THE CHANGE DRIVERS IN THE MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING IN ROMANIA

The emergence and development of the management accounting in Romania represents a point of interest due to the specific economic and political context which is characteristic to the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had for four decades a socialist economic and political regime. The change between the three generations of management accounting in Romania [1st generation (1940-1947), 2nd generation (1948-1993), 3rd generation (1994 present)]is analysed differently depending on the development stage of management accounting and on the possibility accountants had to exercise their professional judgment. The analysis of the change during the first two periods is done in this article based only on literature investigation given that during the 1st generation the only issue raised was that of presenting concepts and exemplifying certain practices regarding cost calculation, and that during the 2nd generation it was not possible to make any volunteer changes (by initiative of the accountants, based on applying professional judgment). For the 3rd generation, where the change in management accounting may occur voluntarily, several drivers of change are taken into account, the research being focused on the following directions: 0 analysis of the existing trend at international level in terms of changes taking place in management accounting; (ii) analysis of the changes occurred in the national accounting legislation aimed at the organisation and role of management accounting; (iii) analysis of the typology of accountants in Romania correlated with their perception on management accounting with respect to interpreting the factors that led to change, and (iv) empirical study on the analysis of the attitude shown by the accountants in Romania with respect to the information provided by management accounting in two different moments in time (2009 and 2014). The results of the empirical study have shown that there is a voluntary change in the attitude of accountants in Romania concerning the information provided by management accounting.