I have been remarking as I travel around the world that the volume of manuscripts has not changed much over previous years but the quality has gone way up!!!  This presents both good news and challenges.  For a world of accounting that likes to focus on rejection rates, sorry folks, my rejection rate is going down.  For the world of scholarship – good news – we are accepting articles that would have a problem finding a home elsewhere despite their being important topics.

The first paper our team accepted was a field study of governance committees (by Dana Hermanson et al forthcoming in issue 1 of 2019).  Governance Committees are second order actors in issues that accountants study themselves (i.e. governance pick the pool that is available to fill the audit committee, etc). Furthermore, the authors objected to a lot of excessive theorizing – we know from lots of field studies in North American governance at least that it takes a combination of agency, resource based view and power theories in order to account for the diversity of practices in corporate governance.  Nonetheless, the paper had been done very well and we decided that the push for excess theorizing was getting a little out of hand.  Mind you, we requested that the authors do more theoretical analysis than they wanted, but in the end we had a meeting of the minds!