Research Trends of Strategic Management Accounting in Japan: Based on Literature Studies

Abstract

Strategic management accounting proposed by Simmonds has been studied by many researchers as a field connecting strategic management and management accounting. However, no clear definition has been formed even today. This paper will clarify the situation of strategic management accounting research in Japan. I conducted two types of content analysis on 120 papers from 1986 to 2018 on strategic management accounting in Japan. First, I research the management accounting techniques regarded as strategic management accounting. As a result, eight techniques (target costing, strategic cost management, balanced scorecard, activity-based costing, quality costing, life cycle costing, competitor analysis, customer profitability analysis) were mentioned by a certain number of researchers. Second, I classified the 120 papers into three research categories; case studies, survey studies, and other studies. As a result, I found that the number of case studies and survey studies were few.