Management Accounting in the Digital Economy

Author(s): Alnoor Bhimani

Year: 2004

Description:

There is mounting evidence that the deployment of digital technologies by enterprises affects not just their functioning in economic terms, but also mobilizes broader social, institutional and organizational effects. At a technical level, Digitization directly influences organizational processes. Notions of its potential also define managerial pursuits and the search for enhanced organizational performance. Inevitably, digitization impacts the form, substance and provenance of internal accounting information with attendant consequences on the behavior and actions of decision-makers. Knowledge about the influence of digital technologies on management accounting thinking processes and practices is starting to emerge. A variety of issues relating to pricing strategies, cost management and control mechanisms are evident. But the implications for the field are far wider. Aspects of trust, organizational power, cultural shifts, strategization, convergence of product and information elements, and newly perceived contingencies between information dimensions and contextual factors are altering management accounting systems, structures, thinking and practices. This book explores these and other issues along different planes of reference. The first part of the book consists of chapters, which discuss accounting and management control systems and wider structural shifts connected with the advent of digital technologies. In the second section, the contributors analyze organizationally focused shifts occurring concomitantly alongside digital transformations in the economy. The final part of the book comprises chapters, which consider avenues of accounting transformation, which may be pursued, in specific contexts both in terms of practice and as concepts, which afford insights into possible management accounting futures. Broadly, the fourteen chapters of this book brings together practical commentaries, conceptual frameworks and theoretical argumentation and explore wider narratives regarding the interface between management accounting and the digital economy.