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Most changes in accounting are the direct or indirect consequences of diffusion processes. A study of how management accounting innovations are being adjusted and bundled together with other ideas to facilitate entry into new markets may help us to a better understanding of the popularity and adoption of management accounting practices. The present study looks at the communication, diffusion and transformation of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in Sweden from a supply side perspective. The high interpretative viability (Benders and van Veen, 2001) of the BSC allows for different interpretations and uses of the concept that could potentially increase the supply side effect in the diffusion process, e.g. by including elements that reduce barriers and resistance to change. We have identified three elements that the propagators of the BSC include in their Swedish BSC package, in order to make the innovation more attractive to a potential Swedish adopter market.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the contribution made by the balanced scorecard (BSC) in regaining the practice relevance of management accounting research.Design/methodology/approachUsing discourse analysis, the paper investigates the speech genre in use in main BSC texts.FindingsThe authors' analysis reveals that the BSC is defined in a way that can provide management with a type of general overarching model. However, the model lacks realistic scholarly characteristics and instead it exhibits characteristics of a myth speech genre. This is especially so in the presentation of the central concern with cause‐effect statements in the BSC.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors' analysis, therefore, suggests that methodological issues relating to the usage of cause and effect statements must be solved if research, such as that carried out in the BSC development, is to become more relevant to practice. To overcome this problem and regain research relevance, the paper recommends a more scholarly speech genre, giving more attention to various usages of inferential statements and specifically a pragmatic constructivist perspective for analyzing construct causalities.Originality/valueThe paper advocates a scholarly methodological basis as a requirement for accounting innovation to enable it to solve practice problems in a way that improves practice and hence increases relevance of research.

This paper contains an analysis of the activity-based costing (ABC) literature which has been accumulated in the UK and USA accounting journals over the fourteen-year period since the first articles on ABC emerged. This evidence is used both longitudinally and cross-sectionally to gain insights into how ABC started, how it has been communicated, how it has been researched, how it is constituted, how it has generated attention and how it has developed and changed. From the analysis conclusions are drawn on these issues and on the role of academic research when confronted by a new practical innovation of this type.

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