Tempo e management accounting: un caso aziendale

Someone would argue that in accounting studies time tends to be left out from discussions and therefore research designs or theories risk to be temporally incorrect or incomplete as well as processes are misunderstood or misrepresented. Assuming that accounting is not only able to measure and report time but can also contribute to the construction of specific aspects of it, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between time and management accounting. To investigate this idea a case study will be examined adopting an action research methodology. The main findings of the study are the following. Firstly, in accounting there is the need to combine the different conceptions of time (objective vs. subjective; cyclical vs. non-cyclical) in order to fully understand a phenomenon. Secondly, accounting tends to capture time only from a quantitative perspective, overlooking its qualitative aspects. Moreover, accounting enables talking about time and achieving a more and more sophisticated and shared perception of the temporal dimension.