Professional dominance: The relationship between financial accounting and managerial accounting, 1926-1986

Accounting Historians Journal, The, Dec 2002 by Richardson, Alan J

Following this line of development, the journals that Canadian management accountants may have referred/contributed to during the period 1926 to 1986 are:

1911 - 1921 Canadian Chartered Accountant

1922 - 1925 National Association of Cost Accountants Bulletin and National Association of Cost Accountants Year Book

1926 - 1986 Cost and Management/CMA Magazine

1950 - 1961 Canadian Journal of Accountancy

1967 - 1986 CGA Magazine

Cost and Management was thus the key source of professional guidance for management accountants during this period and the only publication controlled by management accountants. It is recognized that professional journals serve many purposes that may affect their content. They serve as a means of communication among members to advance technical knowledge and to establish an epistemic community. They also provide the professional elite with a means to "re-present" the external demands on the profession in a manner that helps the rank-and-file membership make sense of their craft and its place within the institutional field [Simmons and Neu, 1997]. It is the latter role that is the focus of this paper.

Abbott [1988, pp. 99-100] pays special attention to the role of rhetoric in establishing and contesting jurisdictional boundaries. Professional journals provide an important media through which rhetorical strategies are implemented. The journals are read in this paper as part of the broader discourse about the role of cost accounting and its relationship to other professionals claiming influence upon this area of practice. Abbott [1988, p. 1351 suggests that jurisdictional disputes reach equilibrium over different time frames. He suggests, based on his review of the history of many professional bodies, that "jurisdictions are renegotiated in workplaces over two- to three-year periods, in public over ten- to twenty-year periods, in law over twenty- to fifty-year periods". The data used in this paper relate to the "public" recognition of jurisdictional boundaries. The data suggest that jurisdictional disputes between cost accounting and financial accounting have recurred at about 20-year intervals triggered by "disturbances" [Abbott, 1988, p. 215] such as the development of new techniques such as marginal or standard-costing or the rise of inflation in the immediate post-war period and again in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The period under consideration thus provides several overlapping episodes in which cost accounting was motivated to reconsider the boundaries between itself and financial accounting.

In this article I use commentaries (articles, editorials and letters) from Cost and Management between 1926 and 1986 to specify the nature of the relationship between financial and managerial accounting. A research assistant (blind to the topic under consideration) read the entire set of journals and any contribution that mentioned both financial and managerial accounting was copied for further analysis. Since the purpose of this paper is inductive rather than deductive, no formal content analysis was undertaken. A grounded theory approach was used [Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1998] in which conceptual categories were created that could parsimoniously and comprehensively capture the variation in the data (this is referred to as achieving "theoretical saturation").