The purpose of this study is to provide a new analytical view point based on knowledge transfer and knowledge creation. The adoption process of management accounting is considered as the process of cocreation of management accounting knowledge. The paper discusses how management accounting experts and nonexperts (agents) influences its process with using absorptive capacity and disseminative capacity. In conclusion, the process of management accounting knowledge cocreation presents that participative agents complementally use not only absorptive capacity but also disseminative capacity, then reciprocally transfer knowledge each other through knowledge conversion. This study finally provides the figure of concept showing an analytical view. There are three implications including that management accounting knowledge has the composite and social characteristics, the cocreation of management accounting knowledge is considered as the continuous process of knowledge conversion, and both cocreation of management accounting knowledge and trust relationship between agents may influence exploration of management accounting change.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the current status and prospects of inter-organizational management accounting research by focusing on boundary spanners’ behavior and characteristics. This review clarified that previous studies have discussed the effects of the behavior of boundary spanners from static and dynamic perspectives, focusing on the use of inter-organizational management accounting, and that, with respect to the micro-environment around boundary spanners, these studies have discussed opportunities to improve their capabilities as boundary spanners, and the development of information systems. Based on these results, this paper points out that as future research directions, it is effective to examine further how the behavior of boundary spanners affects various aspects of the design and use of inter-organizational management accounting and to consider the degree of development of relationships as an additional element of the micro-environment. These directions will lead to a deeper understanding of the question raised in recent years about how managers responsible for operating relationships with other firms are involved in inter-organizational management accounting.

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Tournaments (or relative evaluation) are a widely used incentive system. Under these incentive systems, there is a problem which is called heterogeneous contestant. Heterogeneous contestant is that tournament participants’ efforts are not fully exploited in case their ability are so much different. In this paper, we examine whether the problem of heterogeneous contests can be solved by giving monitoring authority to supervisors through laboratory experiments. The results revealed the following two points: (1) monitoring by supervisors elicits effort from the evaluators, and (2) in some cases, participants continue to choose a higher level of effort than the theory predicts. The results of this paper suggest that giving supervisors the authority to monitor may solve the problem of heterogeneous contestants and that the psychological factor of “wanting to win over other participants” has a non-negligible effect on predicting participants’ behavior under these incentive systems.

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[in Japanese]

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