Alternative management accounting research - whence and whither

This paper reviews alternative management accounting research in AOS from 1976 until 1999. We highlight seven different research perspectives that have flourished under this label: a non-rational design school; naturalistic research; the radical alternative; institutional theory; structuration theory; a Foucauldian approach; and a Latourian approach. It is contended that these different approaches have assumed an important role in raising a number of significant and interesting disciplinary insights. As a form of collective non-positivist enterprise, alternative management accounting research has demonstrated: the many different rationalities of management accounting practice; the variety of ways in which management accounting practice is enacted and given meaning; the potency of management accounting technologies; the unpredictable, non-linear and socially-embedded nature of management accounting change; and the ways in which management accounting practice is both constrained and enabled by the bodily habitudes of its exponents. In conclusion, we consider how alternative management accounting research may sustain its distinct contributions in the future. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.