After 25 years of building bridges I am pleased to see a lot more engagement between positivist and interpretist researchers both within journal communities and indeed at several conferences. One area where they do not seem to meet much is on the working paper platform started by accountants now owned by Eliviser. The Social Science Research Network – SSRN – for short.
SSRN has been used by positivist researchers around the world to gather early reaction to working papers and act as a means of dissemination of what folks call “Grey” papers. Grey papers are a key resource to the academic community if one is looking to find unpublished papers with null effects that might indicate unpromising paths or leads on research that is not reproducible.
But there is a distinct lack of uptake of this free resource by interpretivist researchers. Instead one has to look for conference websites and personal networks to find out what is going on in this community of accounting scholars. Why is it not used? No idea to be frank but I have never heard of any attempts to silence alternative accounts on this platform and I have personally posted my interpretivist work on this site.
Heck, I suspect the good folks at SSRN might set up an ejournal that focused on qualitative accounting research if you asked!
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 