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Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 01/21/2016 05:34 AM
ABC Diffusion in the Age of Digital Economy: the UK
Experience
Journal: Journal of Applied Accounting Research
Manuscript ID: JAAR-May-2011-0034
Manuscript Type: Research Paper
Keywords: ABC, ERP, digital economy, IT
Journal of Applied Accounting Research
For Peer Review
1
ABC Diffusion in the Age of Digital Economy: the UK Experience
1. Introduction
Nowadays businesses are experiencing new changes and challenges. Being the age of digital
economy might be the most important feature of the 21st century (Bhimani, 2003). Information
Technology (IT) dominates the business environment in the 21st century. Exploiting IT resulted
in the emergence of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, e-commerce applications
(e.g., e-business, e-procurement, e-government, and virtual organisations), electronic data
interchange, Intranets and Extranets (Davenport, 2000; Light et al., 2001). All these new
technologies were used to invent and develop new business structures and forms which have not
been possible before. Hunton (2002: 2) argues that IT “has disrupted our peaceful existence by
radically transforming the manner in which business is conducted across the world and alerting us to the
many challenges that lay ahead.”
Since the beginning of the 21st century, management accounting scholars have called for tracing
the effects of the speedy changes in business environment upon management accounting
practices (e.g. Hunton, 2002; Bhimani, 2003; Granlund and Mouritsen, 2003; Hartmann and
Vaassen, 2003; Gunasekaran et al., 2004; Hyvonen et al., 2008, 2009). Granlund and Mouritsen
(2003: 17), for instance, argue that researchers should increasingly follow these speedy
developments of IT, and investigate the potential and realized changes it may cause for
accounting practices. This is important today as the accounting profession must deal with many
complex issues that never existed in the past (Hunton, 2002). In the future, advances in IT will
influence...