Cost Management A Strategic Emphasis

Cost Management: A Strategic Emphasis, by Blocher/Juras/Smith is dedicated to answering the question: Why Cost Management? It answers this question by providing cost-management tools and techniques needed to support an organization's competitiveness, improve its performance, and help the organization accomplish its strategy. The text is written to help students understand the broader role of cost accounting in helping an organization succeed - not just the measurement of costs. 

While the text does include coverage of traditional costing topics (e.g., job-order costing, process costing, service-department cost allocations, and accounting for joint and by-products), its primary strength is the linkage of these topics, as well as more contemporary topics, to an organization's strategy. And with Connect, an easy-to-use homework and learning management solution that embeds learning science and award-winning adaptive tools to improve student outcomes, instructors receive a course solution that includes high quality content and assessment paired with assignments that help students build the skills they need to succeed.

Edward J. Blocher is an emeritus professor of accounting at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His undergraduate degree (economics) is from Rice University, his MBA from Tulane University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Blocher has presented regularly on strategic cost management at the national meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).
While he is involved in a number of accounting organizations, Professor Blocher has been most continually active in the IMA, where he has been a member of the IMA’s Research Foundation. He is a certified management accountant (CMA), has taught review courses for the CMA exam, and has served on the IMA’s national education committee. He has supervised or participated in the direction of several doctoral students, many of whom prepared dissertations in management accounting. Professor Blocher is also the author or co-author of several articles in management accounting and in other areas of accounting and has served as associate editor and reviewer for a number of accounting journals. He has a 2009 article in Issues in Accounting Education on the topic of teaching strategic cost management.
Putting research and teaching into practice is important to Professor Blocher, who has worked closely with other firms and organizations in developing products, publications, and teaching materials. He was a member of the task force for the IMA that developed a new definition of management accounting in 2008. From 2010–2014, he served as a member of the joint curriculum task force of the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the AAA and the IMA, which was charged with the responsibility of developing curriculum recommendations for accounting education. The task force has two recent publications in Issues in Accounting Education. Also, he has provided expert testimony and has consulted with a number of organizations regarding cost management matters.

Paul E. Juras is the Vander Wolk Professor of Managerial Accounting and Operational Performance and Chair of the Accountancy and Law Division at Babson College. Previously he was a professor of accountancy at Wake Forest University. He earned both his BBA and MBA at Pace University and his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. He is a certified management accountant (CMA) and has a certified public accountant (CPA) license from New York. Professor Juras has experience in strategic management accounting. He has published articles and cases in many journals, including the Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance, Issues in Accounting Education, The CPA Journal, and Strategic Finance. He has made numerous presentations at meetings of both the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). In 2014, he received the IMA’s Lybrand Gold Medal, awarded to the author(s) of the outstanding article of the year published in Strategic Finance, and in 2015 he received the IMA’s R. Lee Brummet Award for Distinguished Accounting Educators.

Professor Juras teaches managerial accounting and strategic cost management courses and has taught in the undergraduate program, the Masters of Science in Accountancy program, and the MBA program at Wake Forest University. He has also taught in the undergraduate, the full-time MBA, the evening MBA, and the blended-learning MBA programs at Babson College.

While he was active in CAM-I, the Consortium for Advanced Management-International, and has served in leadership roles in the Management Accounting Section of the AAA, Professor Juras dedicates most of his efforts outside the classroom to the IMA. He is currently a member of the IMA Global Board of Directors and serves as Chairman of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants, the organization responsible for the CMA certification. In addition, Professor Juras served a three-year term as the chair of the IMA Research Foundation and 10 years as an associate editor of the IMA Educational Case Journal.



Steven D. Smith is an associate professor of accountancy and the Kristine V. and Randy J. Vest Fellow in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University (BYU). Previously he was an assistant professor of accountancy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned B.S. and MAcc degrees from BYU and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University. He is a certified management accountant (CMA). Professor Smith teaches cost and management accounting courses in the undergraduate and graduate accounting programs, as well as the full-time and executive MBA programs at BYU. Professor Smith has experience working in the field of strategic cost management, including a 2016 professional development leave from BYU, during which he worked as an in-house financial planning and analysis consultant for Ortho Development Corporation, a medical device company in Salt Lake City, UT.

Professor Smith's expertise is in the areas of management control systems, focusing on the provision of incentives and performance measurement. He has published numerous articles in prestigious academic publications such as The Accounting Review, Review of Accounting Studies, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Accounting Horizons. He has presented his research at numerous conferences and invited presentations throughout the world. Professor Smith has also published teaching cases in the IMA Educational Case Journal and Strategic Finance. Professor Smith has served in a variety of research- and teaching-focused positions in both the Management Accounting Section (MAS) of the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA).