Kertu Lääts successfully defended her PhD dissertation

Kertu Lääts successfully defended herPhD dissertation Management accounting change in a dynamic economic environment based on examples from business and public sector organizations on November 30, 2011 Supervisor: Professor Toomas Haldma (PhD), University of Tartu Opponents: Professor Erkki K. Laitinen (PhD), University of Vaasa, Finland Professor Edita Gimzauskiene (PhD), Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania Changes seem to be an integral part of the current economic environment. The critical aspect determining the survival or success of an organisation is its management and the quality of its decisions in changing contexts. The current dissertation aims to provide an in-depth understanding of management accounting (MA) change and its influential factors in business and public organisations operating in a dynamic market economy context. The dissertation was motivated by the shortcomings of previous MA research in clearly conceptualising the management accounting change in different economic environments and by the scarce research evidence on the main influencing factors and characteristics of organisational MA change in the Eastern-European countries representing the dynamic market economies. A greater understanding of MA change and the factors that influence it will help advance the rational view in organisations' management. The dissertation addresses the indications of conceptual and technical sophistication, and the impact of MA change factors within business and public sector organisations in Estonia. The results of the empirical studies revealed that the influences from the tightening or creation of competition and changes in legal accounting framework were recognised as universal dominant environmental factors to drive the MA changes. The lack of management accounting competences among the people and continuous changes in organisational structure, which can be considered as an inherent feature of the dynamic context, signified the main barriers that slowed down the MA change process. The dissertation's findings indicate the unbalanced development of the MA system, where the technical and conceptual MA changes associate more with the cost accounting and performance measurement and less with budgeting and reporting. The dissertation findingssupport the contention that in the initial stages of accounting transition towards market economy practices, MA focuses on simpler cost determination and performance measurement approaches. Later we can track a shift from simple to more sophisticated approaches. These MA developments show that the studied Estonian organisations follow international performance measurement patterns, where financial performance measurement tools dominate non-financial ones and the adoption of integrated multidimensional and innovative performance measurement tools increases.