The future of interpretive accounting research—A polyphonic debate

Abstract

In 1997-99 the three of us organised a series of European Commission funded\nconferences aimed at building a network of young researchers in the area of\naccounting. At the time “young” was defined by the Commission as researchers\nunder 35 years of age (allowing for maternity leave or national service). Over the\nintervening years our network had grown and we wanted to try and take stock of the\nfield in which we had now been working for a surprising number of years. To that\nPage 1 of 29\nAccepted Manuscript\n2\nend we put together the above email and a broad invitation list of people who had\nbeen at those first meetings, and others of the same generation (or even younger)\nwhom we had met since.\nAbout half of those originally contacted managed to make the meeting where we\nspent a stimulating couple of hours of debate on the topics raised below—so\nstimulating that we developed a collective desire to leave a trace of the discussion.\nWriting a traditional paper with so many, so widely dispersed authors was not going\nto work. Instead we came up with a different form of collective writing that mirrored\nthe original debate, and that might contribute to ongoing debates in this journal\nconcerning the nature and status of our research (e.g. Arrington, 2004; Inanga &\nSchneider, 2005; Macintosh, 2004). We agreed a process in which each of us in turn\nwould have one week to add a target of 300 words to a rolling document, going\nthrough the contributors alphabetically. After two rounds we would see what we had\ngot...