Clearly organized and readable, this work is a good introduction to cost accounting for someone with little prior course work or experience in the field. Most chapters include a list of suggested readings. Good index. Most appropriate for community college or public library collections. "Choice"

In response to the expanding roles of accountants in all types of organizations, cost accounting is becoming increasingly multidimensional, relying not only on traditional accounting principles, but also on behavioral, organizational, decisional, and other foundations. These conceptual...

Written for both corporate accountants and advanced students of accounting, this volume offers comprehensive coverage of multinational financial accounting issues. As Ahmed Riahi-Belkaoui explains at the outset, multinational financial accounting is the branch of accounting developed to accommodate the specific international accounting needs of multinational corporations that are not met by their national accounting systems. Among the specific topics he addresses are the dimensions of multinational financial accounting, the efforts underway to harmonize international standards, the...

In recent years, the accounting profession has been faced with a number of unresolved problems. One of the most crucial has been the failure to distinguish between two separate sectors of the economy, the core and the periphery. This work offers a comprehensive study of this dual economy in which large organizations are clustered at the center while smaller organizations are arrayed on the periphery. At least two sets of accounting standards are required to adequately serve this structure, Monti-Belkaoui and Belkaoui argue, and just what these standards are, and how they would affect such...

This study offers a thorough analysis of what determines the level of executive compensation in one corporation as opposed to another. Challenging prior research which has tended to focus solely on the influence of coporate financial performance, the authors argue that structural characteristics of the firm--size, internal organization, and ownership--are equally decisive in influencing the level and structure of executive compensation which allows for the investigation of both the direct and indirect effects of each of these factors on executive compensation and offer a guide to the...

The book is designed to provide a conceptual framework for management accounting. The student as well as the practitioner in management accounting should be aware not only of the new multidisciplinary scope of the field but also of the conceptual foundations which justify this extended scope. Unlike most management accounting books which do not introduce or integrate all these foundations and are generally restricted to an exposition of cost accounting techniques, this book both asserts that the management accounting professional needs a grounding in various disciplines and justifies the...

Timely and reliable accounting information is essential. Not only firms themselves but the markets they serve, and particularly the investment community, depend on it. Accounting data and their interpretation must be above suspicion, says Riahi-Belkaoui, and to be sure of that, corporations and other users of accounting information must be certain that accountants subscribe to and practice morality set to high standards. What these standards are, and how they are deficient, distorted, and sometimes even fallacious, are the themes explored here. In doing so, Riahi-Belkaoui's book leads...

Riahi-Belkaoui's research shows that U.S. firms, and possibly firms elsewhere, resort to the underutilization of their resources, a phenomenon known as organizational and budgetary slack. In this, the first exhaustive study of slack, the author identifies and explains the phenomenon and its causes, explicates the characteristics of organizations afflicted by it, and suggests ways to remedy it. In doing so, he also analyzes the role of the multidivisional structure and the performance plan in the creation of slack, and the distortion of information that accompanies it. A challenging study...

Accounting may be viewed and analyzed as its own special sort of language says Riahi-Belkaoui, and accounting is the language of business. It represents phenomena in the business world as language represents phenomena in the larger world. To understand accounting as a language one must study such things as its readability and understandability, its impact on users behavior, its various linguistic repertories, and the impact that bilinguality has on accounting practices. Riahi-Belkaoui covers all this in a way that not only academics versed in linguistics will understand, but in a way that...

Auditor's reports declare that the financial statements contained in them present fairly the results of operations and cash flows, in conformity with generally accepting accounting principles. Users of accounting information are guaranteed that the auditors have attempted to be fair in their presentation -- but what does this actually mean, and are there other ways in which the fairness concept comes into play? Monti-Belkaoui and Riahi-Belkaoui explore these matters in concise, readable detail, not only for their colleagues in the academic community but for professionals in accounting...