Does academic management accounting lag practice? A cliometric study

Abstract

The schism between accounting practice and the accounting academy has been a lament of accountants for many decades. This schism has two aspects – the schism between research and practice and the schism between education and practice. This article focuses on the later schism and uses a statistical approach to compare the dates of introduction of new management accounting concepts into accounting education and the professional body of knowledge over the period 1967 to 1997. The results indicate that, on average, accounting education lags practice and the length of the lag has increased since the early 1980s. The study contributes to the growing use of cliometrics (quantitative analysis) in accounting history, provides new empirical data on the accounting schism and offers insights for the profession and academy on the pattern of knowledge transfer. The use of new sources and a different research method offer additional insights on the established themes of “relevance lost” and the “accounting lag” in the management accounting and accounting history literatures.

Keywords

accounting history management accounting relevance lost schism

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