Accounting research is not keeping pace with the growing internationalisation of the world of
accounting practice. While accounting in action is now embedded in multi-national enterprises
and multi-national audit firms, and subject to emerging forms of supranational regulation, accounting
research still tends to focus on national contexts and thereby remains largely influenced by
national traditions and national schools of thought. One result is that we still have rather crude
notions of accounting diversity and the reasons for it, and rather minimal understandings of the
nature and forms of international pressures for change. Even where research insights into particular
national traditions of accounting exist, they almost invariably focus on a few Western countries
and uncritically reflect the perspectives of the observers rather than the observed. In the international
accounting literature we still seem to have more Anglo-American views of German accounting,
for instance, than internally probing insights into the nature and dynamics of the accounting
calculii of not only European countries but also China, Japan and other internationally significant
countries.
The proposed research conference aims to stimulate an alternative research agenda, one that is
explicitly internationalist in orientation, probing in intent, and interdisciplinary in outlook. The
conference aims both to argue for the importance of more internationally oriented forms of
accounting research and to produce thought provoking exemplars of what good research of this
type might look like.
Within its internationalist remit, the conference should have a broad agenda covering all
significant aspects of the subject. Amongst the topics it would be desirable to include are the
following: