Non-Financial Indicators and Strategic Management Accounting

For Anthony (1965, p. 17), management control is ‘the set of accounting and financial verification tools based on predefined objectives’; in other words, a verification planning process. The conventional approach to management accounting discloses a tension among the processes of strategic management, management control and operational control. Johnson and Kaplan (1987) explain that coordination between these processes is difficult to obtain. The Strategic Management Accounting (now SMA) stream is a concept and set of practices that tries to solve this difficulty of coordination. It emerged during the 1970s and has been developed since (Schendel and Hofer, 1979; Horovitz, 1979). There has been a growing amount of research on this subject since the mid-1980s. The impact of Johnson and Kaplan’s 1987 work Relevance Lost on management accounting tools is significant.