Business Commons^™

The Relationship Between Management And Financial Accounting As Professions And Technologies Of Practice, Alan J. Richardson

Odette School of Business Publications

This Chapter explores the suggestion to unify financial and management accounting both as professions and technologies of practice. I argue that drift in professional jurisdictions and cognitive domains encourages consolidation of the profession but there remain distinct social roles for each information technology. The challenge for the profession is to maintain the integrity of management accounting as a technology of practice in the face of renewed professional hegemony of financial accounting.

Professionalization And The Accounting Profession, Alan J. Richardson

Odette School of Business Publications

This Chapter reviews the critical literature on the emergence, development and demise of the professional model in accounting and auditing. While the critical accounting literature is broad and amorphous, in this Chapter the focus is on those studies that present an “immanent critique” of professionalization (i.e. an analysis of the contradictions of this institutional form) or which place the accounting profession within a political economy framework that examines its position at the nexus of the economy, civil society and the state. The Chapter is structured as a stylized history of the accounting profession beginning with the emergence of professional associations, …

The Discovery Of Cumulative Knowledge: Strategies For Designing And Communicating Qualitative Research., Alan J. Richardson

Odette School of Business Publications

Purpose: this paper provides guidance for designing and generating cumulative knowledge based on qualitative research.

Design/methodology/approach: the paper draws on the philosophy of science and specific examples of qualitative studies in accounting that have claimed a cumulative contribution to knowledge to develop a taxonomy of theoretically-justified approaches to generating cumulative knowledge from qualitative research.

Findings: the paper argues for a definition of cumulative knowledge that is inclusive of anti-realist research, i.e. knowledge is cumulative if it increases the extent and density of intertextual linkages in a field. It identifies the possibility of cumulative qualitative research based on extensions to the …