Old wine in a new bottle? A bibliometric study of the declared change of ?management accounting? and ?management control systems? into ?performance management?

TORONTO

Conferencia; ASAC CONFERENCE; 2023

ASAC

This study contributes an exploratory bibliometric study of 6,072 management accounting publications listed in Scopus between the years 2000 and 2021. It is motivated by the need to offer an updated description of the state of the art of publications and citations in the broad topic of management accounting (Hesford et al. 2007). In the mid 2010?s the management accounting community identified performance management (PM) as the future area of domain, while management control systems (MCS) represent a stable topic within the large management accounting (MA) research. This study asks if the declared purpose of the academic Management Accounting community has materialized by mapping the evolution of three keywords: 1) Performance Management, that is the new term embraced for management accounting, 2) Management Accounting that is the historical and more traditional term used to identify the community, and 3) Management Control Systems that is a well-defined subset of Management Accounting until 2012 or Performance Management studies after 2012. Results show some changes but mostly affected Performance Management and to a lesser extent Management Accounting, with few changes in the more niche focused topic of Management Control Systems.