Internationally, many academic institutions are nowadays concerned about the extent to which their faculty is ‘research
active’. As I have tried to show in this essay, this is also the case in Continental European institutions, where a focus on
measurable research outputs has become more pronounced in the last few years. The opportunities and threats that go along
with such a focus would suggest a need to come up with a ‘balanced’ approach to research orientation – one that
acknowledges both the emancipatory potential of different control and governance mechanisms and the risk of
compromising something valuable. Research orientation without regrets means that we do not give up the idea that
knowledge about accounting can be gained in a variety of ways, from different theoretical and methodological perspectives,
with a more global or local focus, with more or less engagement with the world of practice, etc. For individual academics, it
would be regrettable if they can no longer pursue what truly motivates or interests them, simply because the control systems