
"Accounting" brings to mind many things. Excel spreadsheets with lines of various dollar amounts and complex formulas. Isolated, sometimes stressful workspaces housed in cubicles. Articles or academic papers featuring complicated or confusing tax codes.
Sue Yang, assistant professor of accounting at the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, is hoping peoples understanding of accounting will soon expand.
“Its more like we are the designer of a company,” Yang said about her field of managerial accounting. “We design the incentives, the contracts and the management control systems. If it was just about numbers, I never would have become an accountant.”
Yang sees accounting in the modern business world as extending well beyond traditional financial reporting. It influences every aspect of a business, from bookkeeping to strategic decision-making.
Her work is part of a new interdisciplinary field of study called neuroaccounting that combines neuroscience, cognitive science and managerial accounting. Yang hopes to utilize different neuroimaging technologies to better understand how and why various workplace managerial decisions impact people in certain ways.