Management accounting and enterprise risk management. A potential integration as a new change in managerial systems

The main goals of this research are: i) to understand if a further change in management accounting (MA) is required by changes in the contemporary extra-organisational environment, highlighting the main direction of this change, with particular attention to the integration with the enterprise risk management (ERM) as a new organisational institution; ii) to investigate if the management accountants’ role should coherently evolve toward a deeper integration and coordination with that of risk managers, as an intra-organisational condition of success. The research method used is a qualitative mixed method, as it integrates inductive and deductive perspectives. In particular, we firstly used an empirical and comparative analysis based on explorative case studies. These case studies included seven companies listed in the Italian “public utilities” market sector and ten large sized unlisted companies, operating in the same sector. The choice of the companies is due to the fact that they have undergone extensive changes, which have had significant effects on both their strategic planning and management control systems, as well as on their ERM. The case studies method excels especially when it is necessary to understand a complex issue (Yin, 1984) and it can develop expertise and strengthen what is already known through previous research and this is the reason we define our case studies as explorative (Ryan et al., 2002). The tool adopted is the interview and the interviews are semi-structured to be kept within the main question area but still open the possibility to get the interviewees own ideas and feelings. Secondly, our research adopted institutional theory, not with the intention of formally testing it, but rather to support our theoretical model of the successful directions of change. Institutional theory is assumed in our article to explain the hypothetical dynamics of change in MA and in management accountants’ roles, considering the dynamics both in terms of extra-organisational institutions and in terms of power relations, as they complement the exogenous drivers that create successful change.