Managerial accounting: a sketch of the methodological profile of a sample of publications in the area of business administration and accounting from 2000 to 2004

Resumen

The objective of this paper is to delineate the methodological profile of the scientific research in the area of managerial accounting (MA) published from 2000 to 2004. It analyzes articles published in the management and accounting journals classified with grade “A” in the “Sistema Qualis/Capes” in 2004. Its purpose is to classify the articles according to their methodological profile, that is, according to the research focus, checking the frequency of occurrence of articles which (1) address concepts and ideas (theoretical articles); (2) concentrate on the data, generating information from the observation of these data (empirical articles); (3) intend to describe or explain some phenomenon by means of data research, based on theoretical assumptions that delimit the scope of research (theoreticalempirical articles). For that purpose, data collection is divided into two parts: delimitation of topics related to managerial accounting and identification of those topics in the selected journals. Topics related to the work by Anthony and Govindarajan (2002) – which here is used as the background against which all articles are examined – are confronted with 11 (eleven) other similar works published in Brazil. The most frequent topics in these articles are gathered into 6 (six) thematic clusters that became the managerial accounting topics for the investigation in the selected journals. The paper then analyzes the percentage of articles on MA in those journals, their distribution in the clusters and according to their methodological profiles. The results suggest the existence of a balance in terms of methodological profile in the articles investigated. This scenario, however, changes when the articles are analyzed in each journal separately, for one then finds a trend toward an empirical approach in the articles published in RAP, toward a theoretical approach in those published in C&F-USP and finally toward a mixed theoretical-empirical approach in the articles published in RAC.

Key words: managerial accounting, academic journals, research, methodological trends.