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The day before the deluge
Setting here in hot and muggy Washington DC after doing my first event of the AAA. The joint journal editors/publications committee meeting. One of the key messages is that there is a strong likelihood of a major disruptive event in academic publishing over the next X years, where X is a small number greater than 6 months and less than 60 months. I think most editors in the room were oblivious to this trend or the potential importance of it to academic publishing. But then again, as the old saying goes “it is hard to remember the objective was to empty the swamp when you have alligators biting your butt!” I will let you make the analogy.
What would this event be? It will be likely to be around the integration of data sets, analysis code, video technology and a change in the publishing platform of record – the traditional PDF file towards a technology that easily integrates these other aspects. Hearing this I am glad that my current research team is working on a video version of our latest research – on audit research knowledge transfer to standard setters. I thought it would be a good means to communicate our message to the standard setting community but it may indeed become part of the version of record of our final article if these trends move as fast as expected. Hope to unveil the video by mid-September!!!
At the American Accounting Association
In one of my rare visits to Trump’s America, I will be attending the AAA meeting in Washington next week. I look forward to seeing the ABO executive in person at their meeting on Monday morning, meeting with editors, editorial board members, and authors/potential authors!!
I will be speaking at the panel on field research on Monday morning right after the plenary. My doctoral student, Yi Luo and I, have a paper on the program and she will be presenting it.
I also will be attending the Senior Editors meeting with the AAA Publications Committee. There are lots of issues to discuss but in typical AAA style it appears that the communication will all be one way. Not only has there been no agenda announced, there has been no call for input on issues that the editors might like to discuss.
So if you see me say hello! If you want to chat longer and you know so in advance email me to fix a time!
more “interesting” BRIA papers
We continue on our mission to learn more about research methods by examining two issues in this first year.
- how do on-line worker’s differ from the general population? W. Brink et al give us some interesting insights into how the values of on-line workers depart from that of the general population. No surprise here really, I certainly expected them to be different, but what ones? how extensive? were they in areas of interest to accounting researchers? These are all discussed in this paper.
- Recently I accepted a review of dual process theories of human decision making applied to financial accounting and investing. We recently have seen an uptick in research using dual process theories in both audit and financial accounting research. Griffiths et al (2016) in AJPT discussed the issue from an audit perspective. Winchel and Hamilton have a forthcoming piece in BRIA looking at it from the application of finanical accounting. One of the key observations among many that they make is that “heuristic or intuitive or peripheral processing or type 1 thinking” (they all mean in essence the same thing with slight variations) has got a really bad rap over the years, because experimenters set up experimental tasks in such a way that it is rare that deep thinking (i.e. a more rational person approach) does not win. They point out implicitly, that if this type of thinking was a bad as experimental researchers portray it, we as a species would not have survived so long. Anyhow, great paper that provides a unifying framework to consider a lot of financial accounting experimental and archival research and that suggests a lot of research directions for the future! I can foresee a few dissertation papers coming out of this one!!!
One of the neat things about dual process theories is that they are strongly supported by neuroscience evidence and they combine a lot of smaller phenomena (with associated theories) from psychology into one overall theoretical framework. In other words the commonalities of dual processing theories show that the notion that psychology is all over the map with its theorizing is not really the case. Those of us who have thought carefully about this know it, but for many researchers (even psychology based ones) they still find this surprising!
dJ
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 