The purpose of this research is to investigate what elements influence the adoption and refinement of management control systems (MCS) and its elaboration process in start-up firms. Through intensive interviews with owners and other top management members of a start up company, we found the following points. Many factors influence the adoption and the elaboration of MCS in start-up firms. Extension of firm size, IPO, and participation and exit of a new top management member contribute to the adoption and elaboration of MCS. Elaboration of MCS influences the role of MCS in start-up firms.

This study explores how management accounting encourages employees to make lateral interaction under the situation that management accounting is not designed in order to encourage to drive lateral interaction. “Support” concept enables to reinterpret lateral interaction. This paper focuses on interaction between direct and indirect departments and encouraging indirect ones to create active support. In addition, the analytical framework includes job rotation as well as using management accounting as information infrastructure. This study found that not only interdepartmental share of knowledge and information by job rotation but also using management accounting as information infrastructure encourages indirect departments to make lateral interaction. There are two implications. First one pointed out the new role of management accounting under the situation that management accounting is not designed in order to encourage to drive lateral interaction. Second one is that support concept enables to expand interpretation of lateral interaction.

Evaluation of electricity generation cost is important to make energy policy. Levelizing technique for cost and benefit, i.e. discounting technique, plays an important role in the evaluation especially for Nuclear Power Generation (NPG) because the activity related to power generation has been performed beyond generations. On the other hand, there are many arguments for the discounting technique for a long-term, e.g. the cost of climate change. However, those are few arguments for the electricity generation cost for NPG. Therefore, I discuss the discounting technique by referring to the history of cost evaluation for NPG and the recent discussion of backend problem. Moreover, gamma discounting, which attracts a particular interest because of the gradual decrease of effective discounting rate, and two-good model are attempted and discussed. As a result, it is concluded that the two-good model proposed in this study is the most reasonable discounting technique.

In an accounting calculation of profit and loss, the result must be negative when the business suffers a loss caused by business. Negative number is indispensable for accounting calculation. However, negative number has never been used in accounting history. The reason is that merchants have made use of positive number as a kind of metaphor instead of negative one that does not exist and cannot be looked. Such a metaphor is a means to recognize something difficult to understand. And some modern theories of accounting are based on the rhetoric.