Wow! Now that is an ambiguous title for a blog post!

But accounting researchers who are or will be submitting articles, reviews and editing decisions over the next six months to a year – BEWARE. The AAA is converting from Allentrack paper management software to an Editorial Manager based system because it appears they have no choice! Allentrack will not be supported for new submissions in 2020 by the good folks at Allentrack.

What this means is a massive increase in workload for AAA staff, lots of chances for senior editors, editors and reviewers to make mistakes when they think they are being responsive and lots of potential for authors submitting papers to have their papers lost or delayed due to process issues.

So be forewarned and forearmed. Read those acknowledgements, pesky as they are, carefully over the coming year STARTing now! Check and recheck what you submit to the system.

and May the Force be with you! ( non English first language readers note, a take off from Star Wars movie)

There is no doubt that the management accounting section is one of, if not the best, run section of the AAA. And JMAR, despite its problems with MAR, is moving up as well given it is now produced three times a year!

However, when it comes to communicating research to practitioners, the management accountants have caught up with the Audit Section, at least where the Audit Section was in 1999! Back in the heady days around Y2K ( young’uns look it up) the fast talking man from Boston College ( who bookended his career at Northeastern – coming and going), Arnie Wright, convinced the Journal of Accountancy to buy into research! The J of A is the captive Journal of the AICPA ( back in the day when the I stood for Institute not International). What Dr. Wright had done was classic, he convinced the AICPA to give him one page of the magazine per issue where he curated “Practice Summaries” mainly, but not exclusively, drawn from AJPT articles! ( Full disclosure – I encouraged this, loudly supported it, and thought it would show the usefulness of academic research to practitioners!)

Fast forward 20 years! The Management Accounting Section is celebrating the commencement of a series of two page articles in Strategic Finance, the captive journal of the IMA ( where the I still stands proudly for Institute)! Once again, it it’s devoted to practitioner friendly versions of academic management accounting articles. While they allow for the possibility that someone might write a literature summary, they like the Audit Section are initially focusing on single article practitioner translations!

Yet we all know one research article is not the basis for making decisions, don’t we??? Indeed, even Einstein’s greatest research did not warrant that!

In the end, this single article focused translation series, like the auditing Practice Summaries in Journal of Accountancy, will be evaluated by the editors after two or three years, be found to be the least valued section of Strategic Finance by the readers, and dropped from the magazine! Indeed, according to rumour, the Practice Summaries were the least read regular column in J of A in the three years they were run!

Remember the chicken and the egg from last Monday? We continue to show we are farmers concerned with the unit produced, not businesspeople focused on selling to a market of consumers. And likely we again will end up with egg on our face!

As I scanned the last afternoon’s program of the AAA Annual Gabfest I noticed an interesting and potentially disturbing trend. Across many of the sections’ program tracks there was a what appears to be a much greater than chance that most if not all the slots were filled with international based authors’ papers and had either US doctoral students or international based faculty as discussants. Indeed at the last coffee break of the conference it looked like a replacement for the recently cut “international reception”. Could there be implicit or explicit bias at work here??? Given the political culture of the USA with America First, it should not be surprising.

Speaking of the International Reception being cut, it was a painless way for the AAA to reduce conference costs. After all international members are very unlikely to complain as we are guests of your association, despite the fact that we seem to do a disproportionate amount of the heavy lifting in some sections. When I started coming to the AAA as a Canadian based assistant professor in 1993, at first I found the idea of an international reception to be a bit strange, especially in the days before 911 and more recently President Orange Hair. However in the last decade I found it an important and useful networking event rather than trying to find international colleagues among the assembled minions.

In the end there is nothing wrong with either of these moves in light of the USA first political culture in the US. But do NOT pretend that the AAA is an international organization any longer, it is a US national association that accepts international members.