نقش‌ها و آثار الگوها در تحقیقات حسابداری

This paper discusses the roles and effects of paradigms in accounting research in general, and management accounting research in particular. In addition, it forms an introduction to the Special Section of this issue of Management Accounting Research on “Paradigms in Accounting Research”. The paper takes an issue of the notable narrowness of accounting research of today, regarding it as forming a threat to scholarly developments in the field. It argues for the importance of keeping paradigm debates alive in order to foster multi-dimensional openness and true scholarship in accounting research.

This paper, as well as the three others in this special section of Management Accounting Research (the papers by Merchant, this issue, Malmi, this issue and Modell, this issue), is motivated by a concern for the increasing narrowness of accounting research in terms of its philosophical assumptions, methodological approaches, and theoretical underpinnings. The current hegemonising tendencies of the so-called mainstream in accounting research are the likely root cause of this narrowness, having led to excessive homogeneity in accounting research. It seems as if the fundamental nature of the discipline of accounting as one of the social sciences – having certain significantly different characteristics from the natural sciences – have become largely overlooked. With the help of the notion of paradigm, I will point out that there always exist, at least in principle, fundamentally different kinds of options for conducting accounting research, thereby seeking to invigorate accounting researchers’ consciousness of this plethora of possibilities. While accounting research of today can be celebrated in terms of the efficiency of the research network and volume of research outputs, as a matter of fact, there have been times of bigger and especially more truly scholarly enthusiasm within the accounting research academy (Hopwood, 2007 and Hopwood, 2008). The bulk of accounting research of today pursues only marginal contributions within one, largely programmed, theoretical and methodological framework and applies taken-for-granted research methods. While there certainly are several exceptions to this, the outcome is far too often rigorously produced but relatively unsurprising research output. It is likely that most accounting researchers do not even realise, in what kind of ‘iron cage’ they are operating, as they have never been educated to ‘stop the world’, at least for a little while, in order to realise where they are coming from and where they are heading to; i.e., to take a look ‘outside the box’ (cf. Hines, 1988). While this phenomenon frequently surfaces in the dominant mainstream of accounting research, it is not unfamiliar to the alternative paradigms either. I will argue that rediscovering the true scholarly enthusiasm in the accounting research academy can be fostered by an open-minded nurturing of heterogeneity in accounting research. Thereby accounting academia would avoid the risk of losing much of its scholarly qualities in the longer run.