Management accounting research on farms: what is known and what needs knowing?

It is difficult to develop an overall picture of the practice of management accounting (MA) in farms and farm enterprises (FEs) because little research has been published on the topic, and these studies are mostly discrete and unconnected to the others. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research, develop an explanatory framework for MA practices in farming entities and identify some major avenues for future research on the topic.

This paper uses systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and an examination of references/citations, 41 empirical journal articles published between 1964 and 2016 are identified, described and analyzed in this research paper.

The findings reveal that the practice of MA in farms is subject to information problems and that the empirical research on this topic largely lacks a theoretical explanation. Therefore, the explanatory framework of MA practices in farming entities reveals that these practices are subject to influencing factors such as familism, government farm policies, market competition, technological changes, the seasons and the weather/climate.

The overall limited findings on the practice of MA in FEs indicate that caution should be taken when generalizing the current knowledge on the use of MA practices in other organizational forms to farming entities. Moreover, future research should draw on explicit theories to explain empirical results.

This paper is the first comprehensive literature review of studies on MA practices in farms and FEs.