Accounting Bits

What really counts

This short commentary responds in an appreciative but provocative manner to Craig Deegan and Sharon Solty’s (2007) paper which itself seeks to explore the publishing patterns of Australasian social and environmental accountants. Deegan and Solty’s basic thesis can be summarised thus. First, relatively few Australasian academics undertake research in the area of social and environmental accounting (hereafter SEA), and of those who do, a relatively small number of academics count for a disproportionate number of those publications. This has the effect of making SEA research in Australasia precarious with the possibility that the field may wither unless some actions are taken to support and strengthen this area of research. Second, that at least part of the explanation for this observed ‘thinness’ of SEA in Australasia is that incentives for career advancement actively prevent academics from researching in SEA. A situation reflective of the growing dominance of research informed by neoclassical economics (the likes of which is published in an array of, so called, premier academic journals, notably The Accounting Review).

The authors’ thesis offers a serious challenge to us as academics. The academic accounting community has a responsibility to facilitate, and engage in, dialogue among stakeholders regarding accounting and organisational management’s public interest responsibilities. In our opinion, SEA is a, if not the, primary accounting area of research pursuing this public interest dialogue. If scholars are discouraged from pursuing SEA, we will lose our voice except as apologists for the status quo. Deegan and Solty identify prestige hierarchies as the core issue. These hierarchies frame the representational schemes and the value systems that afford the context and legitimacy for organisational power structures. These social constructions also provide the context within which choices are made by the current and potential members of the academic accounting community.

In seeking to elaborate on the trends identified by Deegan and Solty, we develop four specific points. First, evidence from the UK suggests that a concentration of publications from the pens of a few is a more widespread trend than that observed in Deegan and Solty’s study. While supporting the Australasia findings, these observations point to some wider effects in academe generally whereby relative few individuals account for a relative large amount of output. Second, we review publishing patterns in The Accounting Review to explore whether or not it is plausible that Australasian promotion committees should use publication in this journal as the basis of promotion. In brief, given how few non-USA academics publish in The Accounting Review failure for this journal to cover SEA would not seem to be a plausible reason for the relatively dearth of SEA researchers in Australasia. That there is a ‘closed shop’ with regard to publishing in North American journals that are highly rated in Australasia, however, is not denied. Third, we outline the challenges that the academe faces in addressing sustainability issues and also offer some suggestion as to why we have little sympathy with the ‘lack of career advancement’ explanation for the dearth of SEA. This part of the commentary is a call to arms for academics to engage in a broader struggle as well as an attempt to be reminded of our current privileged position in society. Finally, we suggest that the area Deegan and Solty are seeking to comment on may be amenable to investigation using the lens of institutional theory.

2. Publishing patterns of the academy

Beattie and Goodacre (2004) provide an informative commentary on publishing patterns of UK accounting and finance academics, assisted by the fact that the British Accounting Association every two years publishes its BAR Research Register which lists all outputs of accounting and finance academics in the UK. Over a number of years, the publishing patterns of UK academia have been the subject of some investigation (see also, Gee & Gray, 1989; Gray & Helliar, 1994) and as such a fairly complete picture of publication types and frequency can be offered. Taking the 1998 and 1999 years as their basis of their analysis Beattie and Goodacre (2004) find a number of trends that are relevant for our purposes.

First, a subset of academics account for a sizeable proportion of all journal publications. Taken for all universities in the UK, some 65 percent of academics of all levels of seniority have no academic journal outputs in the 2-year period examined, leaving 32 percent of the population having between one and five publications.1 In general terms this pattern is similar to that found by Deegan and Solty with relatively few Australasia SEA researchers accounting for the majority of publications. While such a pattern prompts interesting sociological questions, the pattern in SEA is not in and of itself exceptional.

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