Practitioners in Europe and the U.S. recently have
proposed two distinct approaches to address what they
believe are shortcomings of traditional budgeting
practices. One approach advocates improving the
budgeting process and primarily focuses on the planning
problems with budgeting. The other advocates abandoning
the budget and primarily focuses on the performance
evaluation problems with budgeting. This paper provides
an overview and research perspective on these two recent
developments. We discuss why practitioners have become
dissatisfied with budgets, describe the two distinct
approaches, place them in a research context, suggest
insights that may aid the practitioners, and use the
practitioner perspectives to identify fruitful areas for
research. pdf
