Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

Citation

Guthrie, J. and Parker, L. (2012), "Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 9 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qram.2012.31409caa.006

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

Article Type: Commentary From: Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Volume 9, Issue 3

While Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) publishes high level theoretical, critical and empirical research, its publishing house, Emerald Group Publishing, and its own journal editorial polices have a strong commitment to encouraging authors to incorporate in their papers discussions of the policy, practice and societal implications of their findings and conclusions. Hence, papers in AAAJ predominantly do have a strong thread of policy and practice reflection.

Management accounting research published in AAAJ has mostly employed qualitative methodologies whereby the researcher has directly engaged with practice and thereby offers inductively derived insights into organisational and institutional coal-face attitudes, behaviours, structures and processes. Thus, the full range of policy and practice oriented analyses is well in evidence, either in unpacking formerly opaque processes, drivers and consequences, or in critiquing current practice and developing new theorisations and models.

“Academic rigour” is often used as a surrogate for “quantitative positivist” research methodologies. In AAAJ this is not the case. Instead it publishes high quality research that exhibits strongly articulated theorisation, research methodology and contextualised reflections on the study results that include policy, practice and societal implications. All of these are decisive factors in the publishing decision. In addition, AAAJ has focussed on publishing research that is more accessible to policy makers and practitioners by virtue of its workplace engagement and orientation, the research being written in a reader-friendly style. This is an important requirement as we seek to avoid management accounting research becoming a ghetto in which researchers only talk to each other, building a self-referential corpus of work that is unknown to anyone in the general professional, business or public sector communities.

It must also be said that while such methods as interview have become popular amongst the qualitative management accounting research community as a deep level approach to contextual data collection, there still remains a very broad array of qualitative research methodologies awaiting exploitation in tapping into relatively neglected issues, actors, and data. While some of these methodologies may appear at first sight to be less familiar and “risky”, they offer the potential for revealing hitherto invisible or little understood organisational and institutional practices, sense-making and critiques. Visual research methods, auto-ethnography, and on-line electronic research methods are but three areas that may open wider doors into issues of practice and engagement.

Finally it must be emphasised that the original and still persistent mission of AAAJ has been to publish accounting and management accounting research that is heavily contextualised. The accounting literature is resplendent with decontextualized empirical studies that continually resort to abstract modelling, simplistically designed surveys, and artificial laboratory studies divorced from the complexities of the organisational coal-face. Practice engagement and relevance in the AAAJ philosophy, can only come from a holistic and deep level analysis and articulation of the social, political, economic, institutional, and regulatory environment within which management accounting is situated and which it both drives and reflects.

James Guthrie and Lee Parker