Management accounting and corporate governance: what a bibliometric analysis of the literature (2000–2024) reveals

Prof. Dr. Carlos KANINDA MUKENA

2024 · 8 min read

Download PDF

Published in the Revue du Contrôle de la Comptabilité et de l'Audit (RCCA), our bibliometric analysis screens 875 documents indexed in Scopus and Web of Science between 2000 and 2024 on management accounting and corporate governance. It maps the major trends in scientific output, the authors and journals that structure the field, and five thematic clusters that, together, sketch a discipline in full consolidation.

A growing but still concentrated body of research

The analysis covers 875 documents extracted from Scopus and Web of Science using the keyword combination “Accounting” AND “Governance” over 2000–2024, processed with VOSviewer. Output is dominated by journal articles (90.8% of documents), well ahead of reviews (6.1%), conference papers (1.7%) and book chapters or books (1.3% combined) — a distribution that reflects the normal maturity of an established research field, where the peer-reviewed journal remains the primary vehicle for validating and disseminating findings.

Output is also concentrated from an authorship standpoint: Ntim, C.G. (11 documents) and Hussainey, K. (9 documents) stand out clearly, followed by a second tier of prolific authors — Elamer, Ferry, Biondi, Hopper, Pasko, Ullah, Al-Faryan, Almaqtari — reflecting an active research community still structured around a relatively small number of central figures. From a disciplinary standpoint, the field is strongly interdisciplinary: Business & Management (29.2% of documents), Economics, Econometrics & Finance (19.9%), Social Sciences (16.6%) and Environmental Science (12.1%) dominate, with smaller contributions from Energy, Decision Sciences and Computer Science — a sign that corporate governance and management accounting can no longer be studied in isolation from environmental and societal concerns.

The journal network: two clusters that speak to each other

Journal co-citation analysis under VOSviewer reveals a dense first cluster of leading accounting and finance journals — the Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research — tightly interconnected with one another. A second, more peripheral but equally active cluster brings together journals oriented toward business ethics and sustainability, led by the Journal of Business Ethics, Accounting, Organizations and Society and Sustainability. The density of the links between these two clusters confirms that governance research sits at the intersection of the quantitative rigor typical of accounting and finance scholarship, and a growing normative concern for ethics, social responsibility and the sustainability of management practices.

Five thematic clusters structure the field

Keyword co-occurrence analysis across the full corpus distinguishes five thematic clusters. The first, centered on corporate governance in the strict sense, brings together board of directors, audit committee, earnings management and financial reporting. The second links governance approaches to environmental policy and climate change. The third — arguably the most directly relevant to our advisory practice — connects accountability, management accounting, sustainable development and decision-making. The fourth combines finance, economic development and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on governance practices. The fifth, finally, addresses board diversity, social responsibility and gender.

What this means for businesses in the DRC

For executives and boards of companies operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this mapping of the literature confirms an intuition our advisory practice regularly observes on the ground: credible corporate governance is not limited to formal compliance — board composition, committees, internal control procedures. It rests, upstream, on the quality and reliability of the accounting and management information that feeds decision-making. As Congolese investors, lenders and regulators raise their transparency requirements — Law No. 26/018 on Local Content is a recent illustration — companies that invest in the robustness of their management accounting systems, not only in regulatory compliance, will be best placed to attract capital, withstand regulatory scrutiny, and demonstrate social and environmental responsibility.

This study was published in Volume 8, Issue 2 of the Revue du Contrôle de la Comptabilité et de l'Audit (RCCA), ISSN 2550-469X. Our Firm is available to assess the maturity of your governance and management accounting framework.

Continue reading.

A question about this analysis?