Resources of the Firm: Creating, Controlling and Accounting

This work introduces a new conceptual approach towards a resource perspective of the firm, and examines some of its implications for management accounting and controlling. The firm is considered to be a resource-cycle that continuously reconstructs a coherent set of five basic resources: management, employees, external parties/customers/vendors, financial resources and technology.;The firm fails if its resource structure is unbalanced (incoherent). Therefore, the managerial goal of the firm must be to construct a balanced (coherent) resource profile. The value of the firm, then, is a function of the coherence of its resource profile. Furthermore, its value is a function of the systematic (methodological) control of potentials and flexibility. Flexibility is a condition of adaptation and of realizing creativity of development.;A resource perspective will have to make users new tools and data in order to encompass these attributes. To demonstrate some of the implications for management accounting and controlling, a numer of areas have been selected to show the concepts, for example, market resources, human resources, information resources, and research and development resources.