Working in hermeneutic circles in management accounting research: some implications and applications

Abstract Ways of thinking about accounting have changed. Management accounting, in particular, has escaped from being encompassed by a set of calculative procedures. It is now accepted that accounting has organizational and social significance simultaneously reflecting and shaping both structures and ideas. Consequently there has been increasing research interest into the meaning and roles attributed to accounting, processual change in accounting, and accounting histories. Such extensive definitional and boundary changes inevitably brought into focus an issue which was previously unproblematically peripheral to the concerns of accounting researchers—that of methodology. There has been some realization that what is researched and how it is researched are interlinked—that new research methodologies will reveal new research agenda. However, this heightened awareness of the importance of methodology has not been matched by a consideration of its implications for empirical accounting research. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by, first, identifying a nexus of ideas from hermeneutics—ideas which understand action as a text analogue—and, second, drawing out some substantive conclusions on what the adoption of such a methodology would mean for empirical, interpretative accounting research.