James C. Kinard

Jim Kinard is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. His academic appointment is with the Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems in the Max M. Fisher College of Business.

A native Texan, Dr. Kinard received his undergraduate and masters degrees in accounting from the University of Texas at Austin.  He is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of Texas as well as a member of the Texas Society of CPAs and the AICPA.  His Ph.D. degree is from Stanford University in the Graduate School of Business in the field: management accounting.

International activities include trips to China: Hong Kong and Beijing in 1986, Beijing in 1991and 1994 and Beijing and Shanghai in 1994, and trips to Russia (Moscow and Tomsk) in April and June of 1993 and May (included St. Petersburg), June and November of 1994 and June of 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. A special trip in September 2004 to Tomsk was to attend the celebration of the city’s 400 year anniversary. In May, 2007, a trip to Africa as part of a University of South Carolina CIBER FDIB [faculty development in international business] project included visits to Johannesburg, South Africa, and Nairobi, Kenya. Additionally, visits were made to the major cities (including UNCTAD in Geneva) in Switzerland in July of 1993. A trip to Mexico was made in March 2004.

Professor Kinard has been active, in the Russian Federation in the period 1994 to 2000, as director of two USIA university partnership program grants that seeks to provide the developing market economy with students educated about management in market economies by developing faculty at three universities in Tomsk, Russia. The second of these two grants focused on the development and delivery of three distance education courses: business information systems, management accounting, and operations management.  A third grant, in partnership with two Tomsk universities, for the period 2001 to 2006, is on the topic of the economics and management of the forest resources in the Tomsk Oblast and western Siberia. This project was funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the USA State Department.

At the invitation of the Ministry of Finance of the Peoples’ Republic of China, a paper and presentation were delivered at a major national conference in Shanghai in December of 1994 on the topic "Setting Accounting Standards in China".

At OSU he had a joint appointment for several years in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the College of Engineering. Also for several years, he headed the College of Business computing committee and was the first member of the information systems faculty group.

Prior to joining the OSU faculty, he taught in the Graduate School of Business and Public Administration at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  His public accounting experience includes association with three national firms in different capacities. These are: in the Houston, Texas office of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell as a member of the audit staff; in the Los Angeles office of Arthur Young as a faculty intern with the computer audit group; and as a consultant to the Arthur Andersen Public Review Board on administrative services (management consulting) training programs.

Professor Kinard's teaching and research interests concern the uses of information and information processing technology in the management of organizations.  His research has been published in several journals, including the Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, and Decision Sciences. He was the director of the AICPA MAS Division continuing professional education courses called the “AICPA National MAS Training Program” for eight years.

He has taught courses on management accounting for undergraduate, MBA, and Ph.D. students. Other courses include a microcomputer workstation technology course including LAN and mainframe connectivity issues for information systems majors, a management consulting course, and MBA electives including activity-based costing, advanced management accounting, group decision support systems and the cost/benefit evaluation of technology. Recent teaching has been in the introductory management accounting course [AMIS 212] with coordination responsibility for all course sections and responsibility for design and implementation of a new course delivery model using large lectures and small group sessions with extensive out-of-class tutoring staffed by Master of Accounting degree students.

National professional association memberships include the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, including membership in the MCS and IT Sections; the American Accounting Association, the Institute of Management Sciences; and the Decision Sciences Institute. Important professional activities include past service as a member of the AICPA MAS (now MCS) Division Executive Committee and the AICPA Information Technology Division Executive Committee as well as several subcommittees in each division.

Current research interests include the international issues in management, especially in the management accounting information domain, and research on the theoretical aspects of the modern costing methods, particularly ABC, which are of critical importance in the globally competitive environment for manufacturing, logistics, and service organizations. A newer interest is the economic and management issues in the forestry sector of the Tomsk Oblast in western Siberia, Russia. Case studies of enterprises, in both the USA and RF, pertinent to this project are in development. The economics of wildfire detection, suppression, and prevention and the developing market for forests as carbon sinks to mitigate climate change are under study as well.

Personal interests include distance running; dry-fly trout fishing; Russian history, language, and culture; and reading novels, recreational mathematics, and business economics materials.