Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 909914

Interpreting interpretive accounting research

Lee D. Parker
School of Commerce, The University of South Australia, Adelaide 5005, South Australia, Australia
Received 10 October 2006; received in revised form 2 February 2007; accepted 19 March 2007
Abstract
This paper comments on the debate amongst European scholars regarding the development, place
and role of interpretive research in the contemporary accounting research community and literature.
It locates the presence, place and distinctiveness of the interpretive and qualitative research tradition
in an increasingly unitary global accounting research community. Interpretive researchers are advised
to avoid emulating characteristics of the positivist research community and to meet the challenge of
going beyond critique to policy and practice engagement. The paper calls for a celebration and building
of theoretical and methodological pluralism in the interpretive research community, focussing upon
process, context and the embracing of complexity. Accounting researchers are challenged to continue
seeking the new and the risky. They are presented with the dual tasks of defending their tradition
while at the same time continuing to build its distinctive contributions to the accounting literature, all
the while retaining a commitment to understanding, change and making a difference.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The polyphonic debate amongst my European colleagues presents a welcome point
of reection in the development of a corpus of qualitative, interpretive, interdisciplinary
research in the accounting literature over the past 20 or so years. It is both surprising and
unsurprising that the introspections were initially driven by a desire for a shared intellectual
agenda that would permit clearer articulation of the achievements of interpretive research.
The surprise comes from the apparent yearning for some uniformity that belies the valu-
able contributions to knowledge offered by the very diversity of perspectives embraced and
sponsored by the interpretive research community. That this motivation is on the other hand
unsurprising, reects the circumstances of accounting and business academe internation-
ally. We are globally consumed by the unitary, typically North American, economic, and
E-mail address: lee.parker@adelaide.edu.au.
1045-2354/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cpa.2007.03.013
910 L.D. Parker / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 909914
positivist denition of acceptable research. It dominates academic tenure and promotion in
universities across North America, Europe, Asia and onwards, sweeping us up in a wave of
performance measurement myopia that includes the counting of everything: journal status
rankings, journal article citations, business school certication and branding (EQUIS and
AACSB), research grant quantum and more (Parker, 2002; Parker and Guthrie, 2005). In
the light of this veritable tsunami of research narrowing and commodication, the need to
ght for interpretive researchers place in the sun is entirely understandable.
Amongst my European interpretive colleagues reections, I detect a similar malaise
that I observed amongst a meeting of historical researchers at the 2005 Critical Manage-
ment Studies conference. Perchance this is a product of any introspection: self-critique,
self-doubt, and a wariness (or is it weariness?) of toasting with half-empty glasses. Despite
the distance yet to be travelled by our disparate research community, despite the monolithic
shadowcast by academes quantication obsession, and despite the goal displacement from
knowledge contribution to journal article hits (Gray et al., 2002), I remain passionate and
resolutely optimistic about our cause. The interpretive research community internationally
has in many locations truly arrived, carved out a niche and continues to develop an emerging
breed of scholars, research and contributions to our stock of knowledge. The difculty in
recruiting and retaining accounting academics internationally offers our research commu-
nity great opportunity! Despite the rhetoric of hiring, tenure and promotion criteria biased
in favour of North American economic positivist journals, the dearth of available account-
ing academics in many institutions has opened the doors to the prospering of interpretive
researchers (Parker et al., 1998). Thus in many universities, professors actual research pro-
les thankfully bear little resemblance to the narrow monolith propagandised by business
school certications and the persistent dreams of business school deans.
1. Naming the crevasses
In our dialogue within the interpretive community and our representations to constituen-
cies beyond, we need to be mindful of those risks that can undermine the very ends that we
seek. When we label ourselves as alternative, we reify the centrality of the functionalist
economic quantication ideology. When we refer to our communitys research as fractured
or exploratory, we undersell the depth and richness of the contributions to knowledge that
we offer. We must take care in both the prole we project and how we go about projecting
it to the wider communities we wish to engage.
In researching organisational, industry, professional, business and government practice
and policy, we need to address our own tendency to limit our scope to the investigation and
critique of what is, rather than addressing what could or should be. In our reluctance to risk
the unfashionable brand of normativism, we risk emulating our positivist cousins. In doing
so, we shall only reinforce accounting researchers contemporary penchant for observing
the action at a distance, bayoneting the wounded after the battle, offering no policies or
strategies for the future and leaving the practising community to forge new paths unaided
(Dey, 2002).
As critics of conventional wisdom and the status quo, we face increasingly difcult
challenges. The interpretive community has a strong tradition of presenting vibrant and
L.D. Parker / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 909914 911
challenging critiques of business, profession and government policies, practices and ide-
ologies. This is an essential role that falls to the dust if left to a positivist and uncritical
acceptance of current structures and processes. Nonetheless in maintaining our strident
rage against inequity, short-termism, social and environmental irresponsibility and more,
we risk becoming Monty Pythonish gures (viz. powerless protesters) standing outside
the moat, continually baying at the castle walls. If this remains our only strategy, we risk
becoming tolerated as customary background noise to the real business of accounting
research. Just as we directly engage with actors in our research sites, so we must forge mul-
tiple roles and paths for presenting our research amongst all communities of scholars and
practitioners.
Finally, in yearning for some greater recognition and impact in the scholarly community,
we must beware of the risk of becoming like the other from whom we seek to distinguish
ourselves and our contributions. Amongst the interpretivist dialogue, one can detect temp-
tations to yearn for commonly held theoretical positions, appealing for neat models and
solutions, seeking accumulated generaliseable insights, and desiring some unitary interpre-
tivist community image. Yet achieving these would inevitably diminish both the work we
present and the distinctiveness of the contributions to knowledge that we offer.
2. Our distinctive offer
We need to be clear about the fundamental strengths and contributions to knowledge that
we as an interpretive research community offer. We intensively focus upon the black box
of process that our economics oriented colleagues choose to ignore in their obsession with
predicting outputs from inputs. What they regard as incidental to accounting policy and
practice concerns, we regard as central (Dawson, 1997). Their statistically generaliseable
results rarely address the micro-issues of formulating policy and strategy and managing
processes within organisations. Our approaches to research offer the potential to address
an array of issues and problems about which little or nothing is known, if only because of
the garbage can approach to accounting research whereby many accounting researchers are
trained in methods and models they then employ in search of problems to solve, no matter
howtrivial. By way of postscript however, the interpretive community often sells itself short
on the question of generaliseability of its ndings, which can have greater implications than
we sometimes claim (Lukka and Kasanen, 1995).
Our theoretical and methodological pluralism and diversity gives cause for celebration.
It offers a rich tapestry of multiple perspectives and insights that mirror the complexity
of the world we seek to unpack, understand and change (Parker, 2004). For us, context is
the main game, rather than a distraction to be assumed away or dened out of the model.
Unlike our positivist colleagues who research their subjects at a distance, we interpretivist
researchers relish direct engagement at close quarters with the groups we are studying.
We embrace interaction and curiosity about their organisational and social worlds. Our
research reects the involved holistic tradition of direct, intense, and often prolonged con-
tact with the eld, researching live everyday activities and processes in their natural
settings (Ferreira and Merchant, 1992). Our data is collected at the scene of the action.
Ours is a concern to capture actors understandings from the inside, penetrating and cap-
912 L.D. Parker / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 909914
turing multiple constructed realities. Ours is a pursuit and celebration of complexity, depth,
detail, richness, texture and meaning (Ahrens and Dent, 1998). We grapple with a complex
world of culture, language, stories, symbols, perception, cognition, social conventions,
politics, ideology and power. We seek to experience, understand and critique structures
and processes of accounting and accountability. We offer to distinguish latent from mani-
fest, and to better understand and reconstitute what we thought we already knew (Parker,
2003).
3. The agenda
So what is the way forward for the interpretive research community? This European
scholars dialogue offers a wide spectrum of possibilities. There is doubtless a strong case
to be made for the development of meta studies that synthesise and draw oversights from
research to date, where that research has built a corpus of incremental studies. However we
would be wise to avoid creating a reied monolith that dees question or challenge, else
we recreate a Trojan horse within our own community.
Fromour various methodological and theoretical standpoints, we retain the capacity to do
far more in terms of layers of theory building and modication, whether through inductively
deriving theory or through theory driven eld study and critique (Humphrey and Scapens,
1996; Llewellyn, 2003; Parker and Roffey, 1997). But we can go further: subjecting our
theories tothe searchfor evidence of their manner of outworkingor appearance inaccounting
and organisational policy and practice (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Willig, 2001). As
the body of our published work has emerged and continued to grow, we need to become alert
to the risks of institutionalisation. It is all too easy to develop received and accepted research
topics, theories, methodologies, presentation styles and so on. The search for recognition
and status amongst the international accounting research community can lead us to an
emphasis upon theoretical depth, empirical rigour, and signicance of ndings (McKinnon,
1988; Silverman, 2000). All these characteristics are undeniably laudable, but if focussed
upon to the exclusion of all else, miss the greater opportunitythat of seeking the new,
the different, the risky, the dangerous. It is only through being prepared to support these
pursuits that we can maintain any interpretive research claim to uniqueness, novelty, and
breaking the mould!
Interpretive researchers debate whether to focus upon articulating our own unique offer-
ings or to address and counteract the monolithic, economic, and positivist research engine.
We have no choice but to do both. As researchers who specialise in contextualised inquiry,
we cannot ignore the social, political and institutional university contexts within which we
ourselves labour. The positivist economic research tradition, reied by increasingly perva-
sive institutionalised research performance measurement systems, are to be ignored at our
peril. For its survival, the interpretivist community needs the dialogues exhibited here, in
order to both develop and articulate its unique offerings and to clearly differentiate those
offerings from the other. That articulation and communication needs to be clearly and
repeatedly conducted. However in doing so, we need to clearly understand and target the
audiences we ought to address. While research colleagues from differing traditions remain
important targets, our acceptance and inuence will come from engagement (at which we
L.D. Parker / Critical Perspectives on Accounting 19 (2008) 909914 913
are supposed to be particularly competent) with the accounting profession, accounting prac-
titioners, students, the public sector, and community groups. This is entirely possible. There
is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that for example practitioners and students more
readily identify with and relate to the modus operandi and discourse of the interpretive
researcher. It is both a strength and an opportunity available to us. Ultimately it is the next
emerging generation of accounting academics and researchers that represent our strategic
priority.
4. The quest
Is there a holy grail? Probably not. But the hunt and the journey intrigues and delights.
In the midst of the research commodication maelstrom, there is one survivable difference
that interpretive researchers can hold onto. We do not undertake research solely to secure
journal article scores, tenure and promotion points, or personal status. We have a tradition
of undertaking research to contribute to societal and professional understanding and change.
We aimto make a difference to the communities outside academe. That alone gives us reason
for being. If we retain our passion for our world, its ecology, its societies and our profession,
and if we remain passionate about the new, and about making a difference, then despite the
challenges, interpretive research has a future.
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