Barriers to accounting knowledge creation
I have been pondering my assignment for the 25th JMAR anniversary panel that I will be taking part in next Friday.
It has made me think about the wider question of how do we “know what we know” about accounting more widely?
As far as I can see we have made it very difficult to learn much about this subject by our own actions and inactions.
To start, we teach our new initiates to our subject about a mechanical exercise in bookkeeping rather than a rendering of economic accounts and accountability of persons.
We teach what passes as theory of accounting ( financial normally) as a fourth year or masters level course for the initiates.
Our early year textbooks are barren of research references unlike any other social science discipline except perhaps law.
Then within our research community we take pride in our ignorance! Paradigamic concerns trump substantive knowledge about accounting knowledge at every turn. Never has a discipline been where willful ignorance has been gloried like it has been in accounting these past 25 years.
Doctoral programs have little or no real breathe elements. Generations of doctoral students can barely read research in adjacent areas of financial accounting research let alone across research traditions.
We acknowledge journals like JAE and JAR as allegedly leading fonts of knowledge in accounting – journals that can count on one finger the number of management accounting articles they publish in a year!!! Yet management accounting represents a huge portion of both the professoriate and the practice of accounting.
Finally we take no responsibility for this ourselves. We do as one former TAR Editor did on a panel where he proclaimed that if you did not have six working papers and a major paper forthcoming when you obtained your PhD, you should start looking for your second job immediately. there would be no way in XXYY that you would get tenure at the school you would soon be joining. But this was not his fault or his preference, he blamed “them” for it!!!
I hope 2014 might be the year that we may finally get our act together and begin to act as a mature social science discipline. The excuse that we are a young discipline is wearing a bit thin given we are now at least 50 years into the modern era of accounting research and teaching!!!!
That is my hope and my prayer for the NEW Year. Blessings upon all of my readers and peace and joy of the season, however you celebrate it, be upon you!!
CAAA president as CAR EIC??
Reading the front page of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association’s newsletter one would think the CAAA President was CAR editor in chief!!! He talks of the great location of the CAR Conference in Kingston (note to Jim – that the location that you told me was not my job to get but I digress ) and up to date statistics on CAR submissions. Indeed his entire front page column is about editorial matters – things he is suppose to have NOTHING to do with.
The goodness is that the editorial spat at CAR did not affect the quantity of submissions. It is great to know that I left CAR on a upward trajectory!!! But either the CAAA President is doing nothing on his own that warrants mentioning or there is a lot of political interference at CAR if the President (who I think last published a serious academic accounting paper in the middle of the final decade of the last century) devotes most of his column to CAR.
Am I being catty???? My cat Wilson has welcomed me to the species!!!!!
The fall of normative accounting research
In what I found to be an interesting article, July 2013’s Accounting Organizations and Society features a paper on the “The tale of ARIA” (or the more provocative title is “Accounting academic elites: The tale of ARIA” – I wonder if the authors when coming up with titles like this just want to ensure their readership is only those from the critical school – but I digress).
ARIA – Accounting Researchers International Association – was founded by a group of normative accounting researchers in 1974. No doubt it was a reaction to the onslaught of positive empirical research that was rising steadily in the then handful of accounting journals in the first round of paradigm wars to sweep our discipline.
These were researchers such as Yuji Iijiri, Robert Sterling and the like would wanted to reason about what accounting should be from a deductive principles based approach with as little a node to empirical research as they could get away with.
This earned them the title, from the positivist empirical camp, of the “arm-chair researchers.”
Anyhow, the story of how this group of what was in their day some of the leading lights of the academic accounting profession’s attempt to maintain their research tradition in light of the positivist revolution in accounting research is instructive.
It also, at least to me, gives me some insights as to why an earlier generation of positivists researchers reacted so negatively to qualitative methodology based research. More on this later.
In any case the 19 year history of ARIA is an interesting read albeit as usual I recommend a quick scanning of the theory section unless you want an incomplete tutorial on Bourdieu’s social theory. pp. 370 onward tells and analyzes the story of this very interesting organization that was dedicated to what became a rearguard action as all the leading accounting journals but a couple, became to be completely dominated by positivist researchers.
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 