Whither Accounting Research

Ithink that there is a growing sense of unease about the state and direction of accounting research. Although articulated in a variety of different ways in a number of different contexts, there nevertheless is a view that accounting research has become insufficiently innovative and increasingly detached from the practice of the craft. As I am sympathetic with only some of these emerging concerns, I intend to give a quite explicitly personal view of the field of accounting research as it has emerged and as it might develop—a highly selective one and, at times, a somewhat idiosyncratic one. But as I do not have the time to be comprehensive, my aim is to provide a personal account of some of my enthusiasms, my dismays, and some of my suggestions. Although partial, my account is also meant to be well intentioned. I start with some personal reminiscences. I came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in 1965. Arriving in the port of New York on board the Queen Mary on a delightful autumn day (travel by boat then being a requirement of the Fulbright Commission), I was already full of anticipation about my forthcoming studies at the University of Chicago. The late 1960s were tremendously exciting times for accounting research in that institution and possibly for intellectual and cultural life generally in the United States. Certainly for accounting at Chicago, new knowledge was in the process of being created. As I arrived, Bill Beaver had just finished his doctorate and had joined the faculty, as had Gene Fama in the finance area. I still remember standing on the steps of the Business School building with Joel Demski as he waited for the results of his doctoral defense. Phil Brown was already two years into the accounting doctoral program, and Ray Ball and Ross Watts arrived a year after me. The future Nobel Prize winner Myron Scholes was still working on his doctorate in the finance area, as were Marshall Blume and Mike Jensen. I studied finance with Merton Miller, industrial organization with George Stigler, and macroeconomics with Milton Friedman, all of whom were to go on to receive Nobel Prizes. To top it all, after one year I decided to drop finance, the ultimate of heresies, to pick up behavioral science and organizational sociology, studying with such great names as Peter Blau and Morris Janowitz. It really was an exciting time. Knowledge almost literally was moving before your very eyes. Indeed there was a quite explicit awareness that understandings were in the process of changing, an impression that was reinforced by the fact that you could still experience