Wow, it finally happened!!! The first interpretive field study has been accepted and is forthcoming at TAR and it happened in management accounting! Pfister and Lukka did a lot of work to make the study accessible to all readers, so some may not even realize the case study uses interpretive research methods until one gets to the section in methods entitled “abductive analysis”. Yes, a pure intrepretivist researcher could say that their use of these methods to claim to study causal relations is ” selling out”, but in my mind good case study research should inform all types of researchers, and that the rhetoric around contribution is just framing. We learn what we learn from the case research methods! I have been learning from reading interpretive research for 30 years and I did not turn out too badly in the posivitist world order. Congrats to the authors and editors and reviewers. It has been a long time in coming!
The link to the early views version of the paper is
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 