An Approach to Organizing a Management Accounting Curriculum

Abstract

In recent years, numerous tools such as activity-based costing, the balanced scorecard, and target costing have gained prominence within business organizations (Kaplan and Cooper 1998; Kaplan and Norton 1996; Ansari et al. 1997). Nonetheless, traditional management accounting practices such as standard costing and contribution margin analysis continue to be prevalent (Szendi and Elmore 1993). The traditional topics, when coupled with all the recent advancements, create a sizable body of knowledge that presents a challenge to management accounting educators, who bear the responsibility of organizing this subject matter into a coherent whole. In an effort to aid professors wrestling with this challenge, this article presents a new framework for organizing an entire management accounting curriculum. The article also includes one possible application of the framework that is being used at Miami University. The benefits of adopting the framework include: (1) less redundancy within the curriculum, (2) logical distinctions between the topics taught in each course, and (3) more opportunities for in-depth coverage of particular content areas.