Management accountants’ role transitions in IT projects: A job crafting perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Examines how management accountants craft their roles in IT projects. • Uses job crafting to operationalize role transition theory. • Based on interviews and focus groups in 11 organizations. • Identifies the “control architect” as a new role for management accountants. • Shows how micro-level transitions unfold through job crafting. This paper aims to explore how management accountants craft their roles to meet the demands of IT projects and examines the factors that may hinder this process. It uses the concept of job crafting to operationalize role transition theory and explore micro-level role transitions. Using a multiple case study approach, based on interviews and focus groups involving IT managers and management accountants in 11 organizations, we show that to meet the demands of IT projects, management accountants engage in various forms of job crafting by altering the scope or nature of their tasks, their relationships, and by changing their perception of their work. They also take on additional tasks, create new relationships, and reframe the perception that they have of their job. These job crafting activities take them beyond the roles of bean counter or even business partner. This leads them to act as control architects that engage in promoting collaboration, facilitating knowledge transfer and skill development and creating a decentralized control network. By examining the concrete micro-processes through which management accountants craft their roles, our research enriches the management accounting literature by moving beyond established role dichotomies and introducing the control architect as a novel form of role, while also advancing the role transition literature by showing how transitions unfold at the micro-level through job crafting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".