Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of whether working capital management has an effect on the profitability of small and medium-sized Norwegian firms.Design/methodology/approach -The data comprise 21,075 Norwegian small and medium-sized enterprises and 84,300 observations made between 2010 and 2013. Panel data regressions were applied with fixed effects and a two-stage least squares analysis was employed to control for endogeneity.Findings -The results indicate that reducing inventories held, time spent paid for receivables and settling own accounts payable will increase profitability. Even though endogeneity may exist, this does not affect the results from the previous analysis. Similar results are also obtained when industry-specific effects are controlled for, supporting the robustness of the results obtained. The relevance of quadratic dependencies of the profitability on independent variables was also identified and suggests a decreasing trend of return on assets with increasing values of the working capital management characteristic variables.Research implications -Drawing on similar studies, this study confirms that working capital management is relevant for firms' profitability.Practical implications -The practice of aggressive working capital policy in Norwegian firms is confirmed by the results of this study.Originality/value -This study contributes to the current research on the relationship between working capital management and profitability by using a large dataset to add further robustness to results, and thus see whether results in previous studies may be confirmed or not. Also this is among the first published study of this relationship among Norwegian firms from different industries, filling a gap in similar research conducted in other European countries.

This paper explores which journals publish management accounting research and which sources are most cited in these journals. We apply bibliometric methods based on citation data from Web of Science and Scopus. Quantitatively, we examined the boundaries of management accounting by analysing 506,753 and 1,075,838 cited references from each respective database in the timespans 1945-2018 and 1960-2018 and found that the five most cited journals represent 6.5% and 4.7% of the total citations. The most cited journal in both Web of Science and Scopus is AOS, followed by MAR. The findings are discussed in light of diversity, and the article will claim that the boundaries of management accounting research are not subject to severe constraints. Google Scholar was initially chosen alongside Web of Science and Scopus, but, among other challenges, Google Scholar does not provide comparable citation data. Therefore, issues concerning using citation data and databases are also thoroughly discussed.

This study provides an exploratory bibliometric analysis of the emerging literature on Industry 5.0, which is a new visionary concept on the future of industry. Industry 5.0 has in recent years begun to attract the interest of both practitioners and academics, but this new field can still be considered embryonic and not well documented. Therefore, this study aims to map the field and provide a preliminary picture of the emergence and status of the scientific literature on Industry 5.0. Bibliometric data covering the period from 2015 to 2021 were extracted from the Scopus database. Bibliometric analyses of overall publication volume and growth trajectory, influential documents, authors, sources and countries are performed. The exploratory analysis provides a preliminary overview of the birth and emergence of this new research area. The results are discussed in relation to theories on the emergence and evolution of new management concepts. The article closes with some speculations about the future trajectory of Industry 5.0.

Even though Lean is a management concept with roots stretching back several decades, it did not take off on a large scale in Norway until around 2010. Since then, Lean has received frequent attention in the Norwegian media, and recent surveys indicate that the diffusion and popularity of Lean can be considered relatively high in both the private and public sectors. This article focuses on the sustainability of Lean as a management practice in Norway. The Google dictionary defines the term “sustainability” as “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” The article therefore seeks to examine the evolution in the diffusion and use of the Lean concept in Norway in the period 2015–2017. For this purpose, we draw on data from two surveys administered in 2015 and 2017, as well as a small number of follow-up interviews carried out in 2017. The results generally show that the diffusion rate in Norway appears to be relatively stable, and Lean users appear to have a very positive perception of the concept, which indicates that the Lean concept currently has an institutionalised position as a management practice in Norway. Therefore, the evolution pattern of Lean in Norway differs from what has been observed in other countries where the concept appears to be on a downward trajectory in terms of its popularity. Moreover, the results reveal considerable variation in terms of how Lean is interpreted, understood and used in practice, for instance, when it comes to abstraction levels and the use of different Lean-related principles and tools. Overall, the results have several theoretical and methodological implications for future studies on the diffusion, use and long-term sustainability of popular management concepts such as Lean.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the historical evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking in management accounting. As an organising framework, this paper applies the lens of management fashion theory, which is a perspective that is well suited to the examination of the lifecycles of management accounting concepts and ideas. Design/methodology/approach This paper pursues a bibliographic approach to better understand the past and present state of activity-based thinking. Thus, this paper attempts to piece together a mosaic picture by synthesising existing research on activity-based thinking from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources. Findings While the original activity-based costing (ABC) model has evolved and broadened and has generated new related concepts, studies suggest that it is not as successful as accounting concepts such as the balanced scorecard. The overall popularity trajectory of activity-based thinking can be considered to be negative, and it is currently not receiving much attention in accounting journals. Research limitations/implications This paper is based on desk research and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources. In addition, it may be subject to the authors’ own biases when it comes to defining relevant articles studied. Practical implications This paper provides more insight into the evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking and discusses some of the reasons why it is not more widely used in practice. Originality/value Although many studies have examined the diffusion of ABC-related techniques, most are quite dated. More than 30 years have passed since the coining of the ABC term, and the time is ripe to provide a historical re-examination of the impact of this type of thinking in the field of accounting and to consider the latest developments and trends.