Towards an integrated contingency framework for MAS sophistication

On a regular basis, the popular management literature and business consultants try to convince organisations that they should introduce recently-developed, sophisticated management accounting techniques. Unfortunately, researchers who study the introduction of these techniques often find that success is not always guaranteed. This may imply that the appropriateness of using the resulting sophisticated accounting instruments depends on the circumstances in which these instruments are being used. This would give rise to the need to adopt a contingency theory perspective. Based on case studies in two power and gas companies, this paper identifies several contingency factors for the sophistication of accounting instruments. In addition, it makes a contribution to the development of an integrated framework that can be used to explain the sophistication of management accounting systems (MAS). The paper concentrates on a single dimension of MAS sophistication, namely scope.