Comparative Management Accounting

Diploma Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1,7, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: The competitive environment for companies is steadily becoming more challenging and demanding. Large planned company take-overs as recently announced from multinational corporations like for instance MITTAL STEEL or E.ON AG indicate the demand for more sophisticated and advanced management accounting information in order to react properly on the external market pressures worldwide. Multinational companies regularly have to cope with different institutional environments, management practices, techniques as well as cultural understandings between the respective countries. While in this context the field of financial accounting has already attracted much attention from the academic world on a comparative nationwide level, the area of internal management accounting has largely been a concern of approaches focussing on single countries only. These approaches have been analysed by national academic scholars and as a consequence also influenced the practices in other countries. However, in order to initiate a discussion and to highlight best practices, novelties and inefficiencies in the management accounting world, a sophisticated comparison drawing on the differences and similarities in the observed countries has only recently been conducted in the management accounting literature. Furthermore, different labels, in different languages, are used to refer to management accounting around the world. The relatively young discipline of comparative management accounting tries to fill this gap in management accounting research by determining the degree of diffusion of applied concepts and practices in different countries. The present paper analyses the different characteristics of management accounting in Germany, the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States of America (U.S.). The paper is organized as follows. Chapter 1.2 explains the choice of the selected countries and the methodological proceeding. Afterwards, chapter 2 introduces the general concept of comparative management accounting and reviews the current academic literature. Based on the terminological specification of nationwide diverging definitions of management accounting labels, the following chapter 3 describes and compares the main aspects and characteristics of management accounting in Germany, the U.S. and the U.K. Chapter 4 discusses current developments in management accounting. Finally, the concluding chapter 5 summarizes the findings.