CATS, RATS, AND EARS: Making the case for ethnographic accounting research

In this paper we argue that ethnographic or interpretive accounting research studies (EARS), which have been marginalized by critical accounting theory studies (CATS) and rational accounting theory studies (RATS), are a valuable way to understand the way accounting works in actual organizational settings. The problem of researching trust and its relation to accounting is used as an example where EARS seems to hold the edge over both CATS and RATS. The paper describes three main types of EARS—cognitive anthropology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, briefly describes a classical ethnographic study and an accounting example of each type. It then sets up a conversational debate between EARS, CATS, and RATS in order to bring out their major points of disagreement and concurrence. The paper concludes by speculating that some sort of rapprochment might be worked out whereby EARS will be induced to work more closely to current theoretical discourses and that CATS and RATS will pay more attention to the stories and beliefs of real live actors in actual organizational settings. The result could be a sort of critical ethnography. The big challenge seems to be to find out whether trust and accounting are phenomena on different levels of analysis that can be studied (following Wittgenstein) as figure and ground, or whether they are mutually constitutive and thus something we should not talk about—at least until we know more. We conclude that one valuable way to proceed is a research strategy whereby field narratives are produced along classical ethnographic lines and then used to interrogate, reinterpret, and perhaps revise reigning critical accounting studies.

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