Management Accounting — Beyond 2000

In this essay we consider the future of management accounting in the new millennium. We draw on the themes of postindustrialism to highlight the major discontinuities emerging in management accounting work. In particular, these discontinuities are discussed in the context of the following themes: the recession of the real; the rise of rival voices; the cyber‐centred democracy; risk, trust and time‐space; and the erosion of the bi‐polar. We argue that management accounting will emerge as a paradoxical form of practice in the 21st century — management accounting work will continue, but it may not be undertaken by professionals bearing the management accounting brand; reports will be produced for managing, but these reports will have an increasingly diverse authorship; financial representation will remain central to the internal reporting process, but there will be a growing need to represent activities and outcomes that do not have a material referent; management accounting will enter the ‘business’ of building trust, whilst enabling new forms of risk to emerge in more complex organisational and inter‐organisational relationships. We conclude by arguing that postindustrialism creates significant opportunities for researchers in the 21st century.