Abstract

This dissertation aims to provide an extensive picture of management accounting systems and explore the relationships between management accounting systems, strategy, information technology, manufacturing technology and organizational performance. The dissertation consists of four essays. The first essay focuses on the adoption and benefits of management accounting practices, whereas the second essay studies the relations between customer-focused strategy, performance measurement techniques, information technology and their link to customer performance. The third essay studies the relations between manufacturing technology, information technology, strategy and organizational performance. The fourth essay, in turn, studies the management accounting systems and their relations to strategy and information technology. The first three essays employ the survey method while the last essay employs the case method. The framework used in this dissertation is the contingency theory.

The results indicate that financial performance measures will be important in the future and that greater emphasis will be placed on contemporary management accounting practices such as customer satisfaction surveys and employee attitudes. Also, the relative benefits from the previous three years and the future emphasis in the next three years are generally greater when the size of the firm increases. The results show that there is a significant association between customer performance and the three-way interaction involving customer-focused strategy, contemporary performance measures and advanced information technology. The proposed three-way interaction between financial performance measures, customer-focused strategy and advanced information technology is not supported at conventional levels of statistical significance indicating that financial measures are not important in the model. The results also indicate that contemporary performance measures do not help highly customer-focused firms to achieve customer performance. For firms with a low customer-focus, emphasizing contemporary performance measures and advanced information technology assists in enhancing customer performance. The results also suggest that manufacturing technology and information technology together help firms to improve their organizational performance regardless of their emphasis on differentiation strategy.