تأملاتی درباره پارادایم در عمل در حوزه تحقیقات حسابداری

This paper starts by shortly summarizing some of the pros and cons of paradigms. It then provides three personal accounts on paradigms at work. The purpose is to challenge the management accounting academy to think how “healthy” its current condition is, if these experiences represent reality for those trying to do something they find valuable and believe in, but does not fit to the thinking models of the established paradigms.

The point of recounting these experiences is not that we were right and others just do not understand how smart we were. The point is that it is a bit frightening, if people are so deeply captivated by their paradigms that they are not even willing to contemplate or discuss anything that goes beyond those boundaries. As was well expressed by Paolo Quattrone (2009) in his commentary on our article, when one stops criticising, and makes unquestioned assumptions, one falls into the realm of mystical belief and religion. To me, it seems that this happens very easily within every paradigm. I believe that as academic scholars we should aim for new ways forward and stop thinking that we already have solutions for the current and future challenges facing our scientific field of accounting research in economics-based theories, or contingency theory, or social theories, or whatever our preferred theories might be.