The research stagnation problem: a review
The research stagnation problem in accounting academia is well documented. Essentially the problem can be
summarized as an aggressive narrowing of what constitutes legitimate accounting research. Ironically, however, many
mainstream U.S. researchers remain blissfully unaware of the debate and the research documenting the problem. This is
because the debate has occurred primarily outside the most prominent accounting journals and thus, as Reiter (1998)
suggests, many of the most prominent accounting researchers have most likely never even read them. Consistent with this
observation, Schwartz et al. (2005) find that doctoral students have limited familiarity with journals outside the premier
journals and familiarity is even lower among those in elite doctoral programmes.
In this section, we provide a brief overview of what is already well established in the literature, even if it is not yet widely
understood by the mainstream. We do not explore the details of this well established debate but refer interested readers to
the studies cited. We break our discussion into a review of published academic studies and published commentary. The
purpose is to identify what is already well documented prior to proposing a model for change.
Before turning to our review, we note, as prior researchers have done, that this problem is not an accounting specific
phenomenon. It is rather a manifestation of a much broader problem confronting the social sciences. Habermas (1971) refers
to the scientization of politics by which outcomes are cast as objectively derived from science and therefore beyond
challenge. This confers considerable power on those that control the prevailing science and curtails public debate. Seidman
(1996) suggests that science serves as a boundary marker that ‘‘signifies what talk of the social counts as knowledge and
therefore deserving of public authority and national resources’’ (p. 704) with other non-scientific discourses being relegated
to a position of inferiority. This science/non-science binary, he notes, confers considerable power on those whose discourses
are deemed to be science and subjugates those deemed non-scientific. Accordingly, this demarcation in accounting as to
what is acceptable and what is not acceptable science should not really surprise us. In many respects, it simply represents a
power struggle as to who controls the scarce resources available.