economic understandings, he has been

open to a wide variety of other ideas, recognizing their intellectual strengths and capabilities

rather than making artificial distinctions between what is acceptable and what is not. He also

has contributed widely to the accounting literature, taking forward the British tradition of

economic theorizing in financial accounting as well as being a constant source of creative

thinking in the management accounting field. Michael has also contributed in a number of

different institutional arenas: the academic, of course, but also those of the profession and

the wider public sphere. Ever helpful to regulators, the senior civil service, and international

agencies, Michael Bromwich is respected for the ways in which he can combine conceptual

understandings with pragmatic insights. He has been sought out to provide that extra

element of conceptual clarity for the most complex of practical accounting endeavours.

No doubt such abilities reflect Michael’s early grounding in both the practice of accounting

and its economic theorization, the former at Ford and the latter initially at the London

School of Economics and thereafter as a lifetime endeavour. But personal though his

achievements may be, they are also reflective of a wider tradition of significant involvement

in the practical sphere by senior British accounting academics.

For we must remember that it was Professor Edward Stamp who was one of the first to

call the British audit profession to account with his questioning of ‘who shall audit the

auditors?’ The subsequent institutional response has most likely gained as much from the

likes of Professors Harold Edey, Bryan Carsberg, Ken Peasnell, Geoffrey Whittington, and

David Tweedie as it has from the e´minence grise of the profession itself. And even in auditing,

significant roles have been played by Professors Peter Bird, David Flint, and Peter Moizer

amongst others. Indeed it is possible to argue that the British academic accounting professoriate

has played an extremely important role in mediating between the profession and the

state, both bringing knowledge to bear on policy issues and providing a cadre of people who

can operate effectively in this policy sphere.

Michael Bromwich has certainly contributed in this way, advising accounting and competition

regulators on complex issues and providing his own intellectual authority to the

office of President of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

One senses, however, that the British academic accounting community may be less able to

fulfil these roles in the coming years. In part this reflects a more general decline in the

academic world as falling relative salaries and status have reduced the intake of talented

academic entrepreneurs. But I also think it reflects the cumulative impact of regulatory and

careerist pressures in the academic world itself. With government agencies pressing for ever

more standardized and conventional research and with increasingly instrumental careerist

behaviour by academics, there are fewer incentives to bridge the academic and practical

spheres. No doubt this is also exaggerated by an increasingly less curious professional world.

The intellectually curious Technical Partners of the past have been replaced by more market

orientated purveyors of accounting solutions. Accountancy consultancies are much more

interested in simple marketable solutions than more sophisticated insights into the complexity

of the issues at stake.

Although there is more and more talk of the need for relevance and application, the

pressures at play are more likely to push in the opposite direction. Rather than building on a

strong tradition of really useful relationships between the practical and academic spheres in

accounting, I sense that the two worlds have less and less to do with one another.

It is therefore ever more important to reflect on the contributions which Michael

Bromwich has made. He played an important role in the diffusion of modern practices of

capital investment appraisal in the United Kingdom. He has been constantly open to the

insights which advances in economic theory can provide into the accounting art, in many

areas pushing at the frontiers of international knowledge in his own quiet way. In the area of

costing, Michael has undoubtedly deepened our understandings of both conceptual and

practical issues, in recent years providing a voice of reason amidst all the consultancy

excitement of seemingly new ways of costing the business world. He has played a similar

role in the area of accounting standard setting, both taking forward the British tradition of

the economic analysis of financial accounting and, of possibly greater significance, providing

some very original analyses of the possibilities for meaningful accounting standardization.

With an agenda as rich as this, it is all the more praiseworthy that Michael maintained his

dialogues with both the academic and the practitioner communities. But that he did.

Those who know Michael Bromwich are not surprised by his many involvements,

however. Constantly striving, always curious and ever personable, he has developed a

pattern of interests, involvements, and friendships that have sustained his very effective

interventions in many institutional and intellectual spheres. It is indeed fitting that so many

of his friends and colleagues contribute to this volume to recognize Michael’s contributions

to academic accounting. I am honoured to join them.

Anthony G. Hopwood

University of Oxford

December 2005

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