Abstract:
This paper surveys how Management Accounting (MA) has
disseminated in Sri Lanka since it became a British colony. Although
the country can currently boast a high level of dissemination of MA,
its evolution remains largely unexplored, which this paper aims to
explore. It traces the historical evolution of MA as a constitutive
element of institutional knowledge in Sri Lanka. The theoretical
framing of this exercise is drawn from Burawoy's labour process
theory-based analysis of how regimes of control in ex-colonial
developing countries are manifested by state, production and global
politics. Akin to Burawoy's work, the analysis here is historical and
dialectical as it attempts to explain the evolutionary dynamics of
MA in relation to wider political and institutional regimes. Data for
the analysis, therefore, is drawn from a wider set of rich secondary
sources of information together with several in-depth interviews.
The paper asserts that (a) Dissemination of MA has gone through
four distinct phases of evolution, viz., (i) Early initiatives by colonial
masters; (ii) Dual role of financial accountants; (iii) Local IeWA
members hard at work and (iv) Taking wing with globalization, and
(b) Such historical phases are framed by the evolutionary dynamics
of the wider political regimes of colonial despotism, state capitalism
and market capitalism where each regime sets the stage for the next
via the contradictions and conflicts that ignite socio-political changes
nationally and globally. Accordingly, the findings suggest that
dissemination of MA is driven by, and arises in consequence of, the historical and structural needs of the evolving society. The paper
provides further evidence from a developing country that
dissemination of MA is contextually bound, evolves historically and
is socially constructed.
