The relevance of time in accounting. The case of intangibles from a management accounting perspective

In accounting, time is relevant (e.g. Chambers, 1989; Anderson-Gough, et al., 2001; Mouritsen and Bekke, 1999; Quattrone and Hopper, 2005) but it tends to be left out from discussions (Ezzamel and Robson, 1995; Nørreklit, 2000) and therefore research designs or theories are temporally incorrect or incomplete as well as processes are misunderstood or misrepresented (Tuttle, 1997). Moving from the aforementioned consideration, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the construction of time from an accounting perspective and, second, to analyse how time is conceived and used within the accounting field. To investigate this idea, we will use a management accounting perspective on intangibles and apply it on a case study where a new accounting structure is being built up. The main findings are the followings. Accounting incorporates a time paradox because has the ambition to be able to support individuals in understanding the present time and drawing future scenarios offering past data. Another finding is that in accounting there is the need to combine the different conception of time (objective vs. subjective; cyclical vs. non-cyclical). Finally, the study highlights that accounting can be seen as a practice useful to perceive the temporal dimension of specific phenomena.