Management accounting as constructing and opposing customer focus : three case studies on management accounting and customer relations

Sammanfattning: This thesis is onthe relation between management accounting and customer focus andrelates to discussions about how internal managing processes inorganizations are interrelated with interorganizational relations,specifically constructions of customers. Both a normative and adescriptive perspective on the relation are taken within thedifferent parts of the thesis, which consists of a licentiatethesis, three articles and a synthesizing text. The purpose is tounderstand the interaction between management accounting andcustomer focus on operative levels in industrial organizations,where focus on customer has a central place. The results are alsodiscussed with respect to its possible importance in thedevelopment of managing processes of organizations. The thesis isbased on three cases, which have been studied with mainly aqualitative approach. In the licentiate thesis, traditional accounting models, originallydeveloped to provide information for analyzing products, arerevisited under the assumption that customers and products areequally interesting to analyze. The three articles explore the roleof management accounting in interpreting customers and theinterface to customers. In the first article, strong customeraccountability is found to override the intentions from managers,as communicated through the accounting system. Arguments of howmanagement accounting can be perceived as inaccurate then have acentral place in motivating how customers are prioritized in a waynot favored by managers. Furthermore, in the second article,customers are experienced as both catalysts and frustrators tochange processes and changes in management accounting are found inco-development with the different customer relations and howdifferent customers prefer to communicate. The third articleexplores how coordination mechanisms operate in relation to eachother in coordination of customer-supplier relationships. A strongmarket mechanism creates space for bureaucratic control and use ofmanagement accounting. However, the use of bureaucratic control inturn relies on social coordination between actors in order tofunction. These four parts are revisited and related to each other in asynthesizing part of the thesis. The relation between managementaccounting and customer focus is approached in two ways. Managementaccounting may construct customer focus, making it impossible todistinguish between the two. However, another interpretation of therelation is management accounting and customer focus as opposinglogics, where management accounting represents hierarchicalinfluence, homogeneous control processes and cost efficientoperations, and customer focus represents customer influence;control processes adapted to the customer and customizedoperations.