شکل دهی مجدد تحقیقات حسابداری: زندگی در جهانی که در آن زندگی می کنیم

This paper is derived from my participation as a faculty guest of the University of Wollongong's Faculty of Commerce 20th Annual Doctoral Consortium. Consistent with the theme of “paradigm, paradox, and paralysis?”, I argue in this paper that accounting practice and scholarship suffer from paralysis created by the imposition of a neoclassical economic paradigm. Starting from the premise that accounting is foremost a practice, I argue that accounting cannot be limited by any one type of understanding. A human practice like accounting is simply to multi- faceted and complex to be sensibly “modeled” in any one particular way. The “flight from reality” (Shapiro, 2005), that occurred because of the empirical revolution in accounting, should be abandoned in favor of a more problem driven approach to accounting research and practice.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Commerce 20th Annual Doctoral Consortium adopted the theme, “Research in Accounting and Finance: Paradigm, Paradox and Paralysis?” to which this special issue of Accounting Forum is devoted. I was very privileged to be one the three faculty guests invited to speak at the consortium. The paper I presented to the consortium is one titled “Making Imaginary Worlds Real: The Case of Employee Stock Options,” which I have coauthored with Professor Sue Ravenscroft (Ravenscroft & Williams, 2008). Though the paper is focused on a specific accounting issue, it is about a grander issue of the increasing incoherence of accounting discourse in both the academy and in practice. In that paper, using the case of SFAS 123R, Sue and I attempt to demonstrate that accounting in practice is indeed as intellectually incoherent as West (2003) argued it is. In this paper I intend to discuss some of the implications of our analysis of stock option reporting for our behavior as accounting scholars, particularly with respect to “paradigms.” In order to provide context, the next section of this paper will be a brief synopsis of my contribution to the consortium, followed by a discussion of the implications of our basic argument for accounting research in general; the final section will be a brief conclusion.

The theme of the 20th doctoral consortium was “Research in Accounting and Finance: Paradigm, Paradox and Paralysis?” My contribution to the consortium was to present doctoral students with an example of how the current paradigm in mainstream accounting research has led to paradox and paralysis in accounting standard setting. This essay expands on that presentation to present the case for accounting becoming a much more diverse and expansive activity within the academy. Accounting inquiry should be driven by interesting problems whose investigation utilizes approaches most appropriate to the nature of the problem. Not everything there is to learn about accounting is “economic.” Indeed, perhaps very little about accounting practice that is interesting is economic. We should encourage accounting scholars, particularly the tyros in the field, to follow their bliss. Investigate the problems that interest you and do so in ways that provide the most satisfying solutions.