The Professional Project of Management Accountants: Analyzing Data to Help Managers Make Rational Decisions?

Literature often presents the management accountant’s role as being in transition, thus focusing less on technical aspects and increasingly on managerial and operational issues. Based on a field study of five cases in which observation and interviews were undertaken, this paper addresses the effects of this discourse on the way management accountants understand and perform their job. Precisely, this paper shows the empirical diversity underlying the words that management accountants use to account for their work, and contributes to debates on the links between practices, identity, and professional projects by highlighting the role of symbolic categorization.