بحران مالی جهانی: چالش برای پژوهش حسابداری

Accounting practices are deeply implicated in the current financial crisis and in proposals for recapitalizing financial institutions and restoring stability to the global financial system. This essay discusses the methodological and theoretical gaps in accounting research that explain our failure to anticipate the crisis and limit our ability to analyze and respond to it.

While it has become commonplace to blame bankers and their bonuses for the current global financial crisis, as the economic ruin deepens and spreads more fundamental questions will undoubtedly be asked about our economic system and the institutions upon which it is founded. The academic community is one such institution. Why did neoclassical economic thought become unquestioned doctrine in so much of our academic discourse? How did business and economics departments come to be champions of market dogma, rather than centers for intellectual debate and social critique? In the years preceding the near collapse of the US financial system, why did the looming catastrophe, inherent in a highly financialized economy that was fuelled by irresponsible lending practices, financial engineering, bogus bond ratings, opaque financial instruments, and the growth of a systemically dangerous shadow banking system, escape the attention and critique of academic researchers? The magnitude of this financial and economic crisis calls for a fundamental reassessment of all areas of business and economic scholarship, including accounting research. This essay examines the reasons accounting research largely failed to anticipate the crisis that was ballooning in the world of accounting practice. The aim of this self critique is to identify the gaps in our research methodologies and theories in order to better position ourselves to interpret the crisis and understand accounting’s role in ongoing attempts to find a resolution to it. Two reasons for accounting academics’ failure to anticipate the crisis are discussed. The first is methodological, namely the persistent gap between the world of academic research and the world of “accounting in action” (Hopwood, 1978). The second is theoretical, namely our failure to understand the linkages between micro accounting and regulatory technologies, and the macroeconomic and political environment in which accounting operates. The essay concludes with suggestions for a research agenda aimed at understanding accounting’s role in the financial crisis.

In the 1980s, Cooper and Sherer (1984, p. 219) argued the case for a political economy of accounting in the pages of this journal by advising accounting scholars to “be normative, descriptive and critical.” Specifically, they encouraged accounting researchers to make their normative value judgments explicit, to describe and interpret the world of “accounting in action”, and to be critical in the sense of recognizing the politically and socially contested nature of accounting practices. On the whole, financial accounting scholarship has developed in quite different ways. In the futile pursuit of objectivity, we have not been explicit (or reflective) about the value judgments that underpin our theories and research agendas. We became overly dependent on quantitative databases, and failed to grasp developments within the world of accounting practice or describe the ways in which financial reporting standards, accounting firms, and accounting ideologies were implicated in the build up to the crisis. Our dominant theories provided an insufficient bases for understanding the transformations that were occurring in the international political economy over the past quarter century or for analyzing the relationship between macro level changes, such as the rise to power of the financial sector, and the micro level field of financial accounting practice. Most importantly, we did not develop a sufficiently broad culture of critique within our academic community. These shortcomings not only explain our failure to anticipate the current financial crisis, they also limit our ability to analyze, interpret, and response to the crisis as it continues to unfold. Accounting scholars are uniquely positioned to use our knowledge of accounting institutions, the intricacies of accounting rules, and the socially and politically contested nature of accounting practices to identify and explain how seemingly neutral accounting practices facilitated, and continue to facilitate, the massive wealth transfers that mark this extraordinary financial crisis. The crisis, thus, challenges us to re-evaluate our research agendas – and perhaps also the institutional incentives and unexamined assumptions that drive them – so that accounting research can contribute to a broader social and political analysis of the financial crisis.