Why interdisciplinary accounting research tends not to impact most North American academic accountants

Abstract

Interdisciplinary accounting research (iar) has not impacted the north american academic accounting research community to any material extent. This commentary is intended to provide a north american perspective on why this situation exists and what might be done to change it. The commentary explains that in the eyes of so-called “mainstream” researchers iar research appears to suffer from one or more of three main problems—lack of relevance, questionable research contributions, and/or poor communication of findings. It is difficult to discern the contributions of even the best iar research. The commentary concludes by providing suggestions for making the contributions of iar research more easily recognizable by mainstream researchers.