The increasing use of research assessments and journal
rankings could also contribute to the general tendency
for accounting departments (and worryingly for business
schools more generally) to follow the mainstream, and
consequently for them to tend towards the norm and to
discourage research which deviates from that norm. This
can place severe constraints on creativity and innovation if
all accounting departments/business schools pursue similar
‘mainstream’ research agendas. This is rather ironic as
much of the strategy literature, which is usually a central
feature of courses within business schools, emphasises the
importance of product differentiation; something which
many business schools seem to want to avoid, at least in
their research.
As editors of Management Accounting Research, we will
to continue to welcome a broad range of management
accounting research, and we encourage researchers to be
creative and innovative. This does not mean that we do
not want to publish mainstream management accounting
research. We certainly do. A majority of the research
published in Management Accounting Research could probably
be classified as mainstream management accounting
research. But at the same time, we do not want to exclude
research which is different; research which questions
the mainstream; and research which adopts alternative
paradigms. This has been the particular strength of Management Accounting Research over the past 20 years, and
we would like to see it continue in the future. We would
also like to see ‘conversations’ across the paradigms, and
the use of mixed methods research. The emphasis of North
American mainstream accounting research on financial
accounting and the associated difficulties facing management
accounting researchers in the U.S. offers real
opportunities for researchers in Europe and elsewhere in
the world to take the lead in management accounting
research. Management Accounting Research stands ready to
help in this process.
To summarise, we would like to see further developments
in current research, both in the mainstream
and non-mainstream paradigms, but more particularly we
would like to see developments which are creative and
innovative—possibly in directions that we cannot anticipate
at the present time. It is only in this way that we
will be able to avoid the homogenisation and narrowness
which is claimed to be an increasing feature of mainstream
accounting research. When we get to the 30th anniversary
of Management Accounting Research, we hope the editors
(who are unlikely to be us) will be able to look back at the
third decade and to report on the diversity and innovativeness
of the high quality research published during the
Journal’s third decade.