The challenges to and changes of accounting academia over the past several
decades gained sustained attention recently in the international literature. However,
much of the research with international visibility is focused on the context of
developed countries. The matters associated with journal rankings, the effects of assessment and evaluation practices , the relationship between accounting research and practice , and the academic life and
career are but a few of the issues addressed in prior literature, mainly in the context
of developed countries.
Calls have thus been launched to study the challenging academic environment of
developing countries (Samkin & Schneider, 2012). In the context of such countries,
there is some tension between the local culture and history on the one hand, and the
mimetic actions of following international models, on the other hand, which is
worthy of investigation in these settings. In a world characterized by global norms
and models, intensified exchange of students and academics, the local context
might still play an important role and impact the academic environment. For
example, Venter and de Villiers (2013) explain how the accounting profession
dominates academia in the South African context, and imposes rules and structures
that suit the profession. Albuetal. (2015) mobilize the specific problem of journal
rankings in order to discuss how the immediate adherence to international rankings
in Romania impacts national academics’ behavior. Various anecdotal evidence
exists in other emerging economies in general, and in CEE countries in particular,
of the perverting effects of journal and university ranking on the accounting
academic (including focusing on publishing in journals indexed in certain
databases not in international accounting journals, attending conferences that
produce large conference proceedings on paper with ISSN number, not necessarily
relevant accounting conferences, among others). Discussions have recently
emerged on whether focusing on such targets would contribute to increasing the
visibility of research conducted by researchers in emerging economies, or they
would rather stagnate in their local environments.
This special issue thus aims at bringing together papers reflecting the experience of
the countries in Central and Eastern Europe with regard to the changes in their
accounting academic environment, to give a more coherent regional perspective of
such processes.