Explaining the Role of Management Accounting Information System in Strategy Formulation with Actors Network Approach

The real challenge of business environment is derived from a situation where organizations need to find opportunities on how to introduce ideas and new products to market that provide future earnings stream. Management accounting is used as a tool in this process and provides information on opportunities and threats. The purpose of this research is to explain the role of management accounting information system in the process of strategy formulation with actors’ network theory approach. Actor network theory is a valuable approach to improve understanding the power of each actors in management accounting system in the process of strategy formulation and helps to increase our understanding of the actors, intermediaries hidden in it and how they interact in making the network. This research is a descriptive correlational study and its required data have been collected through a questionnaire conducted among 400 financial managers of commercial companies at Tehran in 2017 and the hypotheses testing was performed using nonparametric binomial test. The results obtained show that actors in management accounting system play a key role in the process of formulating organizational strategy. This result suggests that the actors are regarded as interventionists able to influence and change strategic decisions in actor approach contrary to the traditional approach where management accountants are simply considered a scorer or historian.