Journal, school and department assessment exercises have become a significant part of our academic landscape. The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and Financial Times all publish ratings to guide the decisions of recruiters, students, corporate sponsors etc. In the US, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) and the Middle States Commission gives a college an accreditation imprimatur that allows student applicants to apply for government financial aid. Accreditation has major resource allocation effects that can trickle down from the university to department to a newly branded professors. The denial of an accreditation can cost a college millions in terms of lost student applications. In the UK, a similar resource allocation function is performed by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). In Australia, Spain and many other countries, similar assessment exercises now exist. Accounting academics have also bought into the assessment industry, producing rankings of journals, articles and individual academics.

These assessment exercises are now important facts-of-life for critical and progressive accounting researchers, and these major resource reallocations decisions are inducing a fundamental transformation in university cultures. Today, it is no longer sufficient for progressive researchers to indulge in elitist whining about commercialization, and the demise of THE University. Even the ‘conditions of possibility’ of whining are in jeopardy as such conduct seems increasingly anachronistic and pretentious. Progressives need to find ways of effectively combating these changes. The first step is acknowledging the reality of what is happening.

Assessment exercises that have been put out by the mainstream are successful (Ballas & Theoharakis, 2003; Bonner, Hesford, Van der Stede, & Young, in press; Brown, 1996; Lowe and Locke, 2005 A. Lowe and J. Locke, Perceptions of journal quality and research paradigm: results of a web-based survey of British accounting academics, Accounting, Organizations and Society 30 (January 2005) (1), pp. 81–98.Lowe & Locke, 2005) because they stalk behind a classic ambiguity: they trumpet market performance under the guise of the community’s interest (in Marxism, this is akin to advancing labor power qua Labor). Whether or not the wool can be pulled over the eyes depends on whose eyes are in question. For instance, North American’s are more likely to accept that the market imperative is synonymous with public interest than, say, many Europeans. Yet even in North American Universities, deans, administrators and faculty must invoke the facade of “Academic Excellence” in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions—even though these are code words for the cash value of the candidate. A candidate’s cash value ranges from a new rookies access to publishing in “top” journals, to a seasoned recruit’s prowess in fund-raising or involvement in these editorial networks.

There are two giveaways in assessing a conventional assessment exercise: First, who makes the assessment and second, who asks – and answers – the assessment survey questions (e.g. who is polled, and who did the polling). Progressive researchers have begun to catch-on that mainstream assessment exercises are not objective, but that the game is rigged against them along these two dimensions. Accordingly, they have made modest attempts to reclaim the process (e.g. lobbying for less partisan RAE evaluators, or pushing for a wider selection of journals). The results reported in this study are also tempered by this political acumen. Our reported survey helps to reclaim the territory for progressive research, offering an assessment on “our” terms: focusing on problematics that define the critical literature, and assessed by scholars who a schooled and published in that literature. In this exercise, the evaluators are authors and reviewers from the progressive accounting literature, and the questions have been devised to reflect the needs of progressive research and education.1

The results offered here provide data for faculty meetings about hiring, promotion, tenure and firing decisions. For colleagues undergoing recruitment and promotion, it is appropriate that they ask their schools to use assessment surveys constructed by judges who are knowledgeable and qualified in their field of expertise, and are composed of question-items that are relevant to their field. Financial markets researchers would not deign to allow tax specialists to judge them; so why should progressive research be graded by unqualified judges?

There are signs that an “historical moment” may have arrived for critical researchers. This is not to say that progressive research is about to displace mainstream market based research in North America. But it does suggest that there are fissures in the mainstream monolith. Recent historical and institutional upheavals have made this possible. Pamalat, Wordcom, Enron, Vivendi International etc., were a jobs-bill for auditors and internal auditors. The Big 4 alone reported a 20% annual increase in audit work following their collusive demolition of Arthur Andersen and boost from the (consequential) rise of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX). And this was just the tip of the iceberg: all across corporate America, SOX implementation has heightened the demand for auditors and internal auditors.

Mainstream market economists were not only irrelevant to these developments; their market efficiency mantra made them complicit in the market failures. Now the market is tilting away from market researchers, to auditing and internal auditing. And these changes are beginning to trickle down to the groves of academe. Professor Judy Rayburn, President of the American Accounting Association (AAA) lamented the calamitous decline in AAA membership (from over 14,000 to less than 8000) and the need for the AAA flagship journal, The Accounting Review, to diversify beyond market studies. She warns academia of a financial markets glut in doctoral education and research, and the need for more auditing, information systems, taxation, management accounting, and education research.2

The study reported here offers an assessment based on the needs of the progressive and critical accounting community. It is not presented as a definitive piece of work, but is indicative of what could be done to make assessments more meaningful and helpful to that community. Questionnaire responses were obtained by email-request to authors and reviewers of the Critical Perspectives on Accounting Journal, and from hard copy distributions of the instrument at conferences. The results are quite self-explanatory; thus simple tabular and bar chart presentations are sufficient. Data collection is ongoing, thus publications of updates in the future envisaged, as the sample size, and sample composition, changes.

2. Overview of the study

Table A.1 in Appendix A, shows the breakdown of contributors by country or nationality. There are 107 respondents from 19 countries. Table A.2 itemized the 74 universities that participated in the assessment. Table A.3 lists the questions asked in the Survey. Table A.4 identifies the journals that were assessed for each question (mainstream journals are included to provide a benchmark for evaluating progressive journals). After an examination of each of these tables the discussion proceeds to review the results for each question. The analysis of responses by nationality or country affiliation (Table A.1) shows that North America contributes the largest group participating in the survey (29%) followed by the UK (27%) and Australia (20%). Together, these three groups compose 76% of the total. This evidence runs counter to the popular conception that progressive activity is low in North American. If Canada is combined with the US, they account for some 35% of all progressive accounting respondents. Equally striking is that Australia and New Zealand (totalling 23%) are hot on the heels of UK respondents (25%)—the latter putatively the “home” of critical accounting research.

Results of Table A.1 corroborate those in Table A.2. They confirm the growing preponderance of North American and Australian institutions supporting progressive research. In 1980, critical research was an infant industry. By 2006, we see a significant re-distribution within the progressive camp, where the center of gravity is radiating beyond the UK to North America and Australia. These tables indicate the extent of the migration. The final item in Appendix A is Table A.3 that shows the eight questions in the questionnaire.

3. Analysis of the questionnaire results

Appendix B contains Table B.1, Table B.2, Table B.3, Table B.4, Table B.5, Table B.6, Table B.7 and Table B.8 that give the results for each of the questions, and a final overall evaluation (Appendix B, Table B.9 and Table B.10).3 A caveat is in order before we proceed with the interpretation of the results. Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) outscores all other journals on all dimensions. Obviously, this result must be treated with extreme caution, as the information in the survey was collected mainly from CPA authors and reviewers, during the processing of articles for this journal. Much more important are how progressive journals, in general, compare with their mainstream counterparts on questions that are of significance to progressive researchers, when the assessment is made by qualified assessors (scholars who are published and known in progressive accounting research). Overall, the most significant result, delivered by 107 academics, from 16 countries, is that ‘critical’ journals outstrip their mainstream competitors on virtually all dimensions. Consider the results for the individual questions: