The internationalisation of management accounting research in the German-speaking countries – a longitudinal study

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to study the internationalisation of management accounting research in the German-speaking countries and to analyse whether researchers from these countries rely on their intellectual heritage or adapt to the conventions prevailing in the international community. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a research taxonomy of 273 papers published by management accounting researchers from the German-speaking countries between 2005 and 2018 in domestic and international journals with regard to topics, settings, methods, data origins and theories of these papers. The study also systematically compares these publications with the publications by international scholars as synthesised in selected prior bibliometric studies. Findings The findings suggest that German-speaking researchers increasingly adapt to the conventions prevailing in the international management accounting literature. Indicative of this development is the crowding out of traditional core areas of German-speaking management accounting such as cost accounting by management control topics. The study also finds that German-speaking researchers increasingly rely on the research methods and theories prevailing internationally. Research limitations/implications The paper documents considerable changes in the publications of management accounting researchers from the German-speaking countries. These changes raise the question how other national research communities internationalise and whether these processes lead to a greater homogenisation of international management accounting research, which might impair the advancement of management accounting knowledge. Originality/value This paper provides first empirical evidence on how management accounting research conducted in the German-speaking countries has changed in the course of the internationalisation of the research community and builds an important basis for future research in other geographic settings.