SMA usage in (post) transitional economy's public sector organizations ? A Field Study

The concept of Strategic Management Accounting, is still vague and undefined idea after more than 30 years of development, and has a number of development areas lacking valuable researches. One of these areas is the public sector, which many authors believe has been overlooked in SMA researches and literature, and is thus viewed as an important future research direction. Given the fact that the public sector has been increasingly concerned with the issues of strategy and accounting, the usage of SMA core ideas and approaches should not be something completely new to organizations in this sector. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of the SMA treatment and implementation in public sector organizations in a (post) transitional economy, such as the understanding of the SMA concept - its ideas, scope and importance, SMA concept adoption, SMA usage process, SMA techniques usage. The field study research was carried out in several major public sector organizations in Croatia, and the results presented in this paper are an attempt to carry out the above-mentioned overlooked and valuable researches that are absent from the area of SMA usage in public sector organizations.