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A longer blog vacation than a real one!
I thought I would be back blogging a lot sooner than I was! The end of summer rush at BRIA caught me by surprise (although I should know better). A bit more disconcerting was the passing of founding BRIA Editor Ken Euske over the summer! In any event I am back.
First my condolences to Professor Euske’s family. We at BRIA will not leave his death unmarked and there are several folks helping to get together an appropriate memorial article about his contributions to the academy.
Second, we continue to be fortunate with the set of papers sent into BRIA. But folks need to realize I am not, despite my rep in some circles, the journal. Sometimes I will suggest authors submit papers to the journal and both reviewers say “NO”! That is why I have only solicited one paper during my editorship and that paper is a 30 year retrospective about the academic accounting research world from a social and behavioural perspective. All other papers have outcome uncertainty associated with submission. Indeed, the only time I have ever gone against both reviewers saying “NO” is when I ex ante documented why I expected them to say “no” and that is what they said with the expected reasons!
What else have we accepted?
Another paper that is sure to raise some interest (and or hackles) is a very careful study (by Khan and Tronnes from Australia) that suggests like other experimental disciplines, audit behavioral research features a little too many just made the cutoff papers (i.e. p<0.05 and P<0.10). Mind you, on a percentage basis it appears that it is lower that other disciplines but nonetheless it is signficant both statistically and meaningfully.
Some commentators on the paper feared it would be used to show experimental audit researchers in a bad light as it has no evidence about how audit archival researchers trim their data to achieve the same time. Now, in my mind, finding a problem in one area and documenting it does not mean you have to find all the dirty linen in our academic closets at once. No doubt others will be coming along shortly showing a similar pattern in archival audit research (matter of fact I know at least two sets of authors doing work in this area).
In any event a paper that had a hard time being published – at least in auditing journals!!!!
What have we accepted at BRIA – Year 1?
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!
Musings on Accounting Research by Steve 