Extending Robson’s Inscriptions to Management Accounting with Historical Verification

Abstract

Johnson and Kaplan (1987) concluded that at the time of their seminal book, management accounting information “is too late, too aggregated, and too distorted to be relevant for managers’ planning and control decisions.” Their conclusion can be partly explained by Robson (1992), who explained financial accounting as consisting of inscriptions with three attributes, mobility, stability, and combinability that enabled management at a distance. 

This paper extends Robson (1992) to management accounting. Specifically, this paper accesses  the literature to understand additional management accounting inscriptions and tests those findings with archival data from the historical Hudson’s Bay Company at three representative stages: barter-based management accounting, financial accounting-based management accounting, and enterprise resource planning augmented management accounting.  Johnson and Kaplan’s (1987) conclusion is explained with Robson’s (1992) three above mentioned attributes and three additional attributes – physical or social realty, temporality, and uncertainty – which further enables operations to be controlled at a distance. The contributions are the three additional inscriptions that were found to describe effective management accounting. The paper also explains with inscriptions Johnson and Kapan’s (1987) conclusion that management accounting information in 1987 was too late, too aggregated, and too distorted to be relevant.

Extending Robson's Inscriptions to Management Accounting with Historical Verification.

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