Description
The present issue of Accounting, Organizations and Society
is the last that I will edit. Having been Editor-in-Chief
for over 35 years, it is not an inappropriate time to hand
over to a new editor and editorial team who can help to
forge a continuing future for the journal.
Founding and editing the journal has been a truly wonderful
experience. Established with a certain degree of
naivety at a time when its real research focus had still to
be created, the development of the journal has always
been both an intellectual and an entrepreneurial adventure.
The early years were heavily dependent on the support
of a relatively small group of people, later years
certainly had their own moments of adventure and discovery,
and today, with the incredible volume of submissions,
the journal is a collective endeavour with me usually trusting
the wisdom and insights of the impressive editorial
team.
Editorial
Re?ections and projections – and many, many thanks
The present issue of Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety is the last that I will edit. Having been Editor-in-Chief
for over 35 years, it is not an inappropriate time to hand
over to a new editor and editorial team who can help to
forge a continuing future for the journal.
Founding and editing the journal has been a truly won-
derful experience. Established with a certain degree of
naivety at a time when its real research focus had still to
be created, the development of the journal has always
been both an intellectual and an entrepreneurial adven-
ture. The early years were heavily dependent on the sup-
port of a relatively small group of people, later years
certainly had their own moments of adventure and discov-
ery, and today, with the incredible volume of submissions,
the journal is a collective endeavour with me usually trust-
ing the wisdom and insights of the impressive editorial
team.
Over the years there have been moments of anxiety,
particularly in years three and four when the initial good-
will was no longer providing papers and the journal had
still to establish its own credibility. Some of the issues
in those years were both late and very thin! Later on I still
remember agonizing with colleagues over whether to
publish what, in times past, were seen as risky papers –
they would now be seen as pioneering! But only two
rejected papers remain in my memory as risks not taken
that should have been, not that they were published else-
where but rather because their content has been entirely
lost.
Right from its early days all those involved with the
journal have been conscious of its role in creating a new
area of scholarly investigation. While there were a number
of pioneering studies that pointed to the behavioural, orga-
nizational and social positioning and importance of
accounting, a great deal of further inquiry was needed to
appreciate what was at stake in such perspectives and
the implications they might have for both understanding
and changing accounting practice. Over the years the gain-
ing of such insights has been the mission – to use modern
managerial language – of Accounting, Organizations and
Society.
Establishing Accounting, Organizations and Society
The idea for the journal emerged from my involvement
with the Behavioural Accounting Newsletter, the concept for
which came out of discussions with Jake Birnberg at the
1972 Empirical Research Conference at the University of
Chicago. By that time we were both conscious of the grow-
ing research interest in the behavioural, organizational and
social dimensions of accounting on both sides of the Atlan-
tic and indeed elsewhere. But we also were very conscious
that there was little mutual awareness amongst many of
the researchers. In the days before the internet and email
communications, the world was a more detached place,
with members of the research community tending to have
more isolated existences. Jake and I therefore decided to
establish a newsletter that sought to inform interested
researchers of the activities and involvements of their peer
community. As Jake and I said in our initial appeal for
materials for the newsletter:
‘‘The last few years have witnessed a great expansion in
both interest and research in the behavioural and social
aspects of accounting, and there is little doubt that this
area will be one of increasing activity and importance in
the years ahead.
As yet, however, there is no well developed informal
network of connections and contacts between research
workers in the area. The situation is not easy in the Uni-
ted States and even more dif?cult between continents.
A great many things are happening at a variety of loca-
tions, but all too few of us are able to keep abreast of all
the developments. The time lag for journal articles and
the gestation period for research projects are long,
resulting in publications which are dated. Moreover,
some interesting and worthwhile developments receive
scant attention once published if they are published
outside the mainstream of journals read by
researchers.”
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.08.002
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
The ?rst issue of the Behavioural Accounting Newslet-
ter came out in the Summer of 1974, with a longer and
more substantive issue following in the Spring of 1975.
Both of these issues had cartoon like front covers espe-
cially drawn by a very talented designer on the staff of
the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames
(now the Henley Business School) which was my base
at the time. As can be seen from Figs. 1 and 2, the ?rst
illustration featured an accountant trying to talk to a
more people oriented person while the second issue,
perhaps a little more European oriented, had an
accountant in bed with a trade unionist and an
employee!
Even by the time of the second issue it would appear
that the newsletter was starting to realize its potential.
As Jake and I said in our introduction to that issue:
‘‘Many people seem to have found the ?rst issue of the
Behavioural Accounting Newsletter both interesting and
useful. A number of you have written to express your
enthusiasm and a series of international exchanges have
already been started as a direct result of the newsletter.
All this seems very gratifying. So far, at least, it really does
seem that the activity has been justi?ed.
The Behavioural Accounting Newsletter has already dem-
onstrated that the area is both active and growing. A lot of
things certainly seem to be happening in the area and even
a casual look at both this and the previous issue demon-
strates that the action is widely dispersed.”
Although the introduction to the ?rst issue of the news-
letter had stated that ‘‘. . . we have no intention of making
the Behavioural Accounting Newsletter into another jour-
nal. . .” the discussions that the existence of the newsletter
Fig. 1.
888 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
stimulated had made it clear that there was an interest in
and a potential need for a more specialist journal. There
were already signs that the existing journals had little
interest in at least some aspects of the emerging new area
and at that time, even more so than now, many of the key
journals were very nationally oriented, thereby not able to
deal well with the more international nature of the behav-
ioural, organizational and social accounting research com-
munity that was starting to develop.
Aware of this, I started to approach a number of pub-
lishers to ascertain their interest. There was none. It was
a time of some dif?culty in the publishing industry and
the idea of the ?rst specialist journal in the accounting area
that was seeking to create rather than merely service a
Fig. 2.
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 889
?eld of inquiry was seen as just too risky. Shortly thereaf-
ter, however, I met Robert Maxwell, the founder of
Pergamon Press. A takeover battle had forced him out of
the company but the existing editors had insisted on his
return. And return he did, almost immediately seeking to
rebuild the company. So at our meeting he asked me
whether I had any ideas for new journals. Well, as it hap-
pened, I did! Initially Maxwell wanted the establishment
of the journal to be done in exchange for my involvement
in the writing of either his autobiography or biography. For
a young academic that would not have been the right thing
to do given his extremely controversial nature, so over the
years I always seemed to be just too busy in engage in such
work! But fortunately that did not prevent the establish-
ment of the journal.
Although a new journal was about to be published, its
naming was far from obvious. The vast majority of people
consulted wanted to call it the Journal of Behavioural and
Social Accounting. That was the most obvious title at the
time. However I still remember being most uneasy with
this. Even then I was becoming more conscious of the
emergence of an important set of organizational level is-
sues as well as the behavioural and psychological ones
which dominated research at the time. Equally, while that
was a time of real and growing interest in social account-
ing, I had started to become aware that social forces in?u-
enced all accountings, even those of a more conventional
form, albeit that these largely remained poorly understood.
So I started thinking about alternative titles for a journal
that I saw as being focused on the relationships between
accounting, organizations and society. As I did so it sud-
denly became clear to me that the most suitable name
would be just that: Accounting, Organizations and Society.
There was little enthusiasm for this in the wider commu-
nity at the time but despite that, I preceded with that more
descriptive title. I think that the future of the journal dem-
onstrated that this was indeed the right decision.
As I have already said, the early days of the journal were
often complex. But over time it started to develop both an
intellectual focus and a supportive community of scholars.
Some people played a particularly important role, not least
Jake Birnberg in the USA, Shahid Ansari, Eric Flamholtz and
Tony Tinker in hosting the ?rst and very successful confer-
ence for the journal at the University of California at Los
Angeles, and David Cooper who was a constant sounding
board for discussing dif?cult editorial decisions in the
early days of the journal.
In the years that followed one of the real strengths of
Accounting, Organizations and Society has been its outstand-
ing Editorial Board. Over the years I have been fortunate to
be able to work with a group of colleagues whom I re-
spected and whose judgments I trusted. Always hardwork-
ing, always willing to help and always facilitative in
nature, both individually and collectively they have been
constantly concerned to realize the full potential of emerg-
ing articles. Their reviews have always been appreciated,
with so many spending a great deal of time preparing
lengthy but invariably helpful review comments. Not only
that, unlike at least some other accounting research jour-
nals (Bedeian, Van Fleet, & Hyman, 2009), the editors of
Accounting, Organizations and Society were themselves a
very research active group of scholars fully aware of the
emerging research issues and needs in the areas covered
by the journal. Over the years this has made a tremendous
difference to the journal. Not only that, they have been an
essential element of why it has been possible for me to
continue with the journal for so long while doing other
things, including my own research and writing and setting
up a new business school!
Emerging opportunities
Of course there are things that I would like to have seen
more of – more cumulative patterns of research, more sys-
tematic interdisciplinary inquiries and more engagement
with at least some of the frontiers of practice. But that said,
Accounting, Organizations and Society has undoubtedly
changed the intellectual landscape of accounting and it
has had and is still having impacts more broadly – in
anthropology, history, politics and sociology, as well as
other management disciplines. At a time when we are see-
ing the consequences of a discipline such as ?nance that
has failed to invest in its own critique, in understanding
more fully its own modes of functioning, and in exploring
the full range of its own consequences, we can appreciate
the importance of having in accounting a tradition of in-
quiry that delves into the organizational, social and politi-
cal aspects of the subject. A diversity of understandings is
important in a complex changing world where knowledge
is an emergent process rather than a more static straight
forward endeavour. While I have always been a believer
in the role of truth, I also have been hugely concerned with
those who claim privileged access to it.
I have also been interested to observe how at least a few
of the more far sighted members of the practitioner com-
munity now recognize the power of the knowledges that
have come to be associated with the journal, albeit quietly
and often in con?dence! I even have had regulators who
have almost apologized for initially denying the role
playing by sectional interests and political processes in
standardization and accounting regulation, now admitting
that the type of perspectives emerging in Accounting,
Organizations and Society have even helped them to under-
stand the processes in which they now ?nd themselves
embedded.
All this said, so many issues remain in need of the inter-
disciplinary investigation that is the real strength of
Accounting, Organizations and Society. In order to illustrate
such potential it is interesting to consider ?nancial
accounting and reporting, an area that has still received
less exploration in terms of the conceptual frameworks
and methodologies available in this journal. Often requir-
ing a technical understanding of accounting as well as an
interdisciplinary insight into its functioning and conse-
quences, the understanding of the organizational and so-
cial nature of external corporate reporting has remained
a relatively unexplored area despite the importance of
gaining better insights into it.
1
1
The following remarks are based on a key note address to the German
Academy of Management, Berlin, May 2008.
890 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
One example of the knowledge to be gained has been
on my mind ever since my student days at the University
of Chicago. Amongst the community of doctoral students
at Chicago at that time there was an acute awareness of
the complex and competitive market in information on
the enterprise, of which ?nancial accounting was only a
part. It was Ball and Brown (1968) who investigated how
much of a part in their pioneering study published in
1968. Recently replicated (Ball & Shivakumar, 2008), the
?ndings still point to the relatively limited role played by
external accounts in the market in corporate information.
And yet we still know very little about the wider nature
of that market. What sources contribute to the market in
corporate information? Should regulators seek to in?uence
a wider variety of information sources rather than their
present ?xation on accounting? Or is that ?xation the re-
sult of lobbying by the audit industry? Indeed what roles
does accounting information play in the market for corpo-
rate information? Is accounting capable of serving as a
mode of analysis for understanding and interpreting other
sources of information as well as serving as a source of
information in its own right? Remembering that many
stock exchanges had their origins in the informal commu-
nications that characterized coffeehouse society (Cowan,
2005; The Economist, 2003), what, one wonders, is the cur-
rent balance of formal and informal sources of corporate
information? Has the signi?cance of informal information
increased as diverse sources of formal information have
become ever more available, not least via the internet?
And is the signi?cance of the informal one reason why
the last few decades have witnessed an ever greater con-
centration of ?nancial employment when earlier predic-
tions were that the internet would result in its
dispersion? One could go on with identifying ever more
questions, many of real practical signi?cance The interest-
ing thing, however, is that despite the widespread recogni-
tion of the importance of the original Ball and Brown study
there have been very few inquiries into the functioning of
the wider information market that it implied. Although
one such study was conducted by Miller and O’Leary
(2000), two scholars closely associated with Accounting,
Organizations and Society, being published by one of the
major audit ?rms, it has not attracted the attention that
it deserves. The result is that we currently have only a lim-
ited understanding of the informational context of the
modern corporation. At a time when there are ever more
pressures to expand the provision of at least the formal
sources of such information, the practical and research
needs for more systematic knowledge of the area are very
real.
Another topic of long standing interest to me has been
what I have come to term the politics of surplus declara-
tion. While there is now an enormous literature on earn-
ings management, the vast majority of such studies only
focus on the economic rationales for this. Yet other factors
can be and indeed are at work, albeit often over longer
periods of time. We already have some insights into the
impact of major socio-economic changes. The shift from
feudal society to a capitalist one most certainly changed
the nature of surplus calculation, not least through the
more widespread commoditization of labour and the
resultant inclusion of wages as a cost. Changes in the forms
taken by colonialism also have had their impact of the cal-
culation and distribution of accounting surplus within
both the colonies themselves and the international agen-
cies and companies whose activities were based on them.
And we know that different institutional con?gurations
also shape the declaration of surplus. As Zambon and Zan
(2000) have shown, the same economic activities orga-
nized as a shareholder company, a consumer cooperative
or a worker cooperative would all result in different calcu-
lations of surplus even though the underlying economic
transactions were the same. But all the above are relatively
pure cases. Does the same apply in more complex mixed
institutional settings?
Such an issue emerged in Germany with the entry of
some of its major corporations into the international capi-
tal markets. While there were those within the interna-
tional accounting research community who thought that
national patterns of ?nancial accounting were deeply
embedded within national cultures and history, some as-
pects of Germany accounting and its regulatory structures
changed incredibly quickly in response to the new institu-
tional setting that was emerging from the globalization of
some of the key enterprises. Not only was change evident
but the process of adjustment was much more rapid than
many had anticipated.
Over the years I have been intrigued by grains of evi-
dence that the processes of adjustment to socio-political
changes can be just as quick. One early example of this
might be provided by the Dutch company Philips who
were early users of replacement cost accounting. Although
this can be seen as having a clear economic rationale (Ash-
ton, 1981), there nevertheless are suggestions that its early
use was also encouraged by the politics of managing a
company where elements of the labour force had been
associated with the resistance during World War II while
management was seen by some as collaborating with the
enemy. Building on this position, the unions were pressing
for higher earnings at a time when the ?nancial resources
of the ?rm were needed to rebuild its manufacturing base.
It has been claimed that using replacement cost account-
ing could help to prioritize reinvestment at a time when
a weaker management might otherwise have found it
more dif?cult to resist union pressures. Clearly such
usages are worthy of serious investigation, not least as
such an explanation ?ts with French experience in the post
war era where modes of in?ation accounting had been spe-
ci?cally introduced by the government in order to protect
earnings so that they could be used for reinvestment.
Moreover in post war Belgium external reporting to
employees was introduced at a relatively early stage, again
in part re?ecting the relative balance of power and in?u-
ence that had emerged in the immediate post war period.
In later years in the United Kingdom there were indica-
tions of a similar appeal to different modes of calculating
surplus. In a period of strong trade unions in the 1970’s Ford
of Europe introduced replacement cost accounting in their
reporting to its employees in the United Kingdom quite
explicitly hoping that this would reduce the pressures for
higher earnings. The trade unions gave a highly informed
response, however, pointing out that actual investment
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 891
was not at the level of the replacement cost. Was, the trade
unions wondered, Ford trying to run down its investment
in the UK? As the true response to that would most likely
be positive, Ford management soon retreated from this
mode of accounting. At the wider national level, however,
a managerial perception of heightened labour power in the
early days of a Labour Government did have its impact on
accounting thought and practice. There was a very rapid
increase in interest in and use of value added accounting
(Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood, 1985), not least as it showed
more directly the high returns already going to labour and
the much lower ones to capital. The professional accoun-
tancy bodies brought out recommendations for changing
accounting reporting practices towards a more stakeholder
model rather than purely a shareholder one and it is not
impossible that at least some of the temporary interest
in in?ation accounting stemmed from similar concerns to
those articulated in Ford of Europe. But all these move-
ments stopped as soon as it was realized that the changes
in the socio-economic power structure was only very tem-
porary ones. Be that as it may, I nevertheless think that
these and similar accounting changes are worthy of more
serious investigation as they are suggestive of a more com-
plex socio-political as well as economic basis for account-
ing practice.
One additional area that I have always thought of as
needing further investigation is that of the politics and
institutional contexts of accounting regulation, particu-
larly at the supra-national and international levels. While
we now take for granted the existence of bodies such as
the International Accounting Standards Board, the politi-
cal processes implicit in their establishment are far from
being well understood. In the case of the IASB it was
likely that the timing of its establishment was in?uenced
by the accounting rami?cations of the United Kingdom’s
entry into the European Union. Moreover, once estab-
lished, its existence set off a chain reaction of institu-
tional elaboration, resulting in the United Nation’s
involvement with accounting and thereafter that of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
as different groups of countries sought to constrain the
power and in?uence of others. At a European level the at-
tempts to bring together the divergent accounting tradi-
tions of many of the Continental European countries
with those of the United Kingdom also resulted in a com-
plex and at times fascinating politics. The rise of what I
would characterize as accounting nationalism was part
of this process with the United Kingdom characterizing
its more free market approach to accounting and auditing
in terms of ‘‘true and fair” and the incorporation of this
obscure and highly ambiguous language into the relevant
European Directive. I have been fascinated with how little
resemblance such conceptions of ‘‘British accounting”, for
instance, had to actual accounting in Britain, seeing this
as an illustration of the important role that language
can play in processes of accounting change and how
important conceptions of accounting can arise at the
boundaries of what is regarded as acceptable rather than
from within its heartland. Studies of both European and
international accounting politics should also have the po-
tential to illuminate the increasing and currently highly
in?uential involvement of the major auditing ?rms in
these political processes. Usually dressed up as a profes-
sional involvement, on most occasions it is one of straight
forward commercial lobbying, often fairly ruthless in
approach.
I think that serious research into all the above topics
has the potential to change our understandings of the
nature of accounting practices. Of course that could be
one of the reasons why there have been constraints on
the development of such ?nancial accounting research.
There certainly are those who would not like to see
accounting in such a way. But numerous other factors
are also at work. Unfortunately accounting research is
no longer driven solely by curiosity (Hopwood, 2008a).
Indeed as numerous of my recent writings have pointed
out (Hopwood, 2007, 2008b), the mainstream of a great
deal of accounting research is now the result of a complex
set of institutional and personal factors rather than any
need for a new understanding. Initially varying by coun-
try, international in?uences and pressures are now creat-
ing a much more conservative context for the conduct of
accounting inquiry.
Pressures on the Accounting Research Process
Accounting, Organizations and Society revels in operating
in a context of diverse research perspectives and ap-
proaches. Although it emphasises the contributions which
behavioural, organizational and sociological insights can
make to advancing our understanding of accounting, it
has never claimed that these are or should be the only
modes of intellectual inquiry into accounting., fully recog-
nizing the legitimacy of economic, ?nancial and more
technical modes of investigation. That wider appreciation
increasingly has not been reciprocated however. Outside
the arenas occupied by Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety there seemingly have been strong pressures to see
accounting as a more monocentric discipline rather than
the polycentric one that it was and which many other
management and social science disciplines remain. In this
respect accounting has been in the process of becoming
similar to economics and particularly ?nancial economics.
Interestingly, however, the recent economic and ?nancial
crisis is resulting in a growing concern with the conse-
quences of such a monocentric approach for our under-
standing of the economy and the ?nancial system (see
for example The Economist, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). As I
have said recently (Hopwood, 2009), ?nance is an aca-
demic discipline that has failed to invest in its own critique
and today we are living with at least some of the conse-
quences of that. Subject as it is to very similar pressures
for uniformity, accounting should be increasingly con-
scious of both the intellectual and practical implications
of these, although I am not optimistic that this will happen.
Accounting research takes place in an increasingly com-
plex institutional environment. At the individual level,
careerist pressures can result in a tendency to do what
people already do rather than carving out areas of intellec-
tual inquiry for oneself. Institutional practices so often
reinforce this, creating what I have called ‘‘hit” or publica-
tion cultures rather than ideas ones (Hopwood, 2008c).
892 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
Recently hearing of one institution that was not recogniz-
ing publications in Accounting, Organizations and Society, I
made some inquires as to why this might be so. Asking
about the activities of the senior faculty, I was repeatedly
told of their high publication outputs in the very top jour-
nals but no one ever mentioned what they were publishing
about! The comments re?ected just such a ‘‘hit” culture
that has emerged from careerist interests as well as regu-
latory and ranking pressures. Additionally many business
schools reinforce such tendencies by constantly looking
sideways at what their peer institutions are doing rather
than looking forward at what the world might require or
at what opportunities for innovation exist.
Such pressures clearly vary from country to country
and across time. For some time they have been strongest
in the Unites States, the reasons for which are worthy of
more serious investigation as even in the US they appear
to vary from subject to subject, seemingly being strongest
in economics, ?nance and accounting. But the pressures
for uniformity have spread from the United States to
many, but not all, business schools in other countries,
most likely re?ecting the ranking pressures in such insti-
tutions as well as the rather conformist cultures that
pervade many of them. Outside of the major business
schools, however, very different intellectual cultures exist
in many countries. Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic
countries and the United Kingdom are amongst those
countries that recognize the value of intellectual diver-
sity, at least in the accounting ?eld. Many Continental
European countries have had there own intellectual tradi-
tions for a long time, although the increasing dominance
of the English language makes it ever more dif?cult for
these to be appreciated and developed (Raffournier &
Schatt, forthcoming). With the advent of a more global
intellectual space such intellectual perspectives are hav-
ing to confront both very different research traditions
and modes of intellectual governance. In some cases na-
tional regulatory authorities are emphasizing the impor-
tance of research publications in more international
outlets, sometimes in the process either ignoring or at
least downgrading their own national journals. In other
cases, The Netherlands for example, certain institutions
are putting pressures on their faculty to move in a more
conformist direction but other institutions revel in intel-
lectual diversity. The situation in Asia is also different.
In many cases, despite not having a long standing re-
search tradition at either a national or an institutional le-
vel, there nevertheless can be very strong pressures to
enter the international research arena at great speed
and with high visibility. In these circumstances it is
indeed tempting to follow the dictates of international
rankings and assessments, not least where these imply
the use of research perspectives and methodologies that
are relatively easier to learn. Canada, being so near to
the United States is particularly interesting. Although it
has a quite diverse intellectual landscape in accounting,
that is not re?ected in its most prestigious national
research publications which are dominated by US main-
stream in?uences (Qu, Ding, & Lukasewich, 2009).All told,
the international accounting research community is
operating in a complex, variable and changing space.
As I have just implied, it is frequently said that there
are strong pressures for the use of research methodologies
that are more easily assimilated and considered to be
more readily assessable. Seen in such terms, more quanti-
tative methodologies are seen as falling into a more desir-
able category, ignoring the often rather procedural use
made of many statistical methodologies. In contrast, qual-
itative approaches can be seen in far less positive terms
even though there are many other social science disci-
plines where qualitative methodologies are centrally
implicated in the construction of the discipline and there-
by the evaluation of its research contributions. Some of
the hypocrisies involved in such views become more evi-
dent when consideration is given to the use of some par-
ticular methodologies. Take experimental approaches for
example. Often accepted as more mainstream, possibly
because of their emergence from psychological research
traditions, the resultant methodologies enable much
speedier research than would be possible with qualitative
?eld studies. Their results, however, are far from unprob-
lematic. The frequent use of students as subjects is highly
questionable in many cases, although clearly very ef?cient
from a research output point of view. Equally, speedily
conducted experiments produce very uncertain results
in situations where it is known that learning can and does
take place across time. But there are even more funda-
mental problems stemming from the demand characteris-
tics of many experimental contexts as repeated research
has shown (Miller, 1972; Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1997).
Not that these dif?culties individually or collectively
undermine the value of experimental research. Far from
it. The point is merely that the dif?culties facing the
acceptable can be as great, if not greater, as those facing
the seemingly less acceptable, suggesting the complex of
factors that are implicated in determining what is re-
garded as acceptable research in some quarters in the
accounting area.
Other reinforcements for the mainstream can emerge
from the relatively modest research involvements of at
least some accounting editorial boards (Bedeian, Van Fleet,
& Hyman, 2009) and the increasingly less intellectual
recruitment into the accounting academic community –
at least in some countries. And the pressures for this to
change are unlikely to be great for the foreseeable future.
Accounting has become a relatively autonomous discipline
having only weakly developed links with other manage-
ment subjects let alone other social sciences. Even in cita-
tion terms it is becoming more rather than less isolated,
creating a research arena where many of the in?uences
are increasingly internally generated within the discipline.
Moreover the links to practice also seem to be getting less
and less, adding to the isolation of its modes of inquiry.
More and more academic accountants seem to know less
and less about the practical aspects of their subject, again
resulting in research that is in?uenced by trends rather
than problems.
Given the complex and numerous factors involved in
the growing intensity of a mainstream tradition of re-
search in the United States it is dif?cult to see change
emerging there in the near future. Indeed in some respects
Accounting, Organizations and Society could be regarded as
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 893
being fortunate already in being one of the very few
non US edited journals that has had any degree of recogni-
tion at all in the social science community in the United
States – although it should be noted that the situation is
different in both the humanities and the natural sciences
where more of a genuine international research commu-
nity exists. That in itself might provide a basis to build
on when opportunities for cooperation and mutual
involvements arise from time to time – perhaps even with
disciplines other than accounting that have a greater tradi-
tion of investing in diverse research perspectives and have
a more genuine interest in problem related research.
And thank you
All the above suggests that Accounting, Organizations
and Society has a rich but complex future ahead of it –
not unlike its environment to date. I wish the new Edi-
tor-in-Chief and his editorial team all the best in dealing
with these challenges. Whilst the future will certainly be
different, I am con?dent it will be as interesting and in?u-
ential as it has been so far. So much remains to be found
out about accounting and the needs for such knowledge
are likely to develop and grow.
It just remains for me to thank all those who have in-
vested in the journal so far. The Associate Editors have
been enormously in?uential and to them I would like to
express my real appreciation, not least to those who will
be leaving the senior editorial team. All the members of
the editorial board have worked hard to maintain the stan-
dards of the journal. Senior and research active by the
standards of many other journals, they nevertheless have
invested a great deal of effort in the review process. And
so have many other researchers in accounting and in other
social science disciplines who have contributed to the re-
view process. Special thanks should also go to the many
authors who have invested in the journal, not least to those
whose papers have not been accepted but who have never-
theless contributed to its reputation in the wider research
community. The contribution of the readers of the journal
to its development and reputation also has been of im-
mense signi?cance. Indeed I would like to express my
appreciation to all of those who have been involved with
the creation and development of Accounting, Organizations
and Society over the years.
It is also important to acknowledge the efforts of the
Editorial Assistants who collectively have added so much
to the journal and particularly to Kathryn Symth, the cur-
rent Editorial Secretary. Finally I would like to thank Sam-
mye Haigh who has been responsible for Accounting,
Organizations and Society at the publishers and has been
a constant source of help and advice. Sammye has indeed
played a very important role in the functioning of the
journal.
It now only remains for me to wish the new editorial
team well. I do that knowing that it will have the support
and encouragement of all those who have worked for the
journal to date. I am sure that the future will be as exciting
and in?uential as the past.
References
Ashton, R. K. (1981). The use and extent of replacement value accounting in
the Netherlands. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England
and Wales.
Ball, R., & Brown, P. (1968). An empirical evaluation of accounting income
numbers. Journal of Accounting Research, 6, 159–178.
Ball, R., & Shivakumar, L. (2008). How much new information is there in
earnings? Working paper: <http://ssrn.com/abstract=1105228>.
Bedeian, A. G., Van Fleet, D. D., & Hyman, H. H. (2009). Scienti?c
achievement and editorial board membership. Organizational
Research Methods, 12, 211–238.
Burchell, S., Clubb, C., & Hopwood, A. G. (1985). Accounting in its social
context: Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 10(4), 381–413.
Cowan, B. (2005). The social life of coffee: The emergence of the British
coffeehouse. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hopwood, A. G. (2007). Whither accounting research? The Accounting
Review, 82(5), 1365–1374.
Hopwood, A. G. (2008a). Changing pressures on the research process: On
trying to research in an age when curiosity is not enough. European
Accounting Review, 17(1), 87–96.
Hopwood, A. G. (2008b). Management accounting research in a changing
world, 20, 3–13.
Hopwood, A. G. (2008c). Schools must focus on ideas not research hits.
The Financial Times, 21(July), 15.
Hopwood, A. G. (2009). Exploring the interface between accounting and
?nance. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(5), 549–550.
Miller, A. G. (Ed.). (1972). The social psychology of psychological research.
New York: The Free Press.
Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (2000). Value reporting and the information
ecosystem. London: PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Qu, S. Q., Ding, S., & Lukasewich, S. M. (2009). Research the American way:
The role of US elites in disseminating and legitimizing Canadian
academic accounting research. Working paper: <http://ssrn.com/
abstract=1347673>.
Raffournier, B., & Schatt, A. (forthcoming). Is European accounting
research fairly re?ected in academic journals? An investigation of
possible non-mainstream and language barrier biases. European
Accounting Review.
Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. R. (1997). People studying people: Artifacts
and ethics in behavioural research. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
The Economist (2003). The internet in a cup: Coffee fuelled the information
exchanges of the 17th and 18th centuries, December 20, 47–50.
The Economist (2009a). What went wrong with economics, July 18,
11–12.
The Economist (2009b). The other-worldly philosophers, July 18, 70–72.
The Economist (2009c). Ef?ciency and beyond, July 18, 73–74.
Zambon, S., & Zan, L. (2000). Accounting relativism: The unstable
relationship between income measurement and theories of the ?rm.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 25(8), 799–822.
Anthony G. Hopwood
University of Oxford,
Said Business School,
Park End Street,
Oxford OX1 1HP,
United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 1865 228 472; fax: +44 1865 288 651
E-mail address: [email protected]
894 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
doc_583140853.pdf
The present issue of Accounting, Organizations and Society
is the last that I will edit. Having been Editor-in-Chief
for over 35 years, it is not an inappropriate time to hand
over to a new editor and editorial team who can help to
forge a continuing future for the journal.
Founding and editing the journal has been a truly wonderful
experience. Established with a certain degree of
naivety at a time when its real research focus had still to
be created, the development of the journal has always
been both an intellectual and an entrepreneurial adventure.
The early years were heavily dependent on the support
of a relatively small group of people, later years
certainly had their own moments of adventure and discovery,
and today, with the incredible volume of submissions,
the journal is a collective endeavour with me usually trusting
the wisdom and insights of the impressive editorial
team.
Editorial
Re?ections and projections – and many, many thanks
The present issue of Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety is the last that I will edit. Having been Editor-in-Chief
for over 35 years, it is not an inappropriate time to hand
over to a new editor and editorial team who can help to
forge a continuing future for the journal.
Founding and editing the journal has been a truly won-
derful experience. Established with a certain degree of
naivety at a time when its real research focus had still to
be created, the development of the journal has always
been both an intellectual and an entrepreneurial adven-
ture. The early years were heavily dependent on the sup-
port of a relatively small group of people, later years
certainly had their own moments of adventure and discov-
ery, and today, with the incredible volume of submissions,
the journal is a collective endeavour with me usually trust-
ing the wisdom and insights of the impressive editorial
team.
Over the years there have been moments of anxiety,
particularly in years three and four when the initial good-
will was no longer providing papers and the journal had
still to establish its own credibility. Some of the issues
in those years were both late and very thin! Later on I still
remember agonizing with colleagues over whether to
publish what, in times past, were seen as risky papers –
they would now be seen as pioneering! But only two
rejected papers remain in my memory as risks not taken
that should have been, not that they were published else-
where but rather because their content has been entirely
lost.
Right from its early days all those involved with the
journal have been conscious of its role in creating a new
area of scholarly investigation. While there were a number
of pioneering studies that pointed to the behavioural, orga-
nizational and social positioning and importance of
accounting, a great deal of further inquiry was needed to
appreciate what was at stake in such perspectives and
the implications they might have for both understanding
and changing accounting practice. Over the years the gain-
ing of such insights has been the mission – to use modern
managerial language – of Accounting, Organizations and
Society.
Establishing Accounting, Organizations and Society
The idea for the journal emerged from my involvement
with the Behavioural Accounting Newsletter, the concept for
which came out of discussions with Jake Birnberg at the
1972 Empirical Research Conference at the University of
Chicago. By that time we were both conscious of the grow-
ing research interest in the behavioural, organizational and
social dimensions of accounting on both sides of the Atlan-
tic and indeed elsewhere. But we also were very conscious
that there was little mutual awareness amongst many of
the researchers. In the days before the internet and email
communications, the world was a more detached place,
with members of the research community tending to have
more isolated existences. Jake and I therefore decided to
establish a newsletter that sought to inform interested
researchers of the activities and involvements of their peer
community. As Jake and I said in our initial appeal for
materials for the newsletter:
‘‘The last few years have witnessed a great expansion in
both interest and research in the behavioural and social
aspects of accounting, and there is little doubt that this
area will be one of increasing activity and importance in
the years ahead.
As yet, however, there is no well developed informal
network of connections and contacts between research
workers in the area. The situation is not easy in the Uni-
ted States and even more dif?cult between continents.
A great many things are happening at a variety of loca-
tions, but all too few of us are able to keep abreast of all
the developments. The time lag for journal articles and
the gestation period for research projects are long,
resulting in publications which are dated. Moreover,
some interesting and worthwhile developments receive
scant attention once published if they are published
outside the mainstream of journals read by
researchers.”
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.08.002
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
The ?rst issue of the Behavioural Accounting Newslet-
ter came out in the Summer of 1974, with a longer and
more substantive issue following in the Spring of 1975.
Both of these issues had cartoon like front covers espe-
cially drawn by a very talented designer on the staff of
the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames
(now the Henley Business School) which was my base
at the time. As can be seen from Figs. 1 and 2, the ?rst
illustration featured an accountant trying to talk to a
more people oriented person while the second issue,
perhaps a little more European oriented, had an
accountant in bed with a trade unionist and an
employee!
Even by the time of the second issue it would appear
that the newsletter was starting to realize its potential.
As Jake and I said in our introduction to that issue:
‘‘Many people seem to have found the ?rst issue of the
Behavioural Accounting Newsletter both interesting and
useful. A number of you have written to express your
enthusiasm and a series of international exchanges have
already been started as a direct result of the newsletter.
All this seems very gratifying. So far, at least, it really does
seem that the activity has been justi?ed.
The Behavioural Accounting Newsletter has already dem-
onstrated that the area is both active and growing. A lot of
things certainly seem to be happening in the area and even
a casual look at both this and the previous issue demon-
strates that the action is widely dispersed.”
Although the introduction to the ?rst issue of the news-
letter had stated that ‘‘. . . we have no intention of making
the Behavioural Accounting Newsletter into another jour-
nal. . .” the discussions that the existence of the newsletter
Fig. 1.
888 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
stimulated had made it clear that there was an interest in
and a potential need for a more specialist journal. There
were already signs that the existing journals had little
interest in at least some aspects of the emerging new area
and at that time, even more so than now, many of the key
journals were very nationally oriented, thereby not able to
deal well with the more international nature of the behav-
ioural, organizational and social accounting research com-
munity that was starting to develop.
Aware of this, I started to approach a number of pub-
lishers to ascertain their interest. There was none. It was
a time of some dif?culty in the publishing industry and
the idea of the ?rst specialist journal in the accounting area
that was seeking to create rather than merely service a
Fig. 2.
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 889
?eld of inquiry was seen as just too risky. Shortly thereaf-
ter, however, I met Robert Maxwell, the founder of
Pergamon Press. A takeover battle had forced him out of
the company but the existing editors had insisted on his
return. And return he did, almost immediately seeking to
rebuild the company. So at our meeting he asked me
whether I had any ideas for new journals. Well, as it hap-
pened, I did! Initially Maxwell wanted the establishment
of the journal to be done in exchange for my involvement
in the writing of either his autobiography or biography. For
a young academic that would not have been the right thing
to do given his extremely controversial nature, so over the
years I always seemed to be just too busy in engage in such
work! But fortunately that did not prevent the establish-
ment of the journal.
Although a new journal was about to be published, its
naming was far from obvious. The vast majority of people
consulted wanted to call it the Journal of Behavioural and
Social Accounting. That was the most obvious title at the
time. However I still remember being most uneasy with
this. Even then I was becoming more conscious of the
emergence of an important set of organizational level is-
sues as well as the behavioural and psychological ones
which dominated research at the time. Equally, while that
was a time of real and growing interest in social account-
ing, I had started to become aware that social forces in?u-
enced all accountings, even those of a more conventional
form, albeit that these largely remained poorly understood.
So I started thinking about alternative titles for a journal
that I saw as being focused on the relationships between
accounting, organizations and society. As I did so it sud-
denly became clear to me that the most suitable name
would be just that: Accounting, Organizations and Society.
There was little enthusiasm for this in the wider commu-
nity at the time but despite that, I preceded with that more
descriptive title. I think that the future of the journal dem-
onstrated that this was indeed the right decision.
As I have already said, the early days of the journal were
often complex. But over time it started to develop both an
intellectual focus and a supportive community of scholars.
Some people played a particularly important role, not least
Jake Birnberg in the USA, Shahid Ansari, Eric Flamholtz and
Tony Tinker in hosting the ?rst and very successful confer-
ence for the journal at the University of California at Los
Angeles, and David Cooper who was a constant sounding
board for discussing dif?cult editorial decisions in the
early days of the journal.
In the years that followed one of the real strengths of
Accounting, Organizations and Society has been its outstand-
ing Editorial Board. Over the years I have been fortunate to
be able to work with a group of colleagues whom I re-
spected and whose judgments I trusted. Always hardwork-
ing, always willing to help and always facilitative in
nature, both individually and collectively they have been
constantly concerned to realize the full potential of emerg-
ing articles. Their reviews have always been appreciated,
with so many spending a great deal of time preparing
lengthy but invariably helpful review comments. Not only
that, unlike at least some other accounting research jour-
nals (Bedeian, Van Fleet, & Hyman, 2009), the editors of
Accounting, Organizations and Society were themselves a
very research active group of scholars fully aware of the
emerging research issues and needs in the areas covered
by the journal. Over the years this has made a tremendous
difference to the journal. Not only that, they have been an
essential element of why it has been possible for me to
continue with the journal for so long while doing other
things, including my own research and writing and setting
up a new business school!
Emerging opportunities
Of course there are things that I would like to have seen
more of – more cumulative patterns of research, more sys-
tematic interdisciplinary inquiries and more engagement
with at least some of the frontiers of practice. But that said,
Accounting, Organizations and Society has undoubtedly
changed the intellectual landscape of accounting and it
has had and is still having impacts more broadly – in
anthropology, history, politics and sociology, as well as
other management disciplines. At a time when we are see-
ing the consequences of a discipline such as ?nance that
has failed to invest in its own critique, in understanding
more fully its own modes of functioning, and in exploring
the full range of its own consequences, we can appreciate
the importance of having in accounting a tradition of in-
quiry that delves into the organizational, social and politi-
cal aspects of the subject. A diversity of understandings is
important in a complex changing world where knowledge
is an emergent process rather than a more static straight
forward endeavour. While I have always been a believer
in the role of truth, I also have been hugely concerned with
those who claim privileged access to it.
I have also been interested to observe how at least a few
of the more far sighted members of the practitioner com-
munity now recognize the power of the knowledges that
have come to be associated with the journal, albeit quietly
and often in con?dence! I even have had regulators who
have almost apologized for initially denying the role
playing by sectional interests and political processes in
standardization and accounting regulation, now admitting
that the type of perspectives emerging in Accounting,
Organizations and Society have even helped them to under-
stand the processes in which they now ?nd themselves
embedded.
All this said, so many issues remain in need of the inter-
disciplinary investigation that is the real strength of
Accounting, Organizations and Society. In order to illustrate
such potential it is interesting to consider ?nancial
accounting and reporting, an area that has still received
less exploration in terms of the conceptual frameworks
and methodologies available in this journal. Often requir-
ing a technical understanding of accounting as well as an
interdisciplinary insight into its functioning and conse-
quences, the understanding of the organizational and so-
cial nature of external corporate reporting has remained
a relatively unexplored area despite the importance of
gaining better insights into it.
1
1
The following remarks are based on a key note address to the German
Academy of Management, Berlin, May 2008.
890 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
One example of the knowledge to be gained has been
on my mind ever since my student days at the University
of Chicago. Amongst the community of doctoral students
at Chicago at that time there was an acute awareness of
the complex and competitive market in information on
the enterprise, of which ?nancial accounting was only a
part. It was Ball and Brown (1968) who investigated how
much of a part in their pioneering study published in
1968. Recently replicated (Ball & Shivakumar, 2008), the
?ndings still point to the relatively limited role played by
external accounts in the market in corporate information.
And yet we still know very little about the wider nature
of that market. What sources contribute to the market in
corporate information? Should regulators seek to in?uence
a wider variety of information sources rather than their
present ?xation on accounting? Or is that ?xation the re-
sult of lobbying by the audit industry? Indeed what roles
does accounting information play in the market for corpo-
rate information? Is accounting capable of serving as a
mode of analysis for understanding and interpreting other
sources of information as well as serving as a source of
information in its own right? Remembering that many
stock exchanges had their origins in the informal commu-
nications that characterized coffeehouse society (Cowan,
2005; The Economist, 2003), what, one wonders, is the cur-
rent balance of formal and informal sources of corporate
information? Has the signi?cance of informal information
increased as diverse sources of formal information have
become ever more available, not least via the internet?
And is the signi?cance of the informal one reason why
the last few decades have witnessed an ever greater con-
centration of ?nancial employment when earlier predic-
tions were that the internet would result in its
dispersion? One could go on with identifying ever more
questions, many of real practical signi?cance The interest-
ing thing, however, is that despite the widespread recogni-
tion of the importance of the original Ball and Brown study
there have been very few inquiries into the functioning of
the wider information market that it implied. Although
one such study was conducted by Miller and O’Leary
(2000), two scholars closely associated with Accounting,
Organizations and Society, being published by one of the
major audit ?rms, it has not attracted the attention that
it deserves. The result is that we currently have only a lim-
ited understanding of the informational context of the
modern corporation. At a time when there are ever more
pressures to expand the provision of at least the formal
sources of such information, the practical and research
needs for more systematic knowledge of the area are very
real.
Another topic of long standing interest to me has been
what I have come to term the politics of surplus declara-
tion. While there is now an enormous literature on earn-
ings management, the vast majority of such studies only
focus on the economic rationales for this. Yet other factors
can be and indeed are at work, albeit often over longer
periods of time. We already have some insights into the
impact of major socio-economic changes. The shift from
feudal society to a capitalist one most certainly changed
the nature of surplus calculation, not least through the
more widespread commoditization of labour and the
resultant inclusion of wages as a cost. Changes in the forms
taken by colonialism also have had their impact of the cal-
culation and distribution of accounting surplus within
both the colonies themselves and the international agen-
cies and companies whose activities were based on them.
And we know that different institutional con?gurations
also shape the declaration of surplus. As Zambon and Zan
(2000) have shown, the same economic activities orga-
nized as a shareholder company, a consumer cooperative
or a worker cooperative would all result in different calcu-
lations of surplus even though the underlying economic
transactions were the same. But all the above are relatively
pure cases. Does the same apply in more complex mixed
institutional settings?
Such an issue emerged in Germany with the entry of
some of its major corporations into the international capi-
tal markets. While there were those within the interna-
tional accounting research community who thought that
national patterns of ?nancial accounting were deeply
embedded within national cultures and history, some as-
pects of Germany accounting and its regulatory structures
changed incredibly quickly in response to the new institu-
tional setting that was emerging from the globalization of
some of the key enterprises. Not only was change evident
but the process of adjustment was much more rapid than
many had anticipated.
Over the years I have been intrigued by grains of evi-
dence that the processes of adjustment to socio-political
changes can be just as quick. One early example of this
might be provided by the Dutch company Philips who
were early users of replacement cost accounting. Although
this can be seen as having a clear economic rationale (Ash-
ton, 1981), there nevertheless are suggestions that its early
use was also encouraged by the politics of managing a
company where elements of the labour force had been
associated with the resistance during World War II while
management was seen by some as collaborating with the
enemy. Building on this position, the unions were pressing
for higher earnings at a time when the ?nancial resources
of the ?rm were needed to rebuild its manufacturing base.
It has been claimed that using replacement cost account-
ing could help to prioritize reinvestment at a time when
a weaker management might otherwise have found it
more dif?cult to resist union pressures. Clearly such
usages are worthy of serious investigation, not least as
such an explanation ?ts with French experience in the post
war era where modes of in?ation accounting had been spe-
ci?cally introduced by the government in order to protect
earnings so that they could be used for reinvestment.
Moreover in post war Belgium external reporting to
employees was introduced at a relatively early stage, again
in part re?ecting the relative balance of power and in?u-
ence that had emerged in the immediate post war period.
In later years in the United Kingdom there were indica-
tions of a similar appeal to different modes of calculating
surplus. In a period of strong trade unions in the 1970’s Ford
of Europe introduced replacement cost accounting in their
reporting to its employees in the United Kingdom quite
explicitly hoping that this would reduce the pressures for
higher earnings. The trade unions gave a highly informed
response, however, pointing out that actual investment
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 891
was not at the level of the replacement cost. Was, the trade
unions wondered, Ford trying to run down its investment
in the UK? As the true response to that would most likely
be positive, Ford management soon retreated from this
mode of accounting. At the wider national level, however,
a managerial perception of heightened labour power in the
early days of a Labour Government did have its impact on
accounting thought and practice. There was a very rapid
increase in interest in and use of value added accounting
(Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood, 1985), not least as it showed
more directly the high returns already going to labour and
the much lower ones to capital. The professional accoun-
tancy bodies brought out recommendations for changing
accounting reporting practices towards a more stakeholder
model rather than purely a shareholder one and it is not
impossible that at least some of the temporary interest
in in?ation accounting stemmed from similar concerns to
those articulated in Ford of Europe. But all these move-
ments stopped as soon as it was realized that the changes
in the socio-economic power structure was only very tem-
porary ones. Be that as it may, I nevertheless think that
these and similar accounting changes are worthy of more
serious investigation as they are suggestive of a more com-
plex socio-political as well as economic basis for account-
ing practice.
One additional area that I have always thought of as
needing further investigation is that of the politics and
institutional contexts of accounting regulation, particu-
larly at the supra-national and international levels. While
we now take for granted the existence of bodies such as
the International Accounting Standards Board, the politi-
cal processes implicit in their establishment are far from
being well understood. In the case of the IASB it was
likely that the timing of its establishment was in?uenced
by the accounting rami?cations of the United Kingdom’s
entry into the European Union. Moreover, once estab-
lished, its existence set off a chain reaction of institu-
tional elaboration, resulting in the United Nation’s
involvement with accounting and thereafter that of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
as different groups of countries sought to constrain the
power and in?uence of others. At a European level the at-
tempts to bring together the divergent accounting tradi-
tions of many of the Continental European countries
with those of the United Kingdom also resulted in a com-
plex and at times fascinating politics. The rise of what I
would characterize as accounting nationalism was part
of this process with the United Kingdom characterizing
its more free market approach to accounting and auditing
in terms of ‘‘true and fair” and the incorporation of this
obscure and highly ambiguous language into the relevant
European Directive. I have been fascinated with how little
resemblance such conceptions of ‘‘British accounting”, for
instance, had to actual accounting in Britain, seeing this
as an illustration of the important role that language
can play in processes of accounting change and how
important conceptions of accounting can arise at the
boundaries of what is regarded as acceptable rather than
from within its heartland. Studies of both European and
international accounting politics should also have the po-
tential to illuminate the increasing and currently highly
in?uential involvement of the major auditing ?rms in
these political processes. Usually dressed up as a profes-
sional involvement, on most occasions it is one of straight
forward commercial lobbying, often fairly ruthless in
approach.
I think that serious research into all the above topics
has the potential to change our understandings of the
nature of accounting practices. Of course that could be
one of the reasons why there have been constraints on
the development of such ?nancial accounting research.
There certainly are those who would not like to see
accounting in such a way. But numerous other factors
are also at work. Unfortunately accounting research is
no longer driven solely by curiosity (Hopwood, 2008a).
Indeed as numerous of my recent writings have pointed
out (Hopwood, 2007, 2008b), the mainstream of a great
deal of accounting research is now the result of a complex
set of institutional and personal factors rather than any
need for a new understanding. Initially varying by coun-
try, international in?uences and pressures are now creat-
ing a much more conservative context for the conduct of
accounting inquiry.
Pressures on the Accounting Research Process
Accounting, Organizations and Society revels in operating
in a context of diverse research perspectives and ap-
proaches. Although it emphasises the contributions which
behavioural, organizational and sociological insights can
make to advancing our understanding of accounting, it
has never claimed that these are or should be the only
modes of intellectual inquiry into accounting., fully recog-
nizing the legitimacy of economic, ?nancial and more
technical modes of investigation. That wider appreciation
increasingly has not been reciprocated however. Outside
the arenas occupied by Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety there seemingly have been strong pressures to see
accounting as a more monocentric discipline rather than
the polycentric one that it was and which many other
management and social science disciplines remain. In this
respect accounting has been in the process of becoming
similar to economics and particularly ?nancial economics.
Interestingly, however, the recent economic and ?nancial
crisis is resulting in a growing concern with the conse-
quences of such a monocentric approach for our under-
standing of the economy and the ?nancial system (see
for example The Economist, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). As I
have said recently (Hopwood, 2009), ?nance is an aca-
demic discipline that has failed to invest in its own critique
and today we are living with at least some of the conse-
quences of that. Subject as it is to very similar pressures
for uniformity, accounting should be increasingly con-
scious of both the intellectual and practical implications
of these, although I am not optimistic that this will happen.
Accounting research takes place in an increasingly com-
plex institutional environment. At the individual level,
careerist pressures can result in a tendency to do what
people already do rather than carving out areas of intellec-
tual inquiry for oneself. Institutional practices so often
reinforce this, creating what I have called ‘‘hit” or publica-
tion cultures rather than ideas ones (Hopwood, 2008c).
892 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894
Recently hearing of one institution that was not recogniz-
ing publications in Accounting, Organizations and Society, I
made some inquires as to why this might be so. Asking
about the activities of the senior faculty, I was repeatedly
told of their high publication outputs in the very top jour-
nals but no one ever mentioned what they were publishing
about! The comments re?ected just such a ‘‘hit” culture
that has emerged from careerist interests as well as regu-
latory and ranking pressures. Additionally many business
schools reinforce such tendencies by constantly looking
sideways at what their peer institutions are doing rather
than looking forward at what the world might require or
at what opportunities for innovation exist.
Such pressures clearly vary from country to country
and across time. For some time they have been strongest
in the Unites States, the reasons for which are worthy of
more serious investigation as even in the US they appear
to vary from subject to subject, seemingly being strongest
in economics, ?nance and accounting. But the pressures
for uniformity have spread from the United States to
many, but not all, business schools in other countries,
most likely re?ecting the ranking pressures in such insti-
tutions as well as the rather conformist cultures that
pervade many of them. Outside of the major business
schools, however, very different intellectual cultures exist
in many countries. Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic
countries and the United Kingdom are amongst those
countries that recognize the value of intellectual diver-
sity, at least in the accounting ?eld. Many Continental
European countries have had there own intellectual tradi-
tions for a long time, although the increasing dominance
of the English language makes it ever more dif?cult for
these to be appreciated and developed (Raffournier &
Schatt, forthcoming). With the advent of a more global
intellectual space such intellectual perspectives are hav-
ing to confront both very different research traditions
and modes of intellectual governance. In some cases na-
tional regulatory authorities are emphasizing the impor-
tance of research publications in more international
outlets, sometimes in the process either ignoring or at
least downgrading their own national journals. In other
cases, The Netherlands for example, certain institutions
are putting pressures on their faculty to move in a more
conformist direction but other institutions revel in intel-
lectual diversity. The situation in Asia is also different.
In many cases, despite not having a long standing re-
search tradition at either a national or an institutional le-
vel, there nevertheless can be very strong pressures to
enter the international research arena at great speed
and with high visibility. In these circumstances it is
indeed tempting to follow the dictates of international
rankings and assessments, not least where these imply
the use of research perspectives and methodologies that
are relatively easier to learn. Canada, being so near to
the United States is particularly interesting. Although it
has a quite diverse intellectual landscape in accounting,
that is not re?ected in its most prestigious national
research publications which are dominated by US main-
stream in?uences (Qu, Ding, & Lukasewich, 2009).All told,
the international accounting research community is
operating in a complex, variable and changing space.
As I have just implied, it is frequently said that there
are strong pressures for the use of research methodologies
that are more easily assimilated and considered to be
more readily assessable. Seen in such terms, more quanti-
tative methodologies are seen as falling into a more desir-
able category, ignoring the often rather procedural use
made of many statistical methodologies. In contrast, qual-
itative approaches can be seen in far less positive terms
even though there are many other social science disci-
plines where qualitative methodologies are centrally
implicated in the construction of the discipline and there-
by the evaluation of its research contributions. Some of
the hypocrisies involved in such views become more evi-
dent when consideration is given to the use of some par-
ticular methodologies. Take experimental approaches for
example. Often accepted as more mainstream, possibly
because of their emergence from psychological research
traditions, the resultant methodologies enable much
speedier research than would be possible with qualitative
?eld studies. Their results, however, are far from unprob-
lematic. The frequent use of students as subjects is highly
questionable in many cases, although clearly very ef?cient
from a research output point of view. Equally, speedily
conducted experiments produce very uncertain results
in situations where it is known that learning can and does
take place across time. But there are even more funda-
mental problems stemming from the demand characteris-
tics of many experimental contexts as repeated research
has shown (Miller, 1972; Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1997).
Not that these dif?culties individually or collectively
undermine the value of experimental research. Far from
it. The point is merely that the dif?culties facing the
acceptable can be as great, if not greater, as those facing
the seemingly less acceptable, suggesting the complex of
factors that are implicated in determining what is re-
garded as acceptable research in some quarters in the
accounting area.
Other reinforcements for the mainstream can emerge
from the relatively modest research involvements of at
least some accounting editorial boards (Bedeian, Van Fleet,
& Hyman, 2009) and the increasingly less intellectual
recruitment into the accounting academic community –
at least in some countries. And the pressures for this to
change are unlikely to be great for the foreseeable future.
Accounting has become a relatively autonomous discipline
having only weakly developed links with other manage-
ment subjects let alone other social sciences. Even in cita-
tion terms it is becoming more rather than less isolated,
creating a research arena where many of the in?uences
are increasingly internally generated within the discipline.
Moreover the links to practice also seem to be getting less
and less, adding to the isolation of its modes of inquiry.
More and more academic accountants seem to know less
and less about the practical aspects of their subject, again
resulting in research that is in?uenced by trends rather
than problems.
Given the complex and numerous factors involved in
the growing intensity of a mainstream tradition of re-
search in the United States it is dif?cult to see change
emerging there in the near future. Indeed in some respects
Accounting, Organizations and Society could be regarded as
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 887–894 893
being fortunate already in being one of the very few
non US edited journals that has had any degree of recogni-
tion at all in the social science community in the United
States – although it should be noted that the situation is
different in both the humanities and the natural sciences
where more of a genuine international research commu-
nity exists. That in itself might provide a basis to build
on when opportunities for cooperation and mutual
involvements arise from time to time – perhaps even with
disciplines other than accounting that have a greater tradi-
tion of investing in diverse research perspectives and have
a more genuine interest in problem related research.
And thank you
All the above suggests that Accounting, Organizations
and Society has a rich but complex future ahead of it –
not unlike its environment to date. I wish the new Edi-
tor-in-Chief and his editorial team all the best in dealing
with these challenges. Whilst the future will certainly be
different, I am con?dent it will be as interesting and in?u-
ential as it has been so far. So much remains to be found
out about accounting and the needs for such knowledge
are likely to develop and grow.
It just remains for me to thank all those who have in-
vested in the journal so far. The Associate Editors have
been enormously in?uential and to them I would like to
express my real appreciation, not least to those who will
be leaving the senior editorial team. All the members of
the editorial board have worked hard to maintain the stan-
dards of the journal. Senior and research active by the
standards of many other journals, they nevertheless have
invested a great deal of effort in the review process. And
so have many other researchers in accounting and in other
social science disciplines who have contributed to the re-
view process. Special thanks should also go to the many
authors who have invested in the journal, not least to those
whose papers have not been accepted but who have never-
theless contributed to its reputation in the wider research
community. The contribution of the readers of the journal
to its development and reputation also has been of im-
mense signi?cance. Indeed I would like to express my
appreciation to all of those who have been involved with
the creation and development of Accounting, Organizations
and Society over the years.
It is also important to acknowledge the efforts of the
Editorial Assistants who collectively have added so much
to the journal and particularly to Kathryn Symth, the cur-
rent Editorial Secretary. Finally I would like to thank Sam-
mye Haigh who has been responsible for Accounting,
Organizations and Society at the publishers and has been
a constant source of help and advice. Sammye has indeed
played a very important role in the functioning of the
journal.
It now only remains for me to wish the new editorial
team well. I do that knowing that it will have the support
and encouragement of all those who have worked for the
journal to date. I am sure that the future will be as exciting
and in?uential as the past.
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Anthony G. Hopwood
University of Oxford,
Said Business School,
Park End Street,
Oxford OX1 1HP,
United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 1865 228 472; fax: +44 1865 288 651
E-mail address: [email protected]
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