Future making in farm management accounting: the Australian "Blue Book"

In the late 1960s, an attempt was made to implement throughout Australia an innovative scheme to develop and standardise management accounting in the agricultural sector. Despite enthusiastic support for the proposed scheme, it was not implemented, although elements of it can be found in farm consultancy practice today. The story of the “Blue Book” (Accounting and Planning for Farm Management) and the Australian Committee for the Coding of Rural Accounts (ACCRA) is analysed in the context of diffusion of innovation frameworks. However, as these frameworks do not adequately capture the visions of the future and the related emotional investment in innovations, the concept of future making is introduced from the work of Barbara Adam on future time in social studies, as a further layer of analysis in this case study. In particular, the problems of embedding management accounting innovations in new software in a time when information technology is changing rapidly affected significantly the diffusion of the innovation in Australia.