Heuristics are short-cuts and deliberately ignore information, for instance through examining fewer cues or integrating less information. However, this collides with a view on management accountants and controllers as rational agents which seems to suggest that all available information should be considered. As their role as information supplier is often accompanied with the task to assist managers in their judgment and decision making, they have huge influence on these processes. Therefore, it is of high relevance to know if, how, and which heuristics management accountants and controllers use. Furthermore, we need to know which individual and situational factors influence their usage of heuristics. With a series of five empirical studies, applying a mixed-methods research design, the author sheds light to these research questions and addresses some central claims of the potential biases but also the stunning benefits of relying on heuristic reasoning. Central to his discussion are dual-process-approaches which are debated in cognitive psychology. Scholars of these approaches claim that we should distinguish between two distinct processes (or systems) of the human mind. Following this interpretation, heuristics are processes which are described as intuitive, automatic, fast, and unconscious. They are routinized cognitive processes which are based on experience in certain social environments and thus often exhibit ecological rationality. Overall, this book picks up an up-to-date topic in behavioural accounting research, which not only is of relevance for researchers but as well for practitioners.

A fundamental challenge that management faces in the twenty-first century is how to exercise adequate control, i. e. how to guide and direct the behaviour of their subordinates. With increasing globalisation firms witness a cross-cultural impact too. Of particular interest is the question of whether to use the standardized form of control similar to the home base of firms or whether to adapt their control practices to the local specificities. Given the meagre state of the literature in management control with a cross-cultural emphasis, this study addresses a real world problem, namely the question whether management control practices are configured similarly or differently across cultures. Relying on a generalized industry sample across four countries (Belgium, Canada, Germany and Poland), this study sought to shed light on one of the more intriguing questions – “does culture matter” – for specific control areas, in particular for performance measurement, performance evaluation and reward systems. The theoretical foundations are grounded in the cultural framework of the GLOBE project accompanied by thoughts of new institutionalism, stakeholder theory and contingency thoughts. Hypotheses are tested by mean comparisons (ANOVA, ANCOVA). The empirical findings highlight cultural differences for a broader set of control practices and deliver new insights into the intersection of culture and management control. This dissertation crafts a novel topic with high relevance for both researchers and practitioners. The study demonstrates areas for which management control practices should be adapted to the local needs and areas for which those practices could be harmonized in the whole company. This monograph stresses some areas in which future empirical cross-cultural research can benefit, and some areas where conceptual thoughts could be advanced.

Accounting systems and sustainability management are vital for company management and performance. This is particularly difficult for small businesses. As such, it is necessary to understand the features and issues of sustainable accounting systems, with a particular focus on small business. Maintaining Sustainable Accounting Systems in Small Business is a critical scholarly resource that explores sustainability accounting systems with small businesses and how the economic, social, and environmental aspects are related to each other in the company’s management and performance. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as management control system, integrated reporting, and small and medium enterprises, this book is geared towards entrepreneurs, business managers, academicians, business professionals, and graduate-level students seeking practical information about the different sustainable accounting systems from strategic, organizational, and accounting perspectives.

The proliferation of entrepreneurship, technological and business innovations, emerging social trends and lifestyles, employment patterns, and other developments in the global context involve creative destruction that transcends geographic and political boundaries and economic sectors and industries. This creates a need for an interdisciplinary exploration of disruptive technologies, their impacts, and their implications for various stakeholders widely ranging from government agencies to major corporations to consumer groups and individuals. Disruptive Technology: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines innovation, imitation, and creative destruction as critical factors and agents of socio-economic growth and progress in the context of emerging challenges and opportunities for business development and strategic advantage. Highlighting a range of topics such as IT innovation, business strategy, and sustainability, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business executives, business professionals, academicians, and researchers interested in strategic decision making using innovations and competitiveness.

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Meta-Heuristics: Advances and Trends in Local Search Paradigms for Optimizations comprises a carefully refereed selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the Second Meta-Heuristics Conference (MIC 97). The selected articles describe the most recent developments in theory and applications of meta-heuristics, heuristics for specific problems, and comparative case studies. The book is divided into six parts, grouped mainly by the techniques considered. The extensive first part with twelve papers covers tabu search and its application to a great variety of well-known combinatorial optimization problems (including the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and vehicle routing problems). In the second part we find one paper where tabu search and simulated annealing are investigated comparatively and two papers which consider hybrid methods combining tabu search with genetic algorithms. The third part has four papers on genetic and evolutionary algorithms. Part four arrives at a new paradigm within meta-heuristics. The fifth part studies the behavior of parallel local search algorithms mainly from a tabu search perspective. The final part examines a great variety of additional meta-heuristics topics, including neural networks and variable neighbourhood search as well as guided local search. Furthermore, the integration of meta-heuristics with the branch-and-bound paradigm is investigated.

Volume 35 of Advances in Management Accounting features a diverse range of authors from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America, focusing on theoretically sound and practical management accounting research which has a cutting-edge and wide-reaching appeal to both academics and practitioners.