The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in the US: The process for anointing academic elites

Abstract This paper reports the results of a study of the most prolific publishers in the four recognized most prestigious journals in accounting for the period 1963 through 1999. The focus is on learning whether the widespread perception that behavioral accounting research (BAR) has diminished in significance as a prominent paradigm in the US accounting academy has any validity and to identify whether a new generation of US BAR researchers is emerging to join the academic elite. Based on the characteristics of persons who have appeared as authors five or more times during the study period, it seems that BAR is in recession in shaping the US academic agenda in accounting. The power of successful individuals to shape the academic agenda as evidenced by service on editorial boards of prominent journals is dominated by those individuals who are graduates of a set of elite schools utilizing a neoclassical economics based research paradigm. The power of this group seems to be growing in the US. In spite of the interest in BAR among accounting doctoral students and faculty, it is not a pursuit that now leads to academic status, which, in turn, diminishes its potential contribution towards the shaping of the accounting academic agenda.

[1]  Paul F. Williams,et al.  ACCOUNTING FROM THE INSIDE: LEGITIMIZING THE ACCOUNTING ACADEMIC ELITE , 1999 .

[2]  Paul K. Feyerabend,et al.  Farewell to Reason , 1987 .

[3]  Victoria Chick,et al.  Formalism, Logic and Reality: A Keynesian Analysis , 2001 .

[4]  M. Mulkay.  Science and the sociology of knowledge , 1979 .

[5]  Edgar A. Whitley,et al.  The Construction of Social Reality , 1999 .

[6]  J. D. Margolis,et al.  Social Issues and Management: Our Lost Cause Found , 2003 .

[7]  R. Brown.  Social science as civic discourse , 1989 .

[8]  H. Simon,et al.  Models of Man. , 1957 .

[9]  Wim A. Van der Stede,et al.  The most influential journals in academic accounting , 2006 .

[10]  Paul D. Allison.  Processes of stratification in science , 1980 .

[11]  William H. Beaver,et al.  Financial Reporting: An Accounting Revolution , 1988 .

[12]  J. Zimmerman,et al.  What's Really Wrong with U.S. Business Schools? , 2005 .

[13]  Dale L. Flesher,et al.  The third quarter century of the American Accounting Association 1966-1991 , 1991 .

[14]  Fabrizio Ferraro,et al.  Economics Language and Assumptions: How Theories Can Become Self-Fulfilling , 2003 .

[15]  Paul F. Williams,et al.  The structure and progressivity of accounting research: the crisis in the academy revisited , 2002 .

[16]  M. C. Jensen,et al.  Can the Corporation Survive , 1978 .

[17]  Thomas A. Lee.  Anatomy of a Professional Élite: The Executive Commitee of the American Accounting Association 1916-1996 , 1999 .

[18]  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,et al.  The Will to Power , 1901 .

[19]  S. Zeff,et al.  2 Decades Of The Journal-Of-Accounting-Research , 1984 .

[20]  H. Simon,et al.  Rationality in Psychology and Economics , 1986 .

[21]  Alexander Rosenberg,et al.  Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? , 1994 .

[22]  US doctoral students’ familiarity with accounting journals: insights into the structure of the US academy , 2005 .

[23]  John T. Rigsby,et al.  Information Processing Using Citations to Investigate Journal Influence in Accounting , 1998, Inf. Process. Manag..

[24]  Y. Ijiri.  US accounting standards and their environment: A dualistic study of their 75-years of transition , 2005 .

[25]  Markus J. Milne,et al.  The Construction of Journal Quality: No Engagement Detected , 2002 .

[26]  T. Kuhn,et al.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. , 1964 .

[27]  G. Northcraft,et al.  Serving Constituencies In Business Schools: M.B.A. Program Versus Research Performance , 2000 .

[28]  S. Ghoshal.  Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices , 2005 .

[29]  Brian Barry,et al.  Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity , 1996 .

[30]  Richard Whitley,et al.  THE TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS FINANCE INTO FINANCIAL ECONOMICS: THE ROLES OF ACADEMIC EXPANSION... , 1986 .

[31]  W. Bennis,et al.  How business schools lost their way. , 2005, Harvard business review.

[32]  Robert J. Fleming,et al.  THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF QUANTITATIVE/EMPIRICAL METHODS IN ACCOUNTING RESEARCH: EVIDENCE FROM THE LEADING AUTHORS OF THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW, 1966–1985 , 2000 .

[33]  Ken G. Smith,et al.  Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development , 2006 .

[34]  Marlan Blissett,et al.  Politics in Science. , 1974 .

[35]  A. Tinker,et al.  The normative origins of positive theories: Ideology and accounting thought , 1982 .

[36]  Andrew Delano Abbott,et al.  Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences , 2004 .

[37]  Thomas A. Lee.  Shaping the US Academic Accounting Research Profession: The American Accounting Association and the Social Construction of a Professional Elite , 1995 .

[38]  N. Macintosh,et al.  Accounting as simulacrum and hyperreality: perspectives on income and capital - The twilight of the real , 2000 .

[39]  Amartya Sen,et al.  On Ethics and Economics , 1988 .

[40]  Thomas A. Lee,et al.  The editorial gatekeepers of the accounting academy , 1997 .

[41]  L. Brown,et al.  Influential Accounting Articles, Individuals, Ph.D. Granting Institutions and Faculties: A Citational Analysis , 1996 .

[42]  Stuart S. Blume,et al.  Perspectives in the sociology of science , 1977 .

[43]  J. Ravetz.  Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems , 2020 .

[44]  Edwin H. Caplan.  Management accounting and behavioral science , 1971 .

[45]  Alan Wolfe,et al.  Whose Keeper?: Social Science and Moral Obligation , 1989 .

[46]  Lowell L. Hargens,et al.  Scholarly Consensus and Journal Rejection Rates. , 1988 .

[47]  Teri Shearer,et al.  Ethics and accountability: from the for-itself to the for-the-other , 2002 .

[48]  R. Zayan.  Editor's preface , 1994, Behavioural Processes.

[49]  R. Whitley.  The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Second Edition: with new introductory chapter entitled 'Science Transformed? The Changing Nature of Knowledge Production at the End of the Twentieth Century') , 1984 .

[50]  Robert K. Merton,et al.  The Sociology of Knowledge , 1937, Isis.

[51]  Joel S. Demski,et al.  Some Thoughts on the Intellectual Foundations of Accounting , 2002 .

[52]  James R. Hasselback.  Accounting faculty directory , 1984 .

[53]  Vernon L. Smith,et al.  Rational Choice: The Contrast between Economics and Psychology , 1991, Journal of Political Economy.

[54]  J. Turner,et al.  "What Makes a Science 'Mature'?: Patterns of Organizational Control in Scientific Production" , 1986 .

[55]  D. Price.  Little Science, Big Science , 1965 .

[56]  Marcello Pera,et al.  The discourses of science , 1994 .

[57]  Lawrence D. Brown.  The Importance of Circulating and Presenting Manuscripts: Evidence from the Accounting Literature , 2005 .

[58]  Nora Jacobson.  Social Epistemology , 2007 .

[59]  Ross L. Watts,et al.  The Demand for and Supply of Accounting Theories: The Market for Excuses , 2006 .

[60]  Joanne Locke,et al.  Perceptions of journal quality and research paradigm: results of a web-based survey of British accounting academics , 2005 .

[61]  伊礼 武志.  Carl Thomas Devine, Research Methodology and Accounting Theory Formation , 1978 .

[62]  Alfred J. Lotka,et al.  The frequency distribution of scientific productivity , 1926 .

[63]  Paul Abrahams,et al.  President's letter , 1987, CACM.

[64]  Ronald J. Huefner,et al.  The Familiarity with and Perceived Quality of Accounting Journals: Views of Senior Accounting Faculty in Leading U. S. MBA Programs , 2008 .

[65]  D. Smith.  A statement , 2005, Journal of Religion and Health.

[66]  Stewart Clegg,et al.  Frameworks of power , 1989 .

[67]  Michael C. Jensen,et al.  THE NATURE OF MAN , 1994 .

[68]  James R. Hasselback,et al.  Benchmarks for evaluating the research productivity of accounting faculty , 2000 .

[69]  P. Kivisto.  Chaos of disciplines , 2002 .

[70]  M. Jones,et al.  UK Accountants' Perceptions of Research Journal Quality , 1996 .

[71]  R. Watts.  What Has the Invisible Hand Achieved , 2006 .

[72]  B. Flyvbjerg.  Making Social Science Matter , 2001 .

[73]  D. Klein.  The Ph.D. Circle in Academic Economics , 2005 .

[74]  S. Harrison.  Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice , 2001 .

[75]  R. Turner.  Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System , 1960 .

[76]  Paul F. Williams,et al.  The Accounting Review and the Production of Accounting Knowledge , 1995 .

[77]  C. J. Beattie,et al.  Communicating the results of research , 1971 .

[78]  C. Mouffe,et al.  Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , 1985 .

[79]  L. Brown,et al.  Using Citation Analysis to Assess the Impact of Journals and Articles on Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) , 1985 .

[80]  H. Longino.  Science as Social Knowledge , 1990 .

[81]  S. Fuller.  Science As Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning , 1994 .

[82]  Paul F. Williams,et al.  PATTERNS OF RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE CREATION AT THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1967 - 1993 , 1996 .

[83]  H. Katouzian.  Ideology and method in economics , 1980 .

[84]  Mark Abrahamson,et al.  The Scientific Community. , 1966 .