Developing the Causal Model

Abstract

This research makes various assumptions about the design of the study that affect the following propositions as well as the choice and advantageousness of the research methods presented thereafter. Hence, the research assumptions are initially discussed:

• • It is assumed that the company or the companies involved dispose of formal management accounting systems. This leads to an exclusion of small companies from the population, as they seldom dispose of formal management accounting systems, and employees would unlikely be able to answer the questions meaningfully.²⁵⁸

• • Studies on the use of information have oftentimes assumed that the same types of information are provided to all study participants across different organizations and/or industries.²⁵⁹ As Diamantopoulos/Souchon’s (1998) research yields significantly different results for the use of different types of export information,²⁶⁰ the data should ideally be collected from employees who work on similar hierarchical levels within one firm. This would ensure that they are provided with the same types of MAI and further guarantee that individual attributes are less contaminated by different organizational contexts. However, the company under study needs to have a large number of employees to yield statistically reliable results.

• • Finally, this research analyzes top-down influence assuming a strong hierarchy with long-term supervisor-subordinate-relationships and clear competencies. This is because “[p]ower is a useful concept for describing social structure only if it has a certain stability over time.”²⁶¹ This excludes from the study professional service firms that propagate flat hierarchies, work on a short-term project basis, and make decisions based on the one-firm concept.²⁶²

For example, cf. Bisbe/Otley (2004); Vandenbosch (1999).