Is Accounting an Academic Discipline

1
Is Accounting an Academic Discipline?

• John C. Fellingham

2
What big intellectual ideas have accounting
researchers contributed to the university?

• Anthony Hopwood offered evidence that accounting
  journals are very internally focused and self
  referential
• Little evidence indicates that the contents of
  the many accounting journals are read or noticed
  by others in the university community.
• Do we document our contributions to academics, or
  explain why the thinking in math or physics or
  other disciplines is better because we are around?

3
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• The codification of accounting rules provides an
  alternative way to organize and frame the
  teaching of accounting.
• That is, we teach the rules (to prepare students
  for jobs), and de-emphasize our contribution to
  the academy.
• So in our teaching and, to a large extent, in our
  research, we emphasize the vocational, which is
  different from the academic thus, location of
  accounting at the academy is problematic

4
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• If we are providing job training (even though the
  training is university housed), then do we belong
  in the sacred halls of academe?
• That is sets up accounting as a citizen of the
  university with a separate and different kind of
  citizenship. This reduces accountings ability to
  speak as a respected source on university and
  scholarly matters.
• Absent well-respected scholarly contributions,
  accountings scholarly credibility is decreased

5
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• Other manifestations of vocational forces work
  against accountings possibilities for achieving,
  or preserving, full academic citizenship. For
  example
• Teaching of accounting is being done,
  increasingly, by instructors (clinical faculty)
• Enrollment in traditional accounting Ph.D.
  programs is declining.
• Nonacademic measures, such as student evaluations
  and school rankings, are increasingly being used
  to decide who teaches and what they teach.
• The evaluation of academic programs is shifting
  its emphasis to short-term revenue measures.

6
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• Profession program the emphasis is vocational,
  not academic.
• It seems that a dynamic academic discipline of
  accounting would well serve the accounting
  profession

7
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• For full academic citizenship, accounting must
  contribute not to us or to the current generation
  of students, but to the academy.
• Science, the contribution to the university, may
  be traded off against career management, because
  the objectives of career management and science
  may be incongruent.
• There would perhaps be less emphasis on the
  teaching of rules and regulations and more
  emphasis on scholarly independent thinking.

8
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• Is accounting an information science?
• Information is a word that is often used when
  describing accounting activities.
• If we wish to act as an information science, a
  plethora of relevant topics could be taught in
  accounting courses. And these topics could be
  researched.
• Note teaching and research are inseparable in
  an academic discipline.

9
Accounting Academic or vocational emphasized?

• What has this to do with academic accounting?
• As true academics we rely on interactions with
  colleagues if we are to make scholarly
  contributions.
• The word vocational comes back into play,
  treating an academic career as an individual
  exercise when
• We have gotten used to measuring individual
  accomplishments,
• Career management concerns are ever present.

10
End Notes

• The real university is not a collection of
  individuals orchestrating their own careers.
• In the real university, papers are written to
  share ideas with the community of scholars and to
  advance scholarship, not to get the paper
  published nor the author promoted
• Curriculum innovations occur to better the real
  university.