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Published in Portuguese and English. Original Version in Portuguese.
Periódico Trimestral, digital e gratuito publicado pela Academia Brasileira de Ciências Contábeis | Available online at www.repec.org.br
Revista de Educação e Pesquisa em Contabilidade
Journal of Education and Research in Accounting
Received in 11/11/2019. Ask to Revise on12/9/2019. Resubmitted on 3/28/2020. Accepted on 6/8/2020 by Dr. Andson Braga de Aguiar (Assistant Editor)
and by Dr. Gerlando Augusto Sampaio Franco de Lima (Editor). Published on 6/28/2020. Organization responsible for the journal: Abracicon.
REPeC, Brasília, v. 14, n. 2, art. 7, p. 237-256, Apr./Jun. 2020 | DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17524/repec.v14i2.2461 | ISSN 1981-8610
Abstract
Objective: Tis paper aims to analyze the relationship between the use of management accounting artefacts
and size, performance, and perceived service quality provided by Brazilian electric power distribution
public utility concessionaires, a sector confgured as a natural monopoly, marked by a large number of
regulations and restricted to a limited number of performance strategies.
Method: Te research involved 22 concessionaires from a universe of 63; for the relationship analyses, the
non-parametric chi-squared, Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, and Kendall’s τ tests were used.
Results: Results show a higher frequency in the use of traditional artifacts and suggest that the use of
artifacts is related with the company size. No relationship could be verifed though between the use of
these artifacts and performance, nor with service quality. It may be concluded that in this context of
natural monopoly, information obtained through artifacts do not lend themselves to the improvement of
operations, even if a small number of organizations have taken initiatives in this sense.
Contribution: Various studies have investigated the relationship between management accounting
practice (artifacts) and organizational performance in diferent contexts, however, very little is known
about this relationship in highly regulated sectors.
Keywords: Management accounting. Management accounting artifacts. Electric utility companies.
Afonso Carneiro Lima
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8780-3671 | E-mail: afonsolima@unifor.br
Eliane Evangelista Correia
https://orcid.org/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX | E-mail: eliane.e.correia@gmail.com
Hong Yuh Ching
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3155-7261 | E-mail: hongching@fei.edu.br
Management Accounting Practices, Quality, and
Performance in the Context of a Natural Monopoly