Globalization and the international convergence of management accounting

The last twenty years have witnessed a massive transformation in business corporations, which have been forced to re-define their strategies, structures and processes in light of the changing business arena. The globalization of the market has led to strategies of merger and acquisition, and has encouraged organizations to secure competitive advantage through both process standardization and world-scale efficiency, as well as flexibility and local responsiveness. In the resulting highly uncertain market environment, the challenge facing globally operating organizations is the ongoing alignment of local business processes with global corporate strategies as they continuously adapt the way they do things to compete successfully in their market. This chapter explores the role of management accounting practices in a context of growing globalization. We will focus on globally operating organizations as privileged venues to explore how globalization is produced and reproduced on a daily basis through organizational practices. In particular, the objective of the chapter is to interpret how management accounting systems shape and are shaped by the global-local dialectic that characterizes contexts of growing globalization, and whether these processes have resulted in increasing homogenization and convergence of accounting practices.