The managerialisation of Financial Reporting: an introduction to a destabilising accounting change

One of the few commonly accepted features of the accounting realm is its sharp subdivision between financial accounting and managerial accounting. Traditionally these two major areas have been seen as detached and separated, broadly corresponding to an external (financial) and an internal (management) perspective on accounting. Consequently, for many decades the two “sister disciplines” of accounting have developed most independently, setting their own research agendas, techniques, issues, practices and professions with distinct journals, scientific challenges and achievements, and even thought leaders. Virtually all the universities in the world have financial accounting courses and managerial accounting courses with differentiated textbooks, syllabuses, curricula studiorum and, of course, teachers. Indeed, although the two fields of accounting are internally further articulated – e.g. capital markets, auditing, financial analysis for financial accounting, and costing, performance measurement, budgeting and capital appraisal for management accounting –, the perception of the diversity and “otherness” between these two areas has been a constant and well recognized feature of the accounting domain. In several countries this division was rooted even in accounting theory. For instance, in the Italian tradition of Economia Aziendale (Business Economics) the calculation of internal production costs was to be kept apart from the financial accounting system. […]