Introduction

This volume of Advances in Management Accounting (AIMA) begins with a paper by Mahlendorf, Schäffer, and Skiba on antecedents of participative budgeting. A review of the empirical evidence on the topic, one of the most intensively researched budgeting variables in management accounting, this review adds insights into why organizations use participative budgeting (i.e., antecedents and causes) in an effort to systematically advance research and overcome its challenges. The research on this topic, in general, has lost its connection to practitioners’ concerns.

Following various calls from literature, the authors assess 22 studies published prior to December 31, 2010, that offer statistical insights into why organizations use participative budgeting by theorizing and modeling it as a dependent variable. This work answers two research questions regarding why organizations use participative budgeting: (a) Which antecedents of participative budgeting have been analyzed so far? (b) Which causal-model forms are used in extant research regarding the antecedents of participative budgeting? This paper provides a detailed overview about findings on the antecedents to explain why organizations use participative budgeting, and expands the findings by developing propositions that combine the objectives that have been found to drive the use of participative budgeting with the context variables used in extant research. The authors’ propositions state that all identified objectives intervene in the relationship between context and use of participative budgeting thereby elucidating the underlying causal processes.