Exploring the Relationship Between Strategy

INTRODUCTION

Since the 80s a new term has been coined in management accounting literature: “Strategic

Management Accounting” (SMA) (Simmonds, 1981). In the following decades, and still

today, a debate about what SMA comprises has been originated. It is well accepted that SMA

is identified as a generic approach to accounting for strategic positioning (Roslender & Hart,

2003). This wide definition leaves unsolved the problem to define what is intended with the

term “SMA techniques”. In general, it has been argued that the “strategic” characteristic

embraces those practices highlighting an external or future focus (Guilding & Cravens, 2001;

Guilding et al., 2000; Roslender & Hart, 2003).

The present paper study, is based on a survey on a sample of Italian large-medium size

manufacturing companies, and aims at contributing to the research debate around the factors

affecting the implementation and use of SMA techniques by addressing two main issues.

Firstly, it shows the extension of the adoption of SMA techniques in Italian companies,

providing a description of adoption and intensity of usage of a fundamental set of SMA

techniques.

Secondly, it focuses on factors that may influence/explain the use of SMA techniques of the

companies in the sample, considering the schemes of analysis of the literature on MCS and

strategy relationships.

In the last decades, in fact, an increasing number of studies regarding the relationship between

strategy and management control systems (MCS) has been published in different journals.

The interest in the topic is growing since the 1980s, when strategy become to be considered as

a contingent variable; empirical researches and case studies started to investigate theconnection between particular elements of the MCS and the specific strategy adopted by the

firms