The purpose of management accounting research is to explain the evolution process of management accounting practices and their reason for existing, and to develop innovative methods that are useful to business. In response to the various needs of business practice, there exist various methodologies of management accounting research. Each methodology has its own role. Therefore collaboration of the methodologies makes it possible to develop fruitful management accounting research. In the near future, behavioral research that focuses on the emotion of human beings will be useful.

This paper explicates the aim of analytical research that applies game theory and develops the explanatory theory of management accounting practice and the contribution this style of research brings to the field of management accounting. There are two types of the analytical research; the one based on agency theory examines the issues related to performance evaluation within an organization and the other based on industrial organization does the ones related to the inter-corporate relationship, collectively called strategic management accounting. These studies aim to sophisticate the conventional wisdom of management accounting and contribute to the development of management accounting education. In addition, they are expected to improve management accounting practice through the contribution to education. Also, to strength the contribution of the analytical research to practice, it is required to collaborate with other approaches: case study, positive research, and experimental research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the features of the empirical research in management accounting. Recently, in Japan, empirical research in accounting has been on the rise, and this tendency is prominent in management accounting. In empirical research, we test the hypotheses formulated under various themes through statistical verification of archival data. The accumulation of evidence plays a key role in the research and practice of management accounting. However, empirical research has limitations, such as bias in hypothesis formulation, subjectivity of the specification of variables, selection of empirical models, and interpretation of empirical results. In order to solve these problems, we need collaboration between empirical researches method and other expected research methods.

The purpose of this study is to examine the methodological importance of experimental researches in managerial accounting and to think of the role of it for future fruitful researches. The experimental research has three excellent characteristics; (i) the ease of use of data, (ii) an ex-ante test to make a discovery of unintended consequences and (iii) high internal validity. There are two types of experimental approach; economic approach used by mechanism verification and psychological approach used by bias verification. In managerial accounting, there are many psychological experimental researches in the field of management control. In future researches of managerial accounting, it would be better that experimental methods will be used as not only psychological approach but also economic approach and will collaborate with other research methods.

The empirical research method based on econometrics and /or the analytical research method based on microeconomics are considered to be effective methods for conducting management accounting researches from the perspective of the rigorous academic research. However, as the purpose of management accounting research is to reveal management accounting practices or to invent innovative practices, the qualitative research method such as case study and action research may be more appropriate method. In this paper, from the viewpoint of the management accounting research focused on accounting practices, the significance of the qualitative research for management accounting researches is examined, and its contributions to management accounting researches are presented as follows: Finding unique management accounting practices, Inventing innovative practices, Finding how management accounting practices are implemented and used in business, and Describing management accounting process. However researchers must be aware of deficits of the qualitative research and they should try to conduct their researches by triangulation or multi-methodology research.