مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد نقش حسابداری مدیریت در کارآفرینی بین المللی – امرالد 2017

Given the paucity of research on the role of accounting in internationalization decisions (Sykianakis and Bellas, 2005), in this paper we study the role of management accounting in international entrepreneurship. Following Oviatt and McDougall (2005, p. 540), we view international entrepreneurship as “the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities—across national borders—to create future goods and services”. A large amount of research shows that firms invest significant amounts of time and other resources in international entrepreneurship and that such resources and capabilities are important factors for international entrepreneurship (e.g., Cavusgil and Knight, 2015; Keupp and Gassmann, 2009; Knight and Cavusgil, 2004; Peng, 2001). We therefore argue that international entrepreneurship may be regarded as a special form of strategic investment, where firms expect to receive some return on their investment. It seems likely that before actually investing, firms will evaluate whether international entrepreneurship opportunities “pay off” by assessing whether they can be expected to create a satisfactory return on investment. Similar to other investment decisions, in many firms, such information is regularly provided by the finance function or—more precisely—by financial controllers or management accountants (Carlsson-Wall et al., 2015; Emmanuel et al., 2010; van Cauwenbergh et al., 1996). Besides evaluating such strategic investment opportunities, the literature also suggests that the management accounting function may also play a key role in the identification and the later implementation of such opportunities (e.g., Burns et al., 2013). Based on these considerations, we expect that management accounting is an important ingredient in identifying, evaluating and exploiting international entrepreneurship opportunities. Indeed, some quantitative research shows that management accounting systems are positively related to internationalization capability (Gómez-Conde et al., 2013) or associated capabilities such as entrepreneurship and innovativeness (Henri, 2006). However, given its methodological nature, such research is unable to explain why management accounting may be an important capability for the pursuit of international entrepreneurship and—more generally—which role management accounting systems play in international entrepreneurship. This is why the present paper focuses on the following research question: