On the pathetic status of Management Accounting.

I realise the value of a management accounting course in MBA programs as well as the value of hands-on experience in industry.

I started my career as an industrial engineer doing what are really cost management tasks, and later when I entered accounting academia taught mostly management accounting topics for the first five years. The time period  between my time in industrial engineering (1968-72) and accounting academia (1977-) was a transformative period for management accounting. 

First, all illusions of accounting in a manufacturing environment just about disappeared  from management accounting except for a lot of hand-waving about manufacturing. When I entered industry cost accounting was a very new term (it used to be referred to earlier as Factory Accounts, a relic of classic British understatement). Collateral to this was the dumping by management accounting of all aspects of factory accounts, such as cost engineering & estimation, project management, inventory management, and all accounting aspects of operations management,... These were precisely the  parts that were grabbed by industrial engineering. This transition was already underway when I started my career in industrial engineering. Those days I was happy because my then chosen avocation was becoming more attractive. Now I feel more ambivalent because the accountants lost important skills.

Second, management became a superficially scholarly field. Outright plagiarisation (I say so because it is questionable if the work shed any new light on our domain enough to impact practice)  of work in Economics on principal-agent models and statisticians' models of decision-making under uncertainty  did not really hold our interest except for a fleeting moment in history.

Third, we gave up modeling as a way of studying the property of operational systems. With this went the idea of rigour in  representation and careful attention to assumptions. We substituted them with impressive vocabulary. Since such modeling is the staple of engineering disciplines, they moved into what was traditionally our domain. Today, the most rigorous courses in cost/management accounting are to be found in engineering and not accounting. You put an industrial engineer even in a service operation and (s)he can be productive very quickly. On the other hand you put an accountant in a manufacturing environment and (s)he will quit in frustration soon.

Fourth, we moved our attentions up Bob Anthony's hierarchy from operational to management controls to finally strategic control. In this progression we also ascended to stratosphere in terms of vocabulary but not in the relevance to practice.

Today, if I were running any enterprise and had to hire a cost accountant I would any day prefer to hire an engineer with a good appreciation of costing rather than an accounting with less than rudimentary appreciation of engineering.