Future Studies in Management Accounting from the Perspective of Education and Research

In the process of globalization, the competition between companies becomes inevitable. Therefore, it is extremely important to employ qualified and well-educated management accountants to provide consultation service to managers. Management accountants should carefully and rationally plan and be prepared to offer services needed by managers. This necessitates continuous forward movement and progress, planning, and foresight by considering the development and changes in society. Therefore, in the present research, the driving forces of management accounting in terms of education and research were identified in the next 20 years.

In terms of the type of data, the present research was a mixed one. Considering the kind of research, it was an explorative and survey one. To identity the main driving forces, the views of experts and experienced professors of management accounting were taken into account. The panel of experts, open questionnaires, interviews, and phase Delphi were used to that end. The method of sampling was judgment sampling and snowball sampling.

The results indicated that management accounting does not have a suitable and high status; therefore, considerable effort is needed to improve its status. Experts (in the phase Delphi) believed that crisis in education and research is the most important thing influencing the future, implying that education and research have and will have a chaotic and disorganized status in a way that experts accept the crisis situation. The relationship between universities and industries and the cooperation between them was ranked the second driving force, implying that in the future, universities will try more to improve their relationship with industries.

Based on the results and the driving forces identified, it is suggested that in order to develop the profession, the agents and actors influencing management accounting embark on long-time planning and executive actions for the future of management accounting.