Content area
Full Text
Supitcha Morakul: Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Frederick H. Wu: University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA
Introduction
Thailand's accounting techniques and practices are adopted from those in more developed countries, mainly the USA. This practice may lead to difficulties in their implementation. Many cross-cultural studies provide evidence that, because of cultural differences, successful accounting techniques and practices in one country need modification for effective use in another country (Hofstede, 1984; Daley et al., 1985; Birnberg and Snodgrass, 1988; Frucot and Shearon, 1991; Harrison, 1993). For example, because of the cultural dimensions of collectivism and post-Confucianism, Taiwanese firms tend to use budgets for control purposes only (Chang et al., 1995a; 1995b). The planning side of the budgeting system in Taiwanese firms is greatly centralized to keep planning information highly confidential as compared with the participative budgeting process in the West. Another study finds that national culture explains the fact that Taiwanese firms tend to modify the incentive schemes of the multi-year performance and evaluation (Merchant et al., 1995).
The major cross-cultural study by Hofstede (1980) suggests that Thailand and the USA are different in all cultural dimensions. Hofstede's study examined work-related beliefs, attitudes, values and norms, obtaining responses from members of one multinational company operating in 50 different countries across two points in time. It is the most comprehensive research project and its high validity in conclusions tends to be well accepted by researchers in the field of cross-cultural research. According to Hofstede, the greatest difference between Thailand, the USA lies in the individualism/collectivism dimension. Another significant difference is in the dimension identified as power distance. These indicate that there are differences in behavior and perceptions between Thai and US managers. Thus, the use of some US accounting techniques in the Thai environment may not provide successful results without appropriate modifications. The expectation in our research was to find that the modifications required for making the system implementation more successful are based on the consideration of cultural differences between Thailand and the USA.
In general, the purpose of this study was to examine the influences of culture on the success of a cost accounting system implemented using US accounting concepts in the Thai environment. One of the most important factors indicating the success of system implementation...