Evolution of Management Accounting Graphic

Provided by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida

History and Development Main Page | Relevance Lost Main Page

For a list of dates that provides a history of all accounting see 200 Years of Accounting History Dates and Events.

For a discussion of the evolution of management accounting from around 1812 to 1980 see the Relevance Lost topic. Also see the Summary of Johnson's 1983 paper for an explanation of the first stage (1812-1920) in the graphic above and Paul Garner's work, e.g., Garner, S. P. 1947. Historical development of cost accounting. The Accounting Review (October): 385-389. (JSTOR link) and Garner, S. P. 1954. Evolution of Cost Accounting to 1925. Tuscaloosa, AL. University of Alabama Press.

For discussions of some of the more recent developments see the topics for:

 JIT, 

ABC, 

ABM, 

CAM-I, 

Target costing, 

Quality, 

Investment management, 

Product life cycle management, 

Relevance Regained and the

Balanced Scorecard.

For more information on value based management, see the Ittner & Larcker 2001 summary. Most of the 150+ topics on MAAW are related to the evolution of management accounting in some way.

See MAAW's History topic for more information related to the history and development of accounting and management.

For a more recent paper analyzing value based management see Ashton, R. H. 2007. Value-creation models for value-based management: Review, analysis, and research directions. Advances in Management Accounting (16): 1-62. (Models of value creation including the balanced scorecard, the Baldrige quality award criteria, the Deming management method, the service-profit chain, and the Skandia intellectual capital model are compared).

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Related summaries:

Johnson, H. T. 1983. The search for gain in markets and firms: A review of the historical emergence of management accounting systems. Accounting, Organizations and Society 8(2-3): 139-146. (Summary).

Johnson, H. T. 1987. The decline of cost management: A reinterpretation of 20th-century cost accounting. Journal of Cost Management (Spring): 5-12. (Summary).

Johnson, H. T. and R. S. Kaplan. 1987. Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. (Summaries and additional information).

Kaplan, R. S. 1984. The evolution of management accounting. The Accounting Review (July): 390-418. (Summary).