Culture, Management Accounting Practices, and Managerial Decision-Making: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Organizational-National Divide

Objective This study maps the intellectual structure and thematic evolution of the scholarly literature at the intersection of national and organizational culture, management accounting practices, and managerial decision-making, in order to identify the field’s dominant themes, establish whether cultural analysis in this literature operates predominantly at the national or organizational level, and surface the specific research gaps that remain. Methodology A systematic bibliometric review was conducted following the PRISMA protocol. A Scopus search combining culture-related and management accounting/decision-making terms returned 1,587 records. A two-stage screening process, applying explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, yielded a final corpus of 483 records. Performance analysis and science mapping were carried out using Biblioshiny (Bibliometrix), complemented by a systematic text-mining scan of abstract content to surface author-stated research gaps across the corpus. Findings The field is in a rapid growth phase, with publication volume nearly tripling since 2022. Research output is geographically diverse, led by the United States but increasingly driven by China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Three independent bibliometric analyses: trend topic evolution, co-occurrence network mapping, and thematic mapping – converge on the same structural conclusion. Research on organizational culture represents the field’s dominant “Basic Theme”. Conversely, Hofstede-anchored cross-cultural research at the national level occupies a peripheral, low-density position, classifying it among “Emerging or Declining Themes”. A complementary text-mining analysis of the corpus’s abstracts corroborates this pattern from within the primary studies themselves: calls for genuinely comparative, multi-country research designs are among the most frequently self-reported gaps in the literature – matched in prevalence only by calls for research on the culturally embedded adoption of artificial intelligence in management accounting, a separate but equally prominent emerging concern. Value Added To the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first bibliometric mapping of the intersection between management accounting practices and managerial decision-making. It offers empirical, data-driven evidence – moving beyond purely narrative impressions – that cross-national comparative research remains significantly underdeveloped compared to firm-level organizational culture studies within this literature, and it surfaces the specific thematic and methodological gaps that future research should prioritize. Recommendations Future empirical work should prioritize explicit cross-national comparative designs grounded in established cultural-dimensions frameworks (e.g., Hofstede, Gray) to strengthen the intercultural dimension of this research area, rather than continuing to rely on organizational culture as a proxy for national-level cultural variation. Particular attention should be paid to under-represented sectors and regions (SMEs, the public sector, emerging markets), to the culturally embedded adoption of artificial intelligence, and to longitudinal, mixed-methods designs – the specific gaps most frequently self-reported by the primary literature.