Some recent literature shows the cases of endowing line organizations with profit responsibility as ones of management accounting practices in Japan. This paper examines the case of SEIREN Corporation to analyze the mechanism of generating profits between line organizations as profit centers (PCs). This paper concludes that they are mutually reinforced by the tension between two powers. One is the power of a marketing department’s power negotiating transfer prices, which is reinforced by the fact that a manufacturing department is responsible for profit. The other is the power of a manufacturing department intensified by the existence of the production system which is the source of competitive advantage of SEIREN’s products.

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This paper focuses on the diffusion process of Value Engineering (VE) in Japanese motor manufacturers that related to a particular situation of postwar Japanese society. Inspired by new institutional sociology, this paper argues that VE had legitimacy of ‘modernizing’ purchasing division in the organizational field, and the ambiguity of the legitimacy enabled VE to penetrate into various technologies such as Industrial Engineering, Quality Control, and management accounting.

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Based on a case study from developing new business domain, this paper aims to clarify the role of management accounting in strategizing. Traditionally the role of management accounting in relation to strategy is recognized as evaluation of economic advantage among alternatives in formulating strategy and help for effective and efficient implementation of formulated strategies. In this view, management accounting is passive for strategy. However, some recent researches suggest that management accounting may have an active role for strategy. We found the active role of management accounting in “strategizing” in this paper : management accounting formed the context for strategizing by the mediating between external environment change and organizational members’ conscious, and guided and provided the framework for the process of the development of strategy formulation. In this way, management accounting has an active role in the process of strategy in practice. Moreover, we found that the concept of “enabling control” (Adler and Borys, 1996) provides a relevant viewpoint in researching the relationship between management accounting and strategizing.

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