The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in … · The winnowing away of behavioral...

www.elsevier.com/locate/aos

Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783–818

The winnowing away of behavioral accounting researchin the US: The process for anointing academic elites

Paul F. Williams a,*, J. Gregory Jenkins b,1, Laura Ingraham c,2

a Department of Accounting, Box 8113, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USAb Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,

Blacksburg, VA 24061, USAc Department of Accounting and Finance, 129 South 10th Street, BT 850, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192-0066, USA

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study of the most prolific publishers in the four recognized most prestigious jour-nals in accounting for the period 1963 through 1999. The focus is on learning whether the widespread perception thatbehavioral accounting research (BAR) has diminished in significance as a prominent paradigm in the US accountingacademy has any validity and to identify whether a new generation of US BAR researchers is emerging to join the aca-demic elite. Based on the characteristics of persons who have appeared as authors five or more times during the studyperiod, it seems that BAR is in recession in shaping the US academic agenda in accounting. The power of successfulindividuals to shape the academic agenda as evidenced by service on editorial boards of prominent journals is domi-nated by those individuals who are graduates of a set of elite schools utilizing a neoclassical economics based researchparadigm. The power of this group seems to be growing in the US. In spite of the interest in BAR among accountingdoctoral students and faculty, it is not a pursuit that now leads to academic status, which, in turn, diminishes its poten-tial contribution towards the shaping of the accounting academic agenda.� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

0361-3682/$ - see front matter � 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reservdoi:10.1016/j.aos.2006.07.003

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 919 515 4436; fax: +1 919515 4446.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P.F. Williams),[email protected] (J.G. Jenkins), [email protected] (L. In-graham).

1 Tel.: +1 540 231 2527; fax: +1 540 231 2511.2 Tel.: +1 408 924 3476; fax: +1 408 924 3463.

Introduction

Dyckman (1998) documented the ascendancy ofthe behavioral paradigm in accounting researchover the period 1978 through 1998. He noted thatin the two leading accounting journals (The

Accounting Review and Journal of AccountingResearch) the number of articles that rely upon a‘‘behavioral paradigm’’ has increased steadily over

ed.

mailto:[email protected]



784 P.F. Williams et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783–818

the 20-year period of his observations. In addition,the number of accounting faculty designatingthemselves as behavioral researchers has grown,as well as the number of schools who count amongtheir residents at least one behavioral researcher.Dyckman tempered this sanguine view of behav-ioral accounting research (BAR) with the acknowl-edgement that funding for such research hasdeclined and that it requires considerable resourcesto conduct meaningful behavioral research.

However, the number of persons employing aparticular paradigm or the number of facultiesthat contain behavioral researchers is not theonly, or necessarily most instructive, way toassess the status of BAR within the US academy.The ultimate test of any paradigm3 or researchprogram is the extent to which it defines the field,establishes the research agenda, or becomes a‘‘root metaphor’’ for the discipline (Crane,1972; Hagstrom, 1965; Kuhn, 1970; Mulkay,1979). The viability of a research genre in theserespects depends on the power its practitionershave to set the agenda, determine the contentof accounting knowledge, define the terms of suc-cess in the field, and control access to the elitestatus required to do so. The purpose of thispaper is to assess the current status of BARwithin the process of elite formation in the USaccounting academy. Specifically, we analyze theproductivity of individual scholars in Accounting,Organizations and Society (AOS), Journal of

Accounting and Economics (JAE), The Accounting

Review (TAR), and the Journal of Accounting

Research (JAR) for the period 1963 through1999. We determined who the elite have been,who the new elite are likely to be, and to whatextent this new elite are BAR researchers. Theresults indicate that the well-documented elitestructure of the US academy exists for BARresearchers as for the other elites but that struc-ture now makes BAR a much less likely avenue

3 ‘‘Paradigm’’ is the term used by Dyckman. We will try toavoid using that term and, instead, use the term ‘‘genre.’’Paradigm is a term popularized by Kuhn (1970), which heutilized with multiple meanings. Recently ‘‘paradigm’’ hasbecome a business ‘‘buzzword’’ bereft of content as is the casefor so many words subject to that fate.

to elite status within the US academy. Theincreasing hegemony of neoclassical economicsover the US academy threatens to reduce BARto Behavioral Finance Research (BFR) with thecorresponding loss from the lexicon of USaccounting discourse premises, concepts, andassumptions from other academic disciplinesbesides economics. We demonstrate how the eliteformation process proceeds in the US academythrough documenting the changes in BAR elitesthrough time. The economic imperialismdescribed by Reiter (1998) is evident in the pro-cess by which BAR elites are diminishing in num-ber and significance.

The remainder of the paper is presented infour sections. The next section is devoted todescribing the real significance of BAR toaccounting, defining what we mean by ‘‘BAR,’’and providing a brief history of the transforma-tion of the US accounting academy over the past40 years. Following this is a section describingour methodology, followed by the section con-taining the presentation of our analyses ofBAR elite formation. The final section containsour conclusions.

Overview of the problem

Why BAR matters: the significance of social

sciences to academic accounting

Accounting is a practice, a human activity con-structed from human values and intentions.Accounting is a social, not a natural, phenomenon(Searle, 1995). As we will discuss subsequently, asaccounting has become an autonomous disciplinewithin the academy, it has adopted various sche-mata, other than the schemata afforded byaccounting practice itself, to ‘‘explain’’ or describeaccounting practice. The disciplinary methods ofhistory, law, philosophy, mathematics, literarycriticism and, most notably, various social scienceshave all been employed to provide understandingsof accounting. In the US, social sciences in partic-ular have come to be regarded as a primary meansfor providing deeper, more reliable, and more rig-orous understanding of accounting. Principally,

4 Abbott speaks from the perspective of a sociologist; for thecase that economic phenomena are no exception to plurality,see Fullbrook (2001).

P.F. Williams et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783–818 785

the social sciences of economics, psychology,social psychology, and sociology have beenimported into accounting just as they have beenin all other business disciplines (all of which arealso practices), in order to provide scientific rigorand ‘‘scientific’’ understanding of these variouspractices.

However, the social sciences have not been asnotably useful to business practices as the naturalsciences have been to practices like engineeringand medicine. The value of the natural sciencesto practices lies in their success in prediction; pre-diction, in turn, enables the control that enablespractices like medicine and engineering to manipu-late the world to achieve their particular desiredoutcomes. Even biology and meteorology, whichare natural sciences dealing with exceedingly com-plex phenomena, have made notable strides indeveloping predictive theory. The social scienceshave been far less successful, i.e.,

After more than 200 years of attempts, onecould reasonably expect that there wouldexist at least a sign that social science hasmoved in the desired direction, that is,toward predictive theory. It has not. . . . Thesocial sciences appear unable to demonstratethe kind of progress which is to characterizenormal science (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 32).

The failure of the social sciences as normal sciencedoes not mean they are not worthwhile activitiesor that they do not lead us to useful understand-ings of social life. It is that social life resistsaxiomatization, a single theory, a univocal ap-proach. Andrew Abbott analogizes the difficultywith explaining social phenomena via a concepthe labels ‘‘syncresis’’. As Abbott puts it:

A syncresis is constituted of ambiguity; toseparate its parts is to destroy it. Syncresesthus do have the fractal character that theyreappear irrespective of levels of reduction.But unlike fractal distinctions they are notoppositions that subdivide, but oppositionsthat unify (Abbott, 2001, p. 43).

The problematic posed by syncresis for studyinghuman action is more prosaically described byFlyvbjerg (2001), i.e.,

The problem in the study of human activityis that every attempt at a context-free defini-tion of an action, that is, a definition basedon abstract rules or laws, will not necessar-ily accord with the pragmatic way an actionis defined by the actors in a concrete socialsituation. Social scientists do not have atheory (rules and laws) for how people theystudy determine what counts as an action,because the determination derives from situ-ationally defined (context-dependent) skills,which the objects of study are profi-cient and experts in exercising, and becausetheory – by definition – presupposescontext- independence (Flyvbjerg, 2001,p. 42).

Thus, the study of human action is inherently apluralistic one; one that is multi-vocal.4 As Abbottopines:

What do we expect when a syncresis or anyother inherently multi-vocal concept is stud-ied under a methodological manifold pre-suming univocality? Of course we expectdisorder and misunderstanding (Abbott,2001, p. 44).

The value of the social sciences to accounting doesnot lie in their power to predict, i.e., to permitengineering the world accountants have arbitrarilyroped off for themselves, but to provide multivo-cality to the study of accounting. The various con-flicts among the social sciences can serve asheuristics for developing new ideas germane toaccounting issues (Abbott, 2004). The social sci-ences provide accounting with languages withwhich to develop accounting’s conceptual struc-ture. Disciplinary languages represent different‘‘. . .metaphors and other linguistic tropes used ina discipline (that) coalesce into a more or lesscoherent knowledge structure that shapes how itsmembers and those they influence construe reality

7 Recently, Naim (2006) provided a practical example.Brazil’s former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (asociologist), bewildered by the conflicting advise from worldrenowned economists rejected their disparate advise yet stillmanaged to avert a financial crisis. As Naim observed abouteconomic science, ‘‘Surveying which economies had the bestprospects for success, Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman,concluded that in predicting superior performance, ‘luck seems


(Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005, p. 15).’’ Thetropes of the social sciences, because all of thesocial (and natural) sciences are value-laden(including economics (Katouzian, 1980; McClos-key, 1985)), also serve more than ‘‘scientific’’ pur-poses, e.g.,

The contemporary social sciences, despiteoccasional claims to the contrary, havenot done especially well as predictive sci-ences. One reason they nonetheless con-tinue to flourish is because they are aparticularly modern form of secular reli-gion, involving, in their own idiosyncraticlanguage, fundamental questions of whatkind of people we who are modern are(Wolfe, 1989, p. 7).5

That is social sciences ‘‘. . .still provide the vocabu-laries through which we express our ultimate con-cerns and thus articulate standards against whichcontemporary society might be judged (Brown,1989, p. 4).’’ Thus, BAR is a concern to accountingscholarship to the extent it constitutes competinglexicons with which to express some potentiallyinteresting and constructive things about the prac-tice of accounting.

Examples abound of differences in fundamentalvalue assumptions underlying the various socialsciences; indeed the existence of multiple social sci-ences is partly attributable to disparate valuejudgements. Psychology and economics are nota-bly at variance in their assumptions about whathuman ‘‘rationality’’ means vis-a-vis human action(Simon, 1986).6 Economics and sociology differ invalue assumptions about social objectives, e.g.,‘‘Economic theory is a prescriptive science; its eth-ical bias lies in its selectivity with respect to great,and equally important, social objectives (Katouz-

5 It is within the contemporary social sciences where the battlefor human nature is primarily being waged (Schwartz, 1986).

6 The recent popularity of laboratory economics and behav-ioral finance are either a belated recognition of psychologicaltruths by economists or the hegemonic impulses of economiststo co-opt psychological insights to retain dominance of thesocial sciences. The jury is still out.

ian, 1980, p. 156).’’7 Were accounting to succumbto speaking with only the voice of neoclassical eco-nomics it would gain next to nothing in practicalpredictive capability, but would lose significantlyin the scope of its capacity to understand itself.Our concern in this paper is to provide some evi-dence on whether the social sciences other thaneconomics are significant alternative discoursesavailable to describe, understand, and shape thepractice of accounting.

The problem of definition: what is BAR?

The ‘‘behavioral paradigm’’ referred to byDyckman (1998) pertains to a genre of accountingresearch that emerged about 40 years ago. It reliedupon theories adopted (and, to some extent,adapted) from the behavioral sciences other thaneconomics to provide explanations for accountingphenomena or to provide solutions to practiceproblems.8 Birnberg and Shields (1989) date thefirst appearance in the accounting literature ofthe term behavioral accounting as 1967. BARemerged out of the same circumstances that sawall of the business disciplines ‘‘scientize’’ andestablish their autonomy from business practice(Whitley, 1986). The mode for accomplishing thetransition of US academic accounting from prac-tice dependent to an autonomous positive socialscience was to adopt theories from the established

as key as economic policies.’ A science that relies on luck toexplain the fate of billions of people is a dismal science indeed(Naim, 2006, p. 2).’’ The appeal of economic theory has more todo with the ethical biases of economics than its explanatorypower. Eliding those ethical biases is made much more difficultwhen other ethical biases are free to enter the conversation.

8 More aptly it has been the experimental or positivistversions of the behavioral sciences other than economics thatcomprise the BAR genre in the US. So, for example,ethnographic studies are virtually non-existent in the US aspart of BAR, which is certainly not the case in accountingoutside the US.


social sciences and apply them in various account-ing contexts. Zeff (1978) and Flesher (1991) bothnoted the significance of the importation of socialscience theories into accounting to transformingthe form of accounting scholarship into that ofempirical social science. The empirical shifts madeacademic success in accounting increasinglydepend on one’s ability to perform the scholarlytasks typical of those types of social scientistswhose academic credentials were already wellestablished within the academy.

BAR emerged in accounting in multiple waysdepending upon which of the established social sci-ences were employed as the theoretical template.As Birnberg and Nath (1967) document, the earli-est BAR studies relied on sociological insights,notably about human behavior within organiza-tions. One of the earliest books within the BARgenre (Caplan, 1971) advocated modernorganization theory (March & Simon, 1958; Schiff& Lewin, 1970; Simon, 1957a, 1957b) as a modelfor accountants interested in managementaccounting. The early BAR work in accountingwas characterized by its emphasis on behavioralscience models and theories that did not sharethe traditional assumptions about human motiva-tion and behavior that characterize the standard,positivist neoclassical economic models. The inad-equacy of these standard economic characteriza-tions was famously described by Carl Devine(1960, p. 394): ‘‘On balance it seems fair to con-clude that accountants seem to have wadedthrough their relationships to the intricate psycho-logical network of human activity with a heavy-handed crudity that is beyond belief.’’ Historically,BAR has been the accounting academy’s responseto this shortcoming.9 BAR, as we will use the termin this paper, refers to this historical constitution,i.e., as relying on the methods and insights of thepositive social sciences other than economics,e.g., psychology, social psychology, sociology.

9 AOS was explicitly created to provide a medium throughwhich a broad array of psychological, sociological, organiza-tional, historical, etc. understandings of accounting could beencouraged and communicated (Hopwood, 1988).

To a large extent the term BAR has fallen intodisuse outside the US. The ‘‘behaviorism’’ conno-tations of the term, the limitations of the positivistversion of social science (Nonaka, 2006), and thegreater relevance of non-positivist methodologiesfor understanding organizational and sociologicaleffects of accounting, have made BAR an inaptdescriptor for much of the work pertaining toaccounting/human being interactions. In the USeven the insights of social sciences other thaneconomics are still limited to a rather narrowexperimentalism. Methodologically, BAR is, likeconventional economic applications, largely stillconfined to statistical causal modeling. We usethe term BAR advisedly, as a shorthand way todelineate US research that falls under Dyckman’srubric of ‘‘behavioral paradigm’’ from the neoclas-sical economics inspired research. The relative nar-rowness of ‘‘behavioral accounting research’’ inthe US, compared to that in the rest of the world,is certainly an issue, but one outside the purview ofthis particular study.

Of course there are still other modes of inquirythat have been applied in accounting for sometime, e.g., legal, historical, and philosophical.These modes are not included under the rubric ofBAR for purposes of this study. These non-socialscience modes of understanding are no longer ofany relevance to the academic agenda in the USsince their application is not an avenue by whichto achieve any notable academic reputation (Rod-gers & Williams, 1996).

Redefining academic success: the transformation

of the US academy

It is well documented that scholarly disciplinestend to be highly stratified, that is, they are hier-archic with a small number of scholars produc-ing the bulk of the discipline’s scholarship(Allison, 1980; Lotka, 1922). They are sociallyorganized (Whitley, 1984) and the form of orga-nization affects what passes for knowledge in thediscipline and also how academic success isachieved (Blisset, 1972; Bourdieu, 1988; Martin,1978; Whitley, 1977, 1984). As an academic dis-cipline in the US, accounting is likewise highlystratified. It is hierarchically organized in a


particular way and that organization affects whomay become a member of the scholarly elite withthe power to be a shaper of and a gatekeeper forthe discipline.

Fleming, Graci, and Thompson (2000) describethe transformation of the US academy via an anal-ysis of the changes that occurred in the nature ofarticles published in The Accounting Review duringthe period 1966 through 1985.10 Notable featuresof the transformation at TAR are the growth inthe popularity of financial reporting topics, thechange to quantitative/empirical methods from‘‘deductive’’ ones, the significant growth in influ-ence of the behavioral sciences, and the Universityof Chicago effect. The University of Chicago effectderives from the fact that of the most cited 19authors in TAR during the period 1966 through1985, 15 of them were graduates of or facultymembers at the University of Chicago (Fleminget al., 2000, p. 61).

The dominance of authors affiliated with theUniversity of Chicago, from the earliest period ofthe transition of academic accounting in the US,has significantly determined the nature of account-ing knowledge in the US. What happened to theaccounting academy had its parallel in finance.11

Whitley (1986) traces the transition of businessfinance from practice oriented to ‘‘scientific’’ tothe movement to make all business disciplinesmore scientific, which started after World War IIand gained significant momentum during the1960s. Whitley concluded (1986, p. 174), ‘‘Essen-tially, business finance had become transformedinto a branch of economics. . .’’ The result of thistransformation of finance into financial economicswas to lead the field of finance into having a pres-tige system that mimicked economics, i.e.,

Because the study of business finance becamedominated by academic economists, espe-

10 The Accounting Review (TAR) is published by the AmericanAccounting Association, which is the organization of account-ing academics in the US analogous, e.g., to the AmericanEconomics Association or the American Finance Association.TAR is the principal scholarly organ of the AAA and the oldestacademic accounting journal in the US.11 Ferraro et al. (2005) document this hegemony of neoclas-

sical economics has extended over all business disciplines.

cially economists adhering to traditionalneo-classical conceptions of economic theoryand analysis, the transformed field has devel-oped an intellectual organizational structurequite similar to orthodox economics (Whit-ley, 1986, p. 180).

This orthodox economics is most closely identifiedwith the University of Chicago program of Stigler-Friedman, which is ‘‘. . .characterized by faithfuladherence to Neoclassical economics and main-tained itself dead against the concept of marketfailures. . . (CEPA, 2005, p. 2).’’

Whitley (1984) characterizes the structure oforthodox economics as a ‘‘patterned bureau-cracy.’’ Academic disciplines are reputationsystems organized in various ways to produce dis-ciplinary knowledge and, consequently, academicelites. Whitley’s schema for classifying the organi-zational structure of disciplines relies on thedegree of four features of academic work organi-zations: functional dependence, strategic depen-dence, technical task uncertainty, and strategictask uncertainty (Whitley, 1984, p. 155). Becauseorthodox or neoclassical economics is atheoretically closed system (Chick & Dow, 2001)because of its mathematical formalization, theunreality of its premises (e.g., the nature ofhumans (Jensen & Meckling, 1994)) lead toexplaining nothing (Fleetwood, 2002), whichobviously makes it highly susceptible to empiricaluncertainties. Empirical reality confronts theorywith uncertainties that can cause great skepticismabout the fundamental orthodoxy. According toWhitley (1984), the analytical, closed structureof orthodox economics must be protected fromthe real economic world. This is accomplishedby partitioning the empirical realm of economicsinto bureaucracies whose function is not to testorthodox theory, but instead to apply orthodoxtheory to ‘‘explain’’ an expanding domain ofsocial phenomena. Fuller (1988, p. 284) describesthe function of orthodox economic theory in asimilar way:

And so, from being evaluated (emphasis inoriginal) by the facts as false, neoclassicaleconomics managed to end up evaluating

(emphasis in original) those same facts as


irrational. In light of the endless and oftenaimless debates in the human sciences, oneis tempted to conclude that, generally speak-ing, normative authority is the ‘‘higherground’’ to which disciplines retreat whentheir theories are in danger of empiricalfalsification.12

Reiter and Williams’ (2002) analysis of the crisisdocument produced by leaders of the US account-ing academy (Demski et al., 1991) indicated thatthe organization of the US academy parallels thatof economics, as well. Accounting as an academicdiscipline in the US is a bureaucracy of orthodoxeconomics – a sub-discipline of a sub-discipline.13

Transformative criticism (Longino, 1990; Pera,1994), the hallmark of scholarly disciplines whosereputation systems are organized to produce scien-

12 Economic science is as much ideology as science. Rosenberg(1992) characterizes it as ‘‘mathematical politics.’’ As a policyscience, economic ideas, values, and assumptions, because theyaffect actions and decisions, have the reflexive property ofbecoming self-fulfilling (Ferraro et al., 2005, p. 12). For anexample of how this reflexivity creates incoherent accountingpolicy see Ravenscroft and Williams (2006). The ideologicalcharacter of orthodox economics is epitomized in the Journal of

Accounting and Economics (JAE), the third of the US trium-virate of premier journals. JAE was created and currently editedby individuals that introduced principal/agent theory intoaccounting; both are physically and ideologically located inthe Rochester School named after William E. Simon. Roches-ter’s Jensen and Meckling’s (1978) published an article aboutthe threats to private property posed by government activism,which was a polemic designed to motivate political action fromthe business community. The transparent political agenda ofprincipal/agent theory is also evident in other works of theRochester school, e.g., Jensen and Meckling (1983, 1994),Watts and Zimmerman (1979). The business school at Roches-ter is named for William E. Simon who, for 23 years, waspresident of the John M. Olin Foundation, a principal fundingsource for right-wing causes. John J. Miller (a writer forNational Review, the conservative magazine founded byWilliam F. Buckley) notes that in 1977, ‘‘. . .Mr. Simon calledfor the creation of a ’counterintelligentsia’ (sic) to balance whathe saw as the liberal dominance of the universities, the newsmedia, non-profit organizations and government bureaucra-cies (Miller, 2005).’’13 Stephen Zeff in a personal correspondence with one of the

authors characterized accounting scholarship in the US as notbeing accounting scholarship so much as ‘‘about aboutaccounting’’ scholarship. Accounting research in the US isnow far removed from anything that resembles accounting’sfunction or concerns of its practitioners.

tific progress, is very limited in the US accountingacademy. Ascendance to the elite ranks in the USis largely determined by the ingenuity one demon-strates in interpreting accounting phenomena to fitthe neoclassical orthodoxy or interpreting neoclas-sical phenomena as being accounting phenomena.The sustaining feature of the neoclassical world-view in accounting is its ideological power, notits instrumental power for manipulating the worldvia its predictive success (Mouck, 1992; Rosen-berg, 1992; Stiglitz, 2002). This libertarian, neolib-eral ideology of neoclassical economics gives itimperialistic tendencies (Reiter, 1998). The imperi-alist tendencies of orthodox economics extend wellbeyond accounting, i.e.,

There is little doubt that economics has wonthe battle for theoretical hegemony in acade-mia and society as a whole and that suchdominance becomes stronger every year.This dominance is especially strong in Wes-tern countries, particularly in the UnitedStates, but is spreading rapidly over theglobe (Ferraro et al., 2005, p. 11).

Reiter (1998) dates the emergence of neoclassicalorthodoxy in accounting (what Beaver (1981)referred to as an accounting revolution) to theperiod ‘‘. . .between the 1966 Journal of Account-

ing Research Conference and the 1968 publica-tion of the seminal Ball and Brown study(Reiter, 1998, p. 145).’’ The importance of theJournal of Accounting Research (JAR) in affect-ing the dominance of neoclassical orthodoxy inUS accounting cannot be underestimated. JARbegan as a joint venture between the Universityof Chicago and the London School of Econo-mics and Political Science. In the first issue ofJAR the dean of the Chicago Graduate Schoolof Business and the Director of the LondonSchool issued a joint statement proclaiming themission for JAR. They said, ‘‘The Journal of

Accounting Research will be neither distractedby the need to deal with non-research mattersnor subject to limitations of research interest; itwill be able to concentrate on general issues,but also try to cover all such issues (Schultz &Caine, 1964, p. 1).’’ On the question of universitysponsorship they argued that:


A university is charged with the seeking ofknowledge for knowledge’s sake. Universitysponsorship permits a detached and long-range view of accounting developments notswayed unduly by questions of results. Inaddition it helps students of accounting prin-ciples to maintain close contact with studentsin economics, computational and statisticaltechniques, social psychology, and other aca-demic disciplines which may have alliedinterests (Schultz & Caine, 1964, p. 1).

JAR was conceived as a scholarly journal whosepurpose was to focus on a wide array of general is-sues, employing an array of research interestswithin a multi-disciplinary perspective. In addi-tion, ‘‘A magazine devoted to the disseminationof new developments and concepts in accountingis by its very purpose international (emphasisadded) (Schultz & Caine, 1964, p. 2).’’

JAR did not turn out as Schultz and Caine envi-sioned. Within just two years JAR began its rapidtransformation into the missal for neoclassicaldoctrine in US accounting. In Sidney Davidson’spreface to the JAR issue containing the papersfrom the 1966 JAR Conference, he stated that‘‘Accounting is singularly (emphasis added) con-cerned with the quantitative expression of eco-nomic phenomena (Davidson, 1966, p. iii).’’ Thisproclaims a quite pronounced narrowing ofaccounting as an academic discipline from thatimplied by Schultz and Caine. Davidson alsoadumbrated a positivist mission for JAR, i.e.,‘‘Accounting thought will develop more effectivelyby increased reliance on the testing of meaningful

(emphasis added) hypotheses. . .(Davidson,1966).’’ This first JAR conference broughttogether academics, practitioners, and personsfrom related disciplines.14 But as Reiter and Wil-liams (2002) demonstrated, practitioners and per-sons from related disciplines were eventuallyexcluded from participation and the only partici-pants at JAR conferences today are those whosescholarship reflects a neoclassical world view.

14 The year 1966 was also the year that the AmericanAccounting Association began both the Notable Contributionto the Accounting Literature Award and the CompetitiveManuscript Award.

JAR is now an extremely important shaper ofthe US academic agenda and consequentially aprincipal mechanism for identifying the academicelite. In countless studies of journal prestige (e.g.Bonner, Hesford, Van der Stede, & Young, 2006;Brinn, Jones, & Pendlebury, 1996; Brown & Huef-ner, 1994; Hasselback, Reinstein, & Schwan, 2000;Houghton & Bell, 1984; Hull & Wright, 1990;Nobes, 1985; Tahai & Rigsby, 1998; Schwartzet al., 2005; Zeff, 1996), JAR is always in the topthree. Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft, andNiemi (2000) cited 13 studies of journal rankingsto determine the top accounting journals for con-sideration in their study of the research prestigeof MBA faculties. They settled on only three:JAR, TAR, and JAE. In all of the work LarryBrown has done over the years investigating aca-demic prestige/stature, he has used only three USbased accounting journals as the definitive reposi-tories of quality accounting scholarship: JAR,TAR and JAE.

JAR’s influence on the oldest US academicjournal, TAR, is also quite significant. TAR wasfirst published in 1926. Until JAR’s creation in1964, TAR was the principal medium for publish-ing scholarly accounting papers in the US; fewaccounting journals existed (Williams & Rodgers,1995). In a study of TAR editorial boards, Wil-liams and Rodgers (1995) tracked the scholarlyprofiles of TAR editorial board members from1967 (the first year the names of editorial boardmembers were published) through 1990. In 1967,94% of the TAR editorial board had publishedin TAR, while only 12% had published in JAR(Williams & Rodgers, 1995, p. 276). By 199085% of the TAR board had published in JAR,but only 74% had published in TAR. TAR boardmembership was dependent more on success atpublishing in JAR than in the journal upon whoseeditorial board they were serving. The only otherjournals cited by more than 20% of boardmembers are Contemporary Accounting Research

(CAR) and JAE (Williams & Rodgers, 1995). Noother accounting publication outlets were impor-tant as success indicators for selection to theTAR board. JAR’s influence on defining qualityat TAR is evident when success at publishing inJAR is a more significant criterion for selection


to the editorial board than publishing in any otherjournal. Thus, all three US premier accountingjournals are infused with the same criteria of qual-ity, one of which is adherence to a certain politicaland economic orthodoxy.

15 The 15 schools are Illinois, Ohio State, Stanford, Texas-Austin, Minnesota, Washington-Seattle, Rochester, Chicago,Michigan State, California-Berkeley, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon,Wisconsin, and Iowa. Other programs that orbit more or lessnear this nucleus of elite schools are Northwestern, Indiana-Bloomington, Florida, Pennsylvania, NYU, Arizona, ArizonaState, and Penn State. Because of the increased dominance offinancial economics in accounting, Pennsylvania may shortly bea permanent member of the persistent elite. Graduates of anyother doctoral programs, US or non-US are not substantiveparticipants in determining the scholarly agenda in the US. Forexample, Brown’s (1996) citation study of accounting articlesidentified 26 ‘‘classics,’’ articles that have had the most influencein accounting over the past 30 years. Of these articles, 75% ofthem published in JAE, 97% published in JAR, and 95%published in TAR were by graduates of the elite-15.

The elite schools

The increasing dominance of US accounting bythe ideological commitments of JAR (and laterJAE) has been abetted by the existence of a setof academic institutions that have been historicallythe primary sources of Ph.D. educated faculty –the elite schools. It is no longer controversial thatall academic disciplines are stratified and a centralfeature of that stratification is a prestige hierarchyof academic institutions. All disciplines are oligar-chic and the creation and maintenance of these oli-garchies are political. Blisset (1972, p. 121)described the features of the hierarchic structure,i.e.,

These oligarchic characteristics, however, donot represent the fortuitous combination ofknowledge and skill, as the hagiographersof science suggest, but are largely the resultof structural features within the scientificcommunity itself. Elites do not happen; theyare created, and the chief creators are men atprestigious institutions who control (1)recruitment and membership into the highechelons of scientific work, (2) the flow ofcommunication, (3) appointments, (4) specialsubsidies, and (5) honorific awards.

The oligarchic structure of accounting in the US isabetted by the AAA, which doles out prestigethrough its awards, offices, journals, conferences,etc. (Lee, 1995). The organization of the Americanacademy facilitates this oligarchic organization be-cause the key to its structure is departments. Thesignificance of departments to the American uni-versity is described by Abbott (2001, pp. 125–126):

American universities compromised by creat-ing departments of equals. The Ph.D. degree,borrowed from Germany, became special-ized into a Ph.D. ‘in something.’ This specificdisciplinary degree provided a medium of

exchange between particular subunits of dif-ferent universities. There was thus completeda subsystem of structures and exchangesorganizing universities internally while pro-viding for extensive but structured careermobility externally, between institutions.Exactly coincident with this departmental-ization of the university was the formationof the national disciplinary societies, fromwhich academics gradually excluded theamateurs of knowledge, even though the lat-ter were often prominent among the socie-ties’ founders.

In accounting certain departments constitute anemployment network whose universities were thefounding members of the AAA (Lee, 1995, 1997,1999; Williams & Rodgers, 1995). Ph.D. candi-dates from these schools were employed as facultyat other of these schools initially because they werethe only schools awarding doctoral degrees. Wil-liams and Rodgers (1995) demonstrated the domi-nation of the editorial board of TAR by graduatesof a set of 15 of these schools.15 For example, in1967 when TAR first published the names of itseditorial board, 75% of the board were graduatesof the 15 elite schools even while their percentageof the population of Ph.D.s was only 59% (Wil-liams & Rodgers, 1995, p. 271). This percentagehas persisted, Avogadro’s Number-like for nearly40 years even as the elite percentage of the globalpopulation of Ph.D. degrees has declined. The per-centage of elite TAR board members reached alow of 48% in 1985 under the editorship of Gary


Sundem (Williams & Rodgers, 1995). Since then,however, subsequent editors of TAR have restoredthe proportion of elite school TAR board mem-bers to previous levels. For 2005 the proportionof elite school Ph.D.s on the TAR board was71%.16 Of the 74 persons comprising the TARboard in 2005 only three had degrees from non-US schools (Vienna, New England, and BritishColumbia) and only three (all with elite school de-grees) were domiciled at non-US schools (Water-loo, Queens, and Nanyang Tech.). Five of the sixeditors have elite degrees and four of the six(including the editor) are students of the coreorthodox economics sites Stanford, Chicago, andRochester.

These same elite schools also dominate author-ship in the leading US journals. For example,Rodgers and Williams (1996) documented author-ship in TAR for the period 1967 through 1993, thesame time period as their editorial board study.The same pattern exists for authors as for editorialboard members. Sixty-four percent of authors withaccounting degrees were elite school graduatesduring Trumbull’s term as editor. During the edi-torships of Zeff and Sundem this proportion beganto fall: 52% under Zeff, 47% under Sundem (Rod-gers & Williams, 1996). However, under Kinney’seditorship the elite school proportion began to riseonce again. By 2005, the proportion of elite grad-uate authors was 62%, back to where it was 38years before.17

School domination is also pronounced in theawards the American Accounting Associationgrants to acknowledge those persons producingthe ‘‘highest quality’’ research; these awards are avery visible stratifying mechanism. Of the 58 per-sons winning Competitive Manuscript Awards,81% have been graduates of the 15 elite schools.Of the Notable Contributions to the AccountingLiterature Awards that went to persons (a total

16 For JAR and JAE these percentages are even higher. InBrown’s (2005) recent study of the importance of circulatingpapers prior to publication, 81.4% of the individuals acknowl-edged by authors were graduates of the elite-15. It is not simplycirculating papers, but circulating them to the right people, i.e.,those who are powerful gatekeepers, that matters.17 Just as for editorial board members, these elite school

authorship proportions are higher for JAR and JAE.

of 75), 88% were graduates of an elite-15 school.However, most of the non-elite winners of thisaward occurred in the early years of the award’shistory. In the past 30 years, 96.3% of the winnershave been graduates of elite-15 schools. For theWildman Medal, of the 35 winners who are aca-demics 85.7% are graduates of elite-15. The mostprestigious AAA award, the Seminal Contribu-tions to Accounting Literature Award has beengiven for only four works comprising sevenauthors. Five of the authors are University of Chi-cago graduates; two are California-Berkeley grad-uates. All of the works have a University ofChicago graduate as its lead author. No foreigneducated scholar has ever won an AAA awardfor scholarship.

This persistent circumstance of school domi-nation is the norm in academe. For example,Yoels (1972) noted this same phenomenon inAmerican sociology and Klein (2005) in eco-nomics. As Yoels (1972, p. 160) observed aboutUS sociology, ‘‘. . .such schools are able to main-tain their positions of dominance within theprestige hierarchy of the discipline by virtue ofthe fact that they control the very process bywhich prestige is awarded.’’ So long as such ahierarchy is an organization that leads to pro-gressivity in knowledge production in the disci-pline, that organization is efficient. But if thatorganization is a prestige system per se, thenthe intellectual vitality of the discipline suffers.Reiter and Williams (2002) provide evidence thatin US accounting the situation is more thelatter.

BAR acquired a place in the prestige hierarchybecause of certain schools among the elite whereBAR, as Birnberg and Shields (1989) describedit, emerged as a reputable scholarly pursuit. Theseschools notably included Ohio State, Washington-Seattle, Texas-Austin, Illinois, and Carnegie-Mel-lon, where Stedry (1960) did some of the earliestwork in accounting using insights from psychol-ogy. JAR’s acceptance of accounting judgementresearch informed by the linear modeling work inpsychology and the heuristics work of Kahnemanand Tversky provided a prestigious outlet for BARscholars (Dyckman & Zeff, 1984). KPMG’s pro-gram of funding audit research also provided a


stimulus to BAR. The data we report below dem-onstrate that the imperialist tendencies of neoclas-sical economics have significantly altered the statusof BAR in the US academy. The power that theUS reputation system affords the neoclassicistshas relegated BAR scholarship to the peripherybecause ‘‘. . .power suppresses that knowledgeand rationality for which it has no use (Flyvbjerg,1998, p. 36).’’

18 That is, the awards are given to published works. Thoughpersons receive the awards, they receive them for specificpublished works or a collection of published work.

Methodology

Identifying the recent BAR elite

The objective of this study is to identify theemerging BAR elite to determine the extent thatBAR research remains an avenue for scholars toeffectively participate in the academic accountingconversation. The question is whether the currentstructure of the US academy is reproducing thequantity of BAR scholars whose prestige andpower is sufficient to affect the scholarly agendaand to sustain at least some substantive multivocal-ity to US accounting scholarship. Or is it now thecase that BAR is simply an appendix to anacademic body now largely transformed into asub-discipline of economics? Our inclination wasskepticism about Dyckman’s (1998) sanguineassessment of the ascendance of BAR within theUS academy. Anecdote and opinion suggest thatBAR is now marginalized in the US academy bythe economic orthodoxy just as more traditionalapproaches were a few years previously.

A most efficacious way to identify emergingelites is by identifying those persons who areacquiring intellectual capital via publications inthe journals acknowledged by the elite as the mostprestigious journals in the field. As Hargens (1988,p. 139) observed the academic journal is ‘‘. . .both ameans by which a community certifies additions toits body of accepted knowledge and a meansthrough which individual scientists compete forpriority and recognition.’’ Historically the primaryrole of the academic journal is to establish propertyrights over scientific knowledge (Merton & Zucker-man, 1973; Price, 1963; Ravetz, 1971). The practiceof citing, the opprobrium heaped upon plagiarists,

the illegality of violating copyright, all are explicitrituals acknowledging the proprietary claim ofthe original author. These claims, which throughpublication are explicitly endorsed by one’s peers,are essential if one is to achieve status in one’s field(see, e.g., Fuchs & Turner, 1986; Mulkay, 1979). Inthe US the American Accounting Associationbases its most prestigious awards (Seminal Contri-bution, Notable Contribution to the AccountingLiterature, and Competitive Manuscript Award)on publications per se.18 Bonner et al. (2006) notethe significance of the most prestigious journalsto individual success, i.e., ‘‘Publishing in the topjournals affects many facets of an accounting scho-lar’s career, including reputation (emphasis added),pay, and tenure and promotion (Bonner et al.,2006, p. 2).’’ In Bourdieu’s (1988) terms publishingin the top journals is how one accumulates one’ssocial (scholarly) capital.

The review process at academic journals is anarchetype of what Laclau and Mouffe (1985) referto as nodal points of discourse. Nodal points, orobligatory passage points (Clegg, 1989), are centralto the issue of problematization, which ‘‘. . .involvesthe attempt by agents to enrol others to their agencyby positing the indispensability of their ‘solutions’for (their definition of) the others’ ‘problems’: thisis achieved when these others are channeledthrough the ‘obligatory passage points’ of practicewhich the enrolling agency seeks to fix (Clegg,1989, p. 204).’’ The premier US accounting journalsare the passage points through which one must passto be admitted to the elite ranks of the society of USaccounting scholars. This social system, both a rep-utation system, but also potentially a system forproducing progress in the field of accounting, hasdeveloped ‘‘. . .rules governing relations of meaningand membership (Clegg, 1989, p. 226)’’ that ossifywith age. And, according to Clegg (1989, p. 226),‘‘Once a given configuration of an organizationfield has been stabilized, the pressures are such toreproduce it that way. . .’’ Thus analyzing whatgets published in academic journals through time

20 One may question why we are including JAE since it doesnot publish BAR. The reason is that our concern is with powerwithin the academy and the extent to which BAR provides thediscourses that condition how that power is wielded. Forexample, Birnberg, Hoffman, and Moser (1998, p. 4) observe:‘‘Thus, while current BAR in management accounting clearly isderived from agency theory, future research may again go off inother directions.’’ How is it that BAR began largely under the


provides significant insights into what the configu-ration of the accounting academy is and whetherit has ossified into a stable pattern of reproducinga predictable type of understanding.

In selecting the most prestigious journals forour purposes we resorted to consulting conven-tional wisdom. Numerous studies have been con-ducted over the years putatively to determinewhich accounting journals are the ‘‘best.’’ Weacknowledge that journal quality is a social con-struction determined by many factors and thatalleging ‘‘journal quality’’ is fraught with danger(e.g., Milne, 2002). The results of numerous studiesin the US of perceived prestige of US accountingjournals indicate there are three journals aboutwhich there is no overt public dissensus as to theirstatus – The Accounting Review (TAR), Journal

of Accounting Research (JAR), and Journal of

Accounting and Economics (JAE). In most studies,Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) isindicated as the fourth most prestigious account-ing journal (Bonner et al., 2006; Brinn et al.,1996; Brown & Huefner, 1994; Hasselback et al.,2000; Houghton & Bell, 1984; Hull & Wright,1990; Nobes, 1985; Tahai & Rigsby, 1998; Zeff,1996). A recent survey of UK accounting scholarsindicated that AOS was ranked as the number oneacademic journal, followed by TAR, JAR andJAE (Lowe & Locke, 2005). In the series of cita-tion studies conducted by Brown and his cohorts(Brown, 1996; Brown, Gardner, & Vasarhelyi,1989; Brown & Gardner, 1985a, 1985b) these fourjournals were the ones chosen to represent themedia through which the most prestigiousaccounting scholars delivered their works.19 Inaddition, the Social Science Citation Index, whichcontains very few accounting journals, includes acomplete citation history of these four journals.JAR, TAR, and JAE are significant as well in

19 The principal objective of Brown’s papers was to identifythe best accounting scholars, papers, or programs. The fourjournals were deemed to be sufficient to do that, i.e., no onecould be a prominent scholar who was not published in one ofthese four journals.

establishing the prestige of business schools.20 Tri-eschmann et al. (2000) cited 13 studies of journalrankings for determining the list of accountingjournals for determining the research prestige ofMBA faculties. They settled on only three: JAR,TAR, and JAE. A study by Schwartz, Williams,and Williams (2005) found that US doctoral stu-dents’ familiarity with accounting journals wasdiverse across doctoral programs except for threejournals – JAR, TAR, and JAE; there is universalfamiliarity with these three journals across doc-toral programs in the US. A principal indicatorof a scholar’s prestige is the extent to which herpeers cite her work. Citation-wise an accountingscholar is invisible to the larger community ofaccounting scholars unless one publishes in TAR,JAR, JAE, or AOS. The institutionalized percep-tion of research quality is dominantly influencedby the extent to which scholars have published inthese four journals.21

For the four journals we compiled a list of everyperson who appeared as an author for the period1963 through 1999. This comprises the ‘‘modern’’period of accounting scholarship when positivistsocial science established itself as the paradigmaticmanner of constructing scholarly texts in account-ing, at least in the US. To identify the most produc-tive scholars, i.e., the potential pool of those who arelikely to become elite influencing the scholarlyagenda, we selected individuals who appeared fiveor more times as an author in the four journals com-

influence of Herbert Simon, only to end up under the influenceof Jensen and Meckling? JAE has been instrumental inestablishing the principal/agent model as the sine qua non ofhow to understand human behavior in organizations. We areconcerned about power, not merely about individual scholar’saccess to journals.21 For example, of the AAA Notable Contribution Awards

that were bestowed on journal publications, 17 were publishedin TAR, 8 in JAR, 7 in JAE, and 1 each in AOS, Contemporary

Accounting Research, and Journal of Accountancy. The eliteschool dominance also is evident, as we have previously noted.


bined for the period 1963 through 1999. We made noadjustments for co-authorship; that is, we countedappearances, not equivalent articles. Five wasselected as the cut-off number because, based onLotka’s law (1922), it would capture only the top5–10% of most productive scholars (see also Rod-gers & Williams, 1996). As the number of appear-ances decreases from five, the number of authorsgrows rapidly. The conclusions we reach from ouranalysis are not sensitive to the number of publica-tions being six or four. For each decade (1960s,1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) we identified all individualswith five or more publications. This allowed us toidentify an emergent group of potentially elite schol-ars for each decade during the modern period.

For the individuals with five or more appear-ances in the decade of the 90s we compiled someadditional metrics that we used in our analyses ofthe new BAR elite. A power index was calculatedfor each person similar to the one utilized by Wil-liams and Rodgers (1995) to ascertain the degreean individual was involved in the gate keeping pro-cess at the four journals. An individual receivedone point for each year he or she was a memberof one of the four journals’ editorial boards duringthe period 1963 through 2000. For example, ifsomeone was a member of the editorial board ofTAR and AOS in 1991 that person received twopoints. Two points were assigned for each year thatsomeone was an associate or consulting editor sincegate keeping power is greater because these individ-uals participate in deliberations on more papers ina given year. Four points were awarded for beingan editor of one of these journals since the editorhas great gate keeping power since he or she ulti-mately decides which papers are reviewed, whodoes the reviewing, and which papers are acceptedfor publication. Both total score and average yearlyscore (total score divided by (2000 � year of receiv-ing Ph.D.)) were determined for each person.

We also did a literature profile for each person.From the bibliographies of all papers publishedduring the decade of the 1990s (1990 through1999), we counted the total citations to academicjournals by the discipline represented by each jour-nal. We ignored citations to books, reports, work-ing papers, government documents, newspaper ormagazine articles, etc. Our interest was in identify-

ing what other disciplines informed the authors asthey constructed their papers. The omission ofbooks is, admittedly, a shortcoming because somedisciplines, e.g., history or philosophy, use booksas a dissemination medium to a greater extent thanother disciplines. This is a more significant prob-lem for authors publishing in AOS since authorsin AOS tend to cite many more books than doauthors in the other three journals. However, sinceour focus is on BAR, a singular focus on journalsis sufficient to capture what we need. The disci-pline categories that were cited at least once were:Economics, Finance, Management/Administra-tion, Marketing, Sociology, Psychology, Statistics,Law, Personnel, Political Science, Engineering,Mathematics, Science, Demography, Medicine/Health Care, Public Relations, Communication,Design/Art, Anthropology, Computer/ArtificialIntelligence, Education, Archeology, Philosophy,Humanities/Literature, and History. Accountingborrows from many disciplines, however, most ofthese disciplinary categories were cited only byauthors publishing in AOS. Of the above list 12disciplines were cited only in AOS. The bibliogra-phies in TAR, JAR, and JAE were more limited inthe range of disciplines consulted.

Based on these counts, we developed a disciplin-ary profile for each person, which consisted of thenumber of times a journal from a particular disci-pline was cited divided by the total citations madeto all journal articles cited. We also included cita-tions to the four journals and a category ‘‘all otheraccounting’’ journals. Thus, for each individual theprofile consisted of the percentage of citations toliterature published in journals for each of TAR,JAR, JAE, AOS, other accounting journals,and various other disciplines. For example,Joni Young published five papers, all in AOS. Herprofile was (percentages less than 1% were treatedas zeros): TAR – <1%; JAR – 0%; JAE – 0%;AOS – 28.3%; other accounting – 28.3%; Econom-ics – <1%; Finance – 14.2%; Mgt./Adm. – 10.4%;Sociology – 5.7%; Political Science – 1.9%;Public Relations – <1%; Communications – 2.8%;Design/Art – 5.7%. These profiles were cluster ana-lyzed to determine how similar or dissimilar theauthors were and to determine how many differentidentifiable clusters there were based on the source

Table 1Publications by emergent behavioral elite by decade

Author Ph.D. schooland year

Appearances in:

JAE JAR TAR AOS

1960s

Birnberga Minnesota, 62 0 0 6 0

1970s

R. Ashtona Texas, 73 0 2 4 0Chesleya Ohio St., 73 0 4 1 0Flamholtza Michigan, 69 0 1 2 2

a


literatures utilized by the authors. We are interestedin determining groups of scholars who are similar ordissimilar to other groups. These groups constituteresearch genres, which are, in turn, research interests

(in the range of senses of the word interest), successat which garners prestige. The results of the variousanalyses follow. Two analyses are presented below.One was for the emergent elite prior to the 1990sand a more extensive analysis for those that emergedin the 1990s.

Kinney Michigan St., 68 0 7 2 1Libbya Illinois, 74 0 4 1 1Lusk Northwestern, 72 0 2 4 0Mocka Berkeley, 69 0 2 2 1Rhodea Minnesota, 69 0 0 2 3

1980s

A. Ashtona Texas, 79 0 3 2 0Caseya Ohio St., 78 0 3 3 0Chow Oregon, 81 0 0 8 0D. Cooper Manchester, 79 0 0 0 5Covaleski Penn State, 79 0 0 0 6Dirsmith Northwestern, 75 0 0 0 6Dyckmana Michigan, 62 0 4 1 2Ferrisa Ohio St., 74 0 0 2 6Hiltona Ohio St., 77 0 4 1 0A. Hopwooda Chicago, 71 0 0 0 5Jiambalvoa Ohio St., 77 1 1 2 3Kida Massachusetts, 78 0 5 0 1B. Lewis Penn St., 78 0 4 1 4Merchanta Berkeley, 78 0 0 2 3Panya Illinois, 78 0 4 1 0Pratt Indiana, 77 0 1 2 3Reckersa Illinois, 78 0 2 3 2Shields Pittsburgh, 78 0 2 1 8Snowballa U. of

Washington, 750 0 3 2

I. Solomona Texas, 79 0 2 3 2Swieringaa Illinois, 69 0 3 1 3Trotman New South

Wales, 840 3 1 2

Ueckera Texas, 73 0 5 4 1Wallera U. of

Washington, 810 4 1 5

A. Wright U. ofS. California, 79

0 1 3 1

a

Presentation of the analyses

Pre-1990 elites

Table 1 contains lists by decade through 1989 ofBAR scholars that emerged via five or more pub-lications in the four journals. We identifiedwhether someone was a BAR scholar in the man-ner similar to that utilized by Dyckman (1998). Ifthe person indicated behavioral as a research inter-est in Hasselback’s Directory (2002) we classifiedthem as a BAR researcher. In addition, weinspected the titles, abstracts, and bibliographiesof the articles to determine if they were consistentwith what constituted BAR research as we definedit based on the description provided by Birnbergand Shields (1989). Only one genuine BAR scholaremerges in the 1960s: Jacob Birnberg. Many of theindividuals who appeared five or more times in theperiod 1963 through 1969 were persons who werecontinuing their careers from the pre-positivesocial science era or were not utilizing positivesocial science models in their work, e.g. Chambers,Staubus, and Brief. Obviously, JAE and AOS didnot yet exist. The emergence of the neoclassicistsoccurs during this same period. Birnberg is joinedby four economics elite – Beaver, Demski, Ijiri,and Dopuch. They (except Ijiri),22 unlike Birnberg,

Denotes elite school graduate.

22 Unlike Beaver, Demski, and Dopuch, it could be arguedthat Ijiri is not within the neoclassical category. That is a validobservation. Ijiri resists easy classification since he brings toaccounting perspectives, e.g., legal, mathematical, that are quitedifferent from the perspectives of the other three persons. Itshould be noted that Ijiri is the only one of the four‘‘economists’’ not still publishing in elite journals during the1990s.

appear later on our list of most prolific publishersin the 1990s as well. Each of these neoclassicistshas won at least one Notable Contribution to theLiterature Award and one (Beaver) has receivedthe Seminal Contribution Award. Three of theseindividuals (Beaver, Demski, and Ijiri) became

Table 2Power indexes for 1980s emergent behavioral elite (post-2000index in parentheses)

Author JAE JAR TAR AOS Total

A. Ashtona 0(0) 0(0) 2(0) 0(0) 2(0)Caseya 0(0) 0(0) 1(0) 0(0) 1(0)Chow 0(0) 0(0) 4(3) 7(2) 11(5)D. Cooper 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 33(5) 33(5)Covaleski 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 6(5) 6(5)Dirsmith 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 16(5) 16(5)Dyckmana 10(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 14(0)Ferrisa 0(0) 0(0) 5(0) 11(0) 16(0)Hiltona 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 0(0) 8(0)A. Hopwooda 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 92(20) 92(20)Jiambalvoa 0(0) 0(0) 11(5) 0(0) 11(5)Kida 0(0) 0(0) 3(0) 0(0) 3(0)B. Lewis 0(0) 18(0) 9(0) 8(0) 35(0)Merchanta 0(0) 0(0) 10(1) 15(5) 25(6)Panya 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0)Pratt 0(0) 0(0) 12(5) 0(0) 12(0)Reckersa 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0)Shields 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 24(10) 32(10)Snowballa 0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)I. Solomona 0(0) 0(0) 9(0) 6(3) 15(3)Swieringaa 0(0) 22(0) 19(0) 15(0) 56(0)Trotman 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 7(5) 15(5)Ueckera 0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)Wallera 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 5(0) 13(0)A. Wright 0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)

a Denotes elite school graduate.


president of the AAA and the other (Dopuch)became the editor of JAR.

During the next decade, the number of BARscholars increases. There were 30 persons in all,eight were BAR (27%), 22 not BAR. All butone of the BAR scholars were graduates of eliteschools, even though Northwestern (Lusk) isone of the schools that was mentioned previ-ously as a ‘‘non-persistent’’ elite. All of theseindividuals published in JAR and/or TAR.None of them appear on the list purely by vir-tue of success at publishing in AOS. In the1980s the number of emergent BAR scholarsincreases to 25. AOS came into existence in1976, which provided more opportunity forBAR scholars to publish their work. There werea total of 73 emergent scholars during the 1980sso BAR scholars represented 34% of the total.Of the 25, 21 published in JAR and/or TAR(84%). Only 4 of the individuals appear exclu-sively because of AOS. The number of non-elitegraduates is 10 (40%), which might be expectedgiven the substantial increase in the number ofdoctoral programs created in the 1960s and1970s. Through the 1980s the leading US jour-nals sustained a BAR elite and enabled it togrow slightly proportionally to the non-BARelite.

In order to provide some additional context forthe analysis of the 1990s elite to follow, we focusedattention on the individuals who emerged in the1980s. This group would by now be in the middleage of their careers when we could expect them tobe participating fully as shapers of the scholarlyagenda and performing significant gate keepingfunctions. Table 2 contains power index scoresby journal for BAR scholars that emerged duringthe 1980s. A number of these individuals achievedsome high index numbers other than just by virtueof AOS (obviously Hopwood’s number is hugesince he is the founder and only editor of AOS).But service to AOS is not the only source of highscores. Hilton, Jiambalvo, Lewis, Merchant, Pratt,Shields, Soloman, Swieringa, Trotman, and Wallerall were a significant presence on the boards of USjournals. However, the number of those individu-als serving on boards of US journals after 2000has dropped quite significantly. In parentheses

beside each score are the scores for each journalfor these persons post-2000. Only two have pro-vided continuing service on TAR’s board (Jiam-balvo and Pratt) and none now serve on the JARboard. Though seven of the non-BAR elite whoemerged during the 1980s still serve on the JARboard, none of the emergent BARs continue. Thisstrongly suggests that something happened duringthe 1990s that changed the prospects for BARresearch as a potential shaper of the discipline. Itis to that we turn our attention.

The 1990 elites

During the period 1990 through 1999, 83 peopleappeared five or more times as authors in JAE,JAR, TAR, and AOS combined. These individualsare listed in Table 3. These persons include indi-viduals who emerged as prominent scholars manyyears prior to this period and their appearance in

Table 3Authors with five or more appearances in JAE, JAR, TAR, and AOS 1990 through 1999 (elite-15 in italics)

Author Ph.D. school and year Appearances in: Power index

JAE JAR TAR AOS Total Per year

Abernathy Latrobe, 89 0 0 0 5 0 0Ali Columbia, 87 2 2 1a 0 3 0.23Amir Berkeley, 91 1 2 3 0 0 0Baiman Stanford, 74 1a 4a 3a 1a 83 3.19Banker Harvard, 80 2 0 4 0 0 0Barth Stanford, 89 4 3 5a 0 12 1.10Bartov Berkeley, 89 2 0 3 0 0 0Beaver Chicago, 65 4a 0a 2a 0 111 3.17Bloomfield Michigan, 92 0 1 3a 1a 8 1.00Bonner Michigan, 88 0 2 5a 2a 17 1.42Bushman Minnesota, 89 2 4a 1a 0 12 1.10Chow Oregon, 81 0 0 0a 7a 11 0.58Chua Sheffield, 83 0 0 0 5a 6 0.35Clinch Stanford, 88 3 2 1 0 0 0Collins, D. Iowa, 73 3a 0 2a 0 59 2.19Collins, J. Florida, 83 1 3 1a 0 10 0.59Cooper, D. Manchester, 79 0 0 0 5a 33 1.57Covaleski Penn State, 79 0 0 0 6a 6 0.29Cready Ohio State, 85 2 1 2a 0 3 0.20Datar, S. Stanford, 85 1 2 4a 0 6 0.40Dechow Rochester, 93 4 1 2a 0 5 0.71DeFond Washington, 87 4 0 1a 0 1 0.08Demski Chicago, 67 1 5 2a 0 21 0.64Dirsmith Northwestern, 75 0 0 0 9a 16 0.64Dopuch Illinois, 61 2 2a 2a 0 149 3.82Dye Carnegie Mellon, 80 2a 4a 2 0 43 2.15Elgers Maryland, 78 1 3 1a 0 3 0.14Feltham Berkeley, 67 4a 1a 2a 0 70 2.12Francis, Jen. Cornell, 87 2a 7a 1a 0 17 1.31Gaver, Jen. Arizona, 86 2 1 2a 0 2 0.14Gaver, K. Carnegie Mellon, 74 2a 1 3a 0 20 0.77Gigler Minnesota, 92 0 4a 1a 0 9 1.13Guenther Washington, 90 3 0 2a 0 1 0.10Hand Chicago, 87 2 2 3a 0 4 0.31Harris, T. Washington, 83 1 6 1a 0 5 0.29Harrison, G. Macquerie, 90 0 0 0 5 0 0.00Hemmer Odense, 90 4a 2a 1 0 5 0.50Holthausen Rochester, 80 4a 0a 1a 0 73 3.65Hughes, J.S. Purdue, 74 3a 1 1a 0 25 0.96Indjejikian Pennsylvania, 89 3 4a 1a 0 14 1.27Ittner Harvard, 92 0 3 1a 2 4 0.50Kang, S.-H. MIT, 88 2 3 1a 0 3 0.25Kennedy Duke, 92 0 4 1 0 5 0.63Kim, O. Pennsylvania, 90 3 1 1 0 0 0King, R. Arizona, 86 2 1 2a 0 3 0.21Koonce Illinois, 90 0 3 1a 1 7 0.70Kothari Iowa, 86 5a 1 2a 0 35 2.50Lang Chicago, 90 1 6 1a 0 4 0.40Larcker Kansas, 78 3a 7a 1a 1a 59 2.68Lev Chicago, 68 2a 4a 2a 0 73 2.28Libby Illinois, 74 0 6a 3a 4a 54 2.08Lundholm Iowa, 87 0 3 3a 0 7 0.54


Table 3 (continued)

Author Ph.D. school and year Appearances in: Power index

JAE JAR TAR AOS Total Per year

Lys Rochester, 82 4a 1 0a 0 31 1.72Maydew Iowa, 93 2a 2 1 0 2 0.29McNichols UCLA, 84 2 2 1a 0 12 0.75Melumad Berkeley, 85 1 4 0a 0 2 0.13Miller, P. London, 83 0 1 0 7a 29 1.71Nelson, M. Ohio State, 90 0 1 7a 2a 18 1.80Neu Queens, 89 0 0 0 7 0 0Ohlson Berkeley, 72 1a 4a 2a 0 50 1.79Penno Northwestern, 82 0 2a 4a 0 15 0.83Potter Wisconsin, 86 2 1 1 1 0 0Power, M. Cambridge, 84 0 0 0 5a 10 0.63Pratt Indiana, 77 0 2 3a 2 12 0.52Preston Bath, 82 0 0 0 5a 10 0.56Rajan Carnegie Mellon, 90 0 4 4a 0 5 0.50Reichelstein Northwestern, 84 1 2 2a 0 3 0.19Robson Manchester, 88 0 0 0 5 1 0.08Shackelford Michigan, 90 4a 2 1a 0 19 1.90Shevlin Stanford, 86 2 2 1a 0 13 0.93Shields, M. Pittsburgh, 78 0 1 0a 4a 29 1.32Sivarama-krishnan Northwestern, 88 0 3 4 0 0 0Skinner Rochester, 89 5 2 1a 0 19 1.73Sloan Rochester, 92 7a 1 4a 0 6 0.75Tan Michigan, 92 0 4 0 1 0 0.00Trotman New South Wales, 84 0 1 1a 3a 15 0.94Verrechia Stanford, 76 6a 4a 3a 0 62 2.58Wang, S.W. Michigan, 88 2 0 3 0 0 0.00Watts Chicago, 71 1a 2a 2 0 116 4.00Waymire Chicago, 84 0 3 2a 0 4 0.25Wild, J.J. Wisconsin, 83 1 2 2a 0 5 0.29Young, J. Illinois, 91 0 0 0 5 0 0.00Zimmerman Berkeley, 74 3a 0 2 0 88 3.38

a Denotes service on editorial board.


Table 3 is testament to their continued activity.There are persons who received their doctoratesin the decade prior to 1990 and there are some thatreceived their doctorates post-1990. Degree datesrange from 1961 to 1992.

Cursory inspection of Table 3 confirms the con-clusion that AOS is much more dissimilar to theUS journals than they are to each other. That is,the US journals do not represent distinctly differ-ent literatures; they are complementary, whereasAOS represents a distinctly different literature(Lee & Williams, 1999; Lowe & Locke, 2005). Thisis evident from the number of zeros in the AOS

column relative to those in the US journal col-umns. People who publish prolifically in AOS tend

not to publish in the US journals, while peoplewho publish in one of the US journals tend to pub-lish in one or more of the others 42 (50.6%) of the1990 elites published in all three US journals.However, 14 (53.8%) of those who published inAOS published at least one article in a US journal.But only 3 (7.1%) of those who published in allthree US journals were able to publish at leastone article in AOS.

Cluster analyses of bibliographic profiles alsoconfirm the distinction between AOS and the USjournals. Table 4 contains the results of clusteranalyses based on bibliographic profiles for vari-ous numbers of cluster solutions to illustrate whena reduction of groupings results in one group

Table 4Cluster membership for authors for three to six cluster solutions

Author Cluster membership

Cluster three Cluster four Cluster five Cluster six

Abernathy 1 1 3 3Ali 3 4 5 4Amir 3 4 5 4Baiman 3 3 4 5Banker 3 4 5 6Barth 3 4 5 4Bartov 3 4 5 6Beaver 3 4 5 4Bloomfield 3 3 4 5Bonner 2 2 2 2Bushman 3 3 4 5Chow 1 1 3 3Chua 1 1 1 1Clinch 3 4 5 4Collins, D. 3 4 5 4Collins, J. 3 3 4 6Cooper, D. 1 1 1 1Covaleski 1 1 3 3Cready 3 4 5 6Datar, S. 3 3 4 5Dechow 3 4 5 4DeFond 3 4 5 4Demski 3 3 4 5Dirsmith 1 1 3 3Dopuch 3 3 4 5Dye 3 3 4 5Elgers 3 4 5 4Feltham 3 4 5 6Francis, Jen. 3 4 5 6Gaver, Jen. 3 4 5 4Gaver, Ken 3 4 5 4Gigler 3 3 4 5Guenther 3 4 5 6Hand 3 4 5 6Harris, T. 3 4 5 6Harrison, G. 1 1 3 3Hemmer 3 3 4 5Holthausen 3 4 5 4Hughes, J.S. 3 4 5 6Indjejikian 3 3 4 5Ittner 1 1 3 3Kang, S.-H. 3 4 5 4Kennedy 2 2 2 2Kim, O. 3 4 4 6King, R. 3 3 4 5Koonce 2 2 2 2Kothari 3 4 5 4Lang 3 4 5 6Larcker 3 3 4 5Lev 3 4 5 6Libby 2 2 2 2Lundholm 3 3 4 6


Table 4 (continued)

Author Cluster membership

Cluster three Cluster four Cluster five Cluster six

Lys 3 4 5 4Maydew 3 4 5 6McNichols 3 4 5 6Melumad 3 3 4 5Miller, P. 1 1 1 1Nelson, M. 2 2 2 2Neu 1 1 3 3Ohlson 3 4 5 6Penno 3 3 4 5Potter 2 2 2 2Power, M. 1 1 1 1Pratt 2 2 2 2Preston 1 1 1 1Rajan 3 3 4 5Reichelstein 3 3 4 5Robson 1 1 1 1Shackelford 3 4 5 6Shevlin 3 4 5 4Shields, M. 1 1 3 3Sivaramakrishnan 3 3 4 5Skinner 3 4 5 4Sloan 3 4 5 4Tan 2 2 2 2Trotman 2 2 2 2Verrechia 3 4 4 6Wang, S.W. 3 4 5 4Watts 3 4 5 4Waymire 3 4 5 6Wild, J.J. 3 4 5 4Young, J. 1 1 1 1Zimmerman 3 4 5 4


joining another. It is clear from Table 4 that thereare substantively only three groups: an AOS

group, a US BAR group, and an economics/finance group, which is by far the largest. The moststable affinity is the US BAR group, since the indi-viduals in this grouping remain together in everysolution. The final cluster centers, i.e., the averageprofile of all members in the clusters, for the 6-group solution are presented in Table 5. Thesedata indicate that the AOS group contains twosubgroups: both are similar except that one citesmanagement/administration literature while theother cites other accounting journals more heavily.Both cite sociology, but the management groupcites psychology, as well. The US BAR people(group 2 in Table 5) are together in all solutionsand their texts are characterized as relying heavily

on citations to JAR, TAR, other accounting jour-nals and psychology journals. The economicsgroup consists of three variations on the genre: aJAE dominated source literature, a JAR/econom-ics literature, and a ‘‘balanced,’’ JAR, TAR,JAE, economics and finance literature. Table 6contains the final cluster centers for the threegroup solution in which we observe the three basic‘‘types’’ of literature being produced by the mostproductive scholars in the four leading journals.These groups are distinctly different. Cluster oneis the AOS cluster and the profile reflects the phi-losophy of the journal as enunciated by AnthonyHopwood (1988). The non-accounting literaturemost utilized is from the disciplines of manage-ment/administration and sociology. The account-ing literature is from AOS and other accounting

Table 5Cluster centers for six cluster solution

Sources Cluster groups

1 2 3 4 5 6

JAE 0.0 1.9 1.0 27.5 10.5 12.6JAR 0.3 19.2 6.5 20.4 20.4 24.3TAR 3.4 15.1 7.2 17.4 9.4 11.7AOS 30.6 4.5 20.4 0.0 9.0 0.0Other Accounting 24.3 15.2 9.9 7.6 8.7 10.8Economics 1.6 3.2 2.9 8.1 29.2 13.2Finance 3.2 2.1 1.9 14.1 6.5 22.2Management/Administration

6.2 4.7 25.9 3.8 6.7 2.9

Sociology 11.1 0.5 10.1 0.0 0.2 0.0Law 1.2 0.6 0.3 0.8 4.9 1.2Psychology 0.0 28.9 7.8 0.2 0.7 0.5Political Science 1.6 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.1 0.1

Table 6Cluster centers for three cluster solution

Sources Cluster groups

1 2 3

JAE 0.5 1.9 17.6JAR 3.6 19.2 21.7TAR 5.5 15.1 13.1AOS 25.2 4.5 0.3Other Accounting 16.6 15.2 9.0Economics 2.3 3.2 15.9Finance 2.5 2.1 14.6Management/Administration 16.7 4.7 4.3Sociology 10.6 0.5 0.1Law 0.7 0.6 2.1Psychology 4.2 28.9 0.4Political Science 0.9 0.0 0.1


journals (e.g., Critical Perspectives on Accounting;Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal;AAA section journals; etc.). Cluster three, the eco-nomics group, illustrates the extent that all threeUS journals are similar. The authors in this group(the largest with 59 members, 71%) combine eco-nomics and finance literature with literature pub-lished in all three US journals. Of the threegroups this one is the least diverse in the literatureit cites (notably, other accounting journals). Thesecond cluster is the US BAR group that emergesas a result of publishing BAR work in the US jour-nals, which constructs its texts from other account-ing journals save JAE and AOS and literaturefrom the discipline of psychology.

There is a notable sameness to the three USjournals. This is evident when comparing the pro-files of the four journals in terms of the specificjournals cited. Table 7 provides a list of those spe-cific journals whose citations comprised at least 1%of total journal citations for the individuals listedin Table 3. Citations in JAR, TAR, and JAE aredominated by citations to just those three journals.Citations to journals other than accounting jour-nals are exclusively to finance and economics jour-nals. The BAR presence in JAR and TAR is notsufficient to give them a citation profile that is dif-ferent from JAE, which publishes no BAR schol-arship. AOS, on the other hand, is quite differentwith minimal citing of finance and economics,but with substantial citing of sociology and man-agement literature. The total percentage of cita-tions accounted for by the journals listed inTable 7 is also instructive. For AOS only 59% ofthe total citations to journals are accounted forby the journals whose citations exceeded 1% ofthe total. For the three US journals citations aremuch more heavily concentrated to that limitedset of journals. There is a greater homogeneityand narrowness of the US journals when com-pared to AOS. Ironically, AOS, a non-US journalcontains significant citations to the major profes-sional US journal, Journal of Accountancy. Thethree US journals do not.

We also determined the frequency with whichspecific articles were cited by the 83 persons inour group of top publishers of the 1990s. The datain Table 7 focuses on total citations to particularjournals. Exhibit 1, panels A, B, C, and D containlists of the top 20 articles (and ties) cited in TAR,JAR, JAE, and AOS, respectively. The articlescited most frequently by AOS authors are mark-edly different from those of the three US journals,which are very similar. One article from Econome-

trica is common to all three US journals and eachof the US journals has four articles in commonwith the other two.

Of the articles cited in the three US journals all,save three, are orthodox economics inspired. Onlythree of the articles cited are BAR studies and twoof those, both involving Libby as an author,appeared in JAR, which no longer has any BARscholars (elite or otherwise) on its editorial board.

Table 7Journal citations of 1990s emerging elite greater than or equal to 1% of total journal citations

Journal cited Journal of interest

TAR JAR JAE AOS

TAR 16.3 10.7 12.0 8.9JAR 20.2 25.1 18.3 7.0JAE 12.5 10.3 25.1 –AOS 1.0 1.3 – 23.4Journal of Financial Econ. 3.8 2.4 7.6 –Journal of Finance 3.7 3.6 5.1 –Journal of Business – 1.5 1.2 –Econometrica 3.2 3.8 2.9 –Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 2.9 – – 1.3CAR 2.2 2.6 2.9 –Bell/Rand Journal of Economics 1.6 3.0 1.6 –Journal of Political Economy 1.6 1.6 2.1 –Accounting Horizons 1.2 1.6 – –American Economic Review 1.1 1.7 1.4 –Journal of Accounting Literature – 1.2 – –Journal of Economic Theory – 1.4 – –Academy of Management Journal – – – 1.1American Journal of Sociology – – – 1.5Academy of Management Review – – – 2.2Administrative Science Quarterly – – – 4.9American Sociological Review – – – 1.3Critical Perspectives on Accounting – – – 1.1Harvard Business Review – – – 1.2Journal of Accountancy – – – 2.5Journal of Personality and Social Psych. – – – 1.1

Total percentage accounted for (out of 100) 71.3% 71.8% 80.1% 59.0%

Total Journal Citations per Journal 2103 2337 2026 2991


The JAR hegemony over the US literature beingproduced by the most productive scholars isapparent. JAR articles are cited 10, 8, and 7 timesin TAR, JAR, and JAE, respectively. Since therewere 50 cites in total to articles in accounting jour-nals (including cites common among the four jour-nals), citations to JAR articles comprise 50% ofaccounting journal citations. Citations to JAEarticles in TAR, JAR, and JAE are 3, 2, and 12,respectively, or 34% of the accounting journal cita-tions. Citations to TAR articles in TAR, JAR, andJAE are 4, 0, and 0, respectively, or only 8% of thetotal. Thus, among the top US journals there is ahierarchy established by this citation behavior ofthe top publishers. JAR is ubiquitous, but articlesin the AAA’s flagship journal TAR are cited fre-quently only in TAR. The citation behavior ofour group of top scholars indicates that JAR has

effectively established the standard for USaccounting scholarship and that standard speaksloudest in the language of neoclassical economics.

Exhibit 1 also indicates which authors or citedpapers appearing in accounting journals receivedtheir doctoral degrees from an elite US school.The dominance of elite schools in the US journalsis pronounced. For the cited articles in JAR, TAR,and JAE that were in accounting journals therewere 45 different authors. Of those authors, threewere not listed in Hasselback (2004) so their degreeschools were not ascertainable; 42 were accountingacademics. Of that 42, 37 (88.1%) received degreesfrom an elite school; 16 of the 42 (38.1%) receivedtheir degrees from just two schools – Chicago (7)and Stanford (9). There are only five individualswith non-elite accounting degrees among theauthors of most cited accounting articles.

Exhibit 1Most frequently cited articles by 1990s emerging elite in TAR, JAR, JAE, and AOS 1990 through 1999 (frequency of citation appearsin parentheses; * denotes elite graduate; ? denotes unknown)

Panel A: Articles published in The Accounting Review

1. (12) White, H. (?). 1980. ‘‘A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity,’’Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817–838.(12) Healy, P.M.(*) 1985. ‘‘The effect of bonus schemes on accounting decisions,‘‘Journal

of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1–3, pp. 85–107.

3. (9) Bernard, V.L.(*) and Thomas, J.K.(*) 1989. ‘‘Post-earnings announcement drift: Delayedprice response or risk premium,‘‘ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 1–36.

4. (8) Holmstrom, B. (?) 1979. ‘‘Moral hazard and observability,‘‘Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 74–91.5. (7) Demski, J.(*) and Feltham, G.(*) 1994. ‘‘Market response to financial reports,’’

Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 17, No. 1–2, pp. 3–40.(7) Dye, R.(*) 1985. ‘‘Disclosure of nonproprietary information,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 123–145.(7) Patell, J.M.(*) 1976. ‘‘Corporate forecasts of earnings per share and stock price behavior:Empirical tests,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 246–276.(7) Libby, R.(*) 1985. ‘‘Availability and the generation of hypotheses in analytical review,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 648–667.(7) Lambert, R.A.(*) and Larcker, D.F. 1987. ‘‘An analysis of the use of accounting andmarket measures of performance in executive compensation contracts,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 85–125.(7) McNichols, M., Wilson, G.P.(*), and DeAngelo, L.(*) 1988. ‘‘Evidenceof earnings management from the provision for bad debts,’’ Journal of

Accounting Research, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 1–31.(7) Barth, M.E.(*) 1991. ‘‘Relative measurement errors among alternative pensionasset and liability measures,’’ The Accounting Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 433–463.

12. (6) Gjesdal, F.(*) 1981. ‘‘Accounting for stewardship,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 208–231.(6) Bernard, V.L.(*) 1987. ‘‘Cross-sectional dependence and problems in inferencez in market-based accounting research,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 1–48.(6) Ball, R.(*) and Brown, P.(*) 1968. ‘‘An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 159–178.(6) Frederick, D.M.(*) and Libby, R.(*) 1986. ‘‘Expertise and auditor judgements inconjunctive events,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 270–290.(6) Landsman, W.(*) 1986. ‘‘An empirical investigation of pension fund property rights,’’The Accounting Review, Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 662–691.

17. (5) Verrechia, R.(*) 1983. ‘‘Discretionary disclosure,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 5, pp. 179–194.(5) King, R., Pownall, G.(*) and Waymire, G.(*) 1990. ‘‘Expectations adjustments via timelymanagement forecasts: Review, synthesis, and suggestions for future research,’’Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 9, 113–144.(5) Wilson, G.P.(*) 1987. ‘‘The incremental information content of the accrual andfunds components of earnings after controlling for earnings,’’ The Accounting Review, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 293–322.(5) Bernard, V.L.(*) and Stober, T.L.(*) 1989. ‘‘The nature and amount of informationin cash flows and accruals,’’ The Accounting Review, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 624–652.

Panel B: Journal of Accounting Research

1. (17) White, H. (?) 1980. ‘‘A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimationand a direct test for heteroskedasticity,’’ Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817–838.(17) Patell, J.M.(*) 1976. ‘‘Corporate forecasts of earnings per share and stockprice behavior: Empirical tests,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol.14, No. 2, pp. 246–276.

3 (11) Verrechia, R.(*) 1983. ‘‘Discretionary disclosure,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 5, pp. 179–194.4. (10) Dye, R.A.(*) 1985. ‘‘Disclosure of nonproprietary information,’’ Journal of Accounting

Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 123–145.(10) Easton, P.D.(*) and Harris, T.S.(*) 1991. ‘‘Earnings as an explanatory variable forreturns,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 19–36.


Exhibit 1 (continued)

6. (9) Ohlson, J.A.(*) 1995. ‘‘Earnings, book values, and dividends in equity valuations,’’ Contemporary

Accounting Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 661–687.(9) Holmstrom, B.(?) and Milgram, P.(?) 1987. ‘‘Aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporalincentives,’’ Econometrica, Vol. 55, No. 2., pp. 303–328.

8. (8) Holmstrom, B.(?) 1979. ‘‘Moral hazard and observability,’’ Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 74–91.(8) Darrough, M.N. and Stoughton, N.M.(?) 1990. ‘‘Financial disclosure policy in an entry game,’’Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 12, No. 1–3, pp. 219–243.(8) Penman, S.B.(*) 1980. ‘‘An empirical investigation of the voluntary disclosure of corporate earnings forecasts,’’ Journal of

Accounting Research, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 132–160.

11. (7) Diamond, D.W.(?) 1985. ‘‘Optimal release of information by firms,’’ Journal of Finance, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 1071–1094.12. (6) Milgram, P.R.(?) 1981. ‘‘Good news and bad news: Representation theorems and applications,’’

Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 380–391.(6) Kyle, A.S.(?) 1985. ‘‘Continuous auctions and insider trading,’’ Econometrica, Vol. 53, No. 6, pp. 1315–1336.(6) Davis, J.S. and Solomon, I.(*) 1989. ‘‘Experience, expertise, and explicit-performanceresearch in public accounting,’’ Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 8, pp. 150–164.(6) King, R., Pownall, G.(*) and Waymire, G.(*) 1990. ‘‘Expectations adjustments via timelymanagement forecasts: Review, synthesis, and suggestions for future research,Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 9, pp. 113–144.(6) Antle, R.(*) and Smith, A.(*) 1986. ‘‘An empirical investigation of therelative performance evaluation of corporate executives,’’ Journal of

Accounting Research, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 1–39.(6) Demski, J.S.(*) and Sappington, D.E.M.(?) 1987. ‘‘Delegated expertise,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 68–89.(6) Freeman, R.N.(*) and Tse, S.Y.(*) 1992. ‘‘A nonlinear model of securityprice responses to unexpected earnings,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 185–209.(6) Lev, B.(*) 1989. ‘‘On the usefulness of earnings research: Lessons and directionsfrom two decades of empirical research,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 153–192.(6) Antle, R.(*) and Eppen, G.D.(?) 1985. ‘‘Capital rationing and organizational slackin capital budgeting,’’ Management Science, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 163–174.

Panel C: Journal of Accounting and Economics

1. (18) Healy, P.M.(*) 1985. ‘‘The effect of bonus schemes on accounting decisions,’’Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1–3, pp. 85–107.(18) Collins, D.W.(*) and Kothari, S.P.(*) 1989. ‘‘An analysis of intertemporal andcross- sectional determinants of earnings response coefficients,’’ Journal of Accounting and

Economics, Vol. 11, No. 2–3, pp. 143–181.

3. (17) White, H.(?) 1980. ‘‘A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity,’’Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817–838.

4. (13) Jones, J.J.(*) 1991. ‘‘Earnings management during import relief investigations,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 193–228.

5. (12) Beaver, W.(*), Lambert, R.(*) and Morse, D.(*) 1980. ‘‘The information contentof security prices,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 3–28.(12) Ball, R.(*) and Brown, P.(*) 1968. ‘‘An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 159–178.

7. (11) Lambert, R.A.(*) and Larcker, D.F. 1987. ‘‘An analysis of the use of accounting and marketmeasures of performance in executive compensations contracts,’’ Journal of Accounting Research,Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 85–125.(11) Easton, P.D.(*) and Harris, T.S.(*) 1991. ‘‘Earnings as an explanatory variable for returns,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 19–36.

(continued on next page)



9. (10) Holmstrom, B.(?) 1979. ‘‘Moral hazard and observability,’’ Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 79–91.(10) Easton, P.D.(*) and Zmiejewski, M.E. 1989. ‘‘Cross-sectional variation in the stockmarket response to accounting earnings announcements,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 11, No. 2–3, pp. 117–141.(10) Jensen, M.(?) and Murphy, K.(?) 1990. ‘‘Performance pay and top-management incentives,’’Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, o. 2, pp. 225–264.

12. (9) Kothari, S.P.(*) and Sloan, R.G.(*) 1992. ‘‘Information in prices about future earnings: Implications for earnings responsecoefficients,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 15, No. 2–3, pp. 143–171.(9) Sloan, R.G.(*) 1993. ‘‘Accounting earnings and top executive compensation,’’Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 16, No. 1–3, pp. 55–100.(9) Demski, J.(*) and Feltham, G.(*) 1994. ‘‘Market response to financial reports,’’Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 17, No. 1–2, pp. 3–40.(9) Kormendi, R.(?) and Lipe, R.(*) 1987. ‘‘Earnings innovations, earnings persistence, and stock returns,’’Journal of Business, Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 323–345.(9) Weisbach, M.S.(?) 1988. ‘‘Outside directors and CEO turnover,’’ Journal of Financial Economics,’’ Vol. 20, pp. 431–460.

17. (8) Murphy, K.J.(?) 1985. ‘‘Corporate performance and managerial remuneration: An empirical analysis,’’Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1–3, pp. 11–42.(8) Freeman, R.N.(*) 1987. ‘‘The association between accounting earnings and securityreturns for large and small firms,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 195–228.(8) Angelo, L.(*) 1988. ‘‘Managerial competition, information costs, and corporate governance:The use of accounting performance measures in proxy contests,’’ Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 10, pp. 3–36.(8) Easton, P.F.(*), Harris, T.S.(*) and Ohlson, J.S.(*) 1992. ‘‘Aggregate accounting earningscan explain most of security returns: The case of long return intervals,’’

Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 15, No. 2–3, pp. 119–142.(8) Antle, R.(*) and Smith, A.(*) 1986. ‘‘An empirical investigation of the relativeperformance evaluation of corporate executives,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 1–39.(8) Banker, R.D. and Datar, S.M.(*) 1989. ‘‘Sensitivity, precision, and linear aggregation of signals in performance evaluation,’’Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 21–39.(8) Lev, B.(*) 1989. ‘‘On the usefulness of earnings research: Lessons and directions from twodecades of empirical research,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 153–192.

(8) Ball, R.(*) and Watts, R.(*) 1972. ‘‘Some time series properties of accounting income,’’Journal of Finance, Vol. 27. No. 3, pp. 663–682.

Panel D: Accounting, Organizations and Society

1. (21) Hopwood, A.(*) 1987. ‘‘The archeology of accounting systems,’’ Accounting,Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 207–234.

2. (20) Burchell, S.(?), Clubb, C.(?), Hopwood, A.(*), Hughes, J.(?) and Nahapiet, J.(?) 1980.‘‘The role of accounting in organizations and society,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 5–27.

3. (16) Miller, P. and O’Leary, T. 1987. ‘‘Accounting and the construction of the governable person,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 235–265.

4. (13) Burchell, S.(?), Clubb, C.(?), and Hopwood, A.(*) 1985. ‘‘Accounting and its social context:Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society,Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 381–413.

5. (12) DiMaggio, P.J.(?) and Powell, W.W.(?) 1983. ‘‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphismand collective rationality in organizational fields,’’ American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, 147–160.

6. (11) Meyer, J.W.(?) and Rowan, B.(?) 1977. ‘‘Institutionalized organizations:Formal structure as myth and ceremony,’’ American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 2, pp. 340–363.(11) Loft, A.(?) 1986. ‘‘Towards a critical understanding of accounting:The case of cost accounting in the UK, 1914–1924,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 137–169.(11) Lehman, C. and Tinker, T. 1987. ‘‘The ‘‘real’’ cultural significance of accounts,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 503–522.(11) Miller, P. and Rose, N.(?) 1990. ‘‘Governing the economy,’’ Economy and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 1–30.

10. (10) Meyer, J.W.(?) 1986. ‘‘Social environments and organizational accounting,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4–5, pp. 345–356.(10) Wilmott, H.(?) 1986. ‘‘Organizing the profession: A theoretical and historical examination of the development of themajor accounting bodies in the UK,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 555–580.



11. (9) Hoskins, K.W. and Macve, R.H. 1986. ‘‘Accounting and the examination: Archeology of disciplinary power,’’ Accounting,

Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 105–136.(9) Armstrong, P.(?) 1987. ‘‘The rise of accounting controls in British capitalist enterprises,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 5, pp. 415–436.(9) Birnberg, J.G.(*) and Snodgrass, C.(?) 1988. ‘‘Culture and control: A field study,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 447–464.(9) Brownell, P.(*) 1982. ‘‘The role of accounting data in performance evaluation, budgetary participation, and organizationaleffectiveness,’’ Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 12–27.

15. (8) Puxty, A.G., Willmott, H.C.(?), Cooper, D.J. and Lowe, T.(?) 1987. ‘‘Modes of regulation in advanced capitalism: Locatingaccounting in four countries,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 273–291.(8) Hines, R.D.(?) 1988. ‘‘Financial accounting: In communicating reality, we construct reality,’’Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 251–261.(8) Miller, P. 1991. ‘‘Accounting innovation beyond the enterprise: Problematizing investment decisionsand programming economic growth in the UK in the 1960s,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society,Vol. 16, No. 8, pp. 733–762.(8) Harrison, G.L. 1992. ‘‘The cross-cultural generalizability of the relation between participation,budget emphasis and job related attitudes,’’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 1–15.(8) Scott, W.R.(?) 1987. ‘‘The adolescence of institutional theory,’’ Administrative Science Quarterly,Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 493–511.(8) Child, J.(?) 1981. ‘‘Culture, contingency and capitalism in the cross-national study of organizations,’’Research in Organizational Behavior,’’ Vol. 3, pp. 303–356.


However, only one of them authored an articlewithout an elite co-author. For the 39 articles cited(excluding common cites among the four journals),38 (97.4%) had at least one elite author.

AOS, on the other hand, does not follow thesame pattern as do the three US journals. In termsof degree schools of authors of the most citedworks, AOS is not dominated by the US eliteschools. Many authors’ degree schools could notbe ascertained because they are not listed in Has-selback (2004); this directory is North Americacentered for the most part and has very incompleteinformation about accounting academics in therest of the world. Of the degree schools that couldbe identified there were Ph.D.s from British, Cana-dian, and both US elite and non-elite schools. Theliterature cited is also much different. Indeed, cita-tion behavior of the 83 people identified in Table 3indicates that there are really only two topaccounting journals – AOS and a single journalof which JAR, TAR and JAE comprise the 10 orso annual issues.

The 83 most prolific publishers during the 1990scome from roughly three generations. Twenty-onewere persons who received their doctorates before1980; by the 1990s these individuals were in the

second and third decades (and in a couple of casesfourth) of their scholarly careers. Forty-three peo-ple received their doctorates between 1980 and1989 putting them on average in the middle ofthe second decade of their scholarly careers. Nine-teen of the people received their doctorates in 1990or later; these are individuals who could beregarded as very successful in the beginning oftheir careers. Table 8, Panels A, B, and C containsa breakdown of these individuals by time of Ph.D.,average power index, cluster membership, andPh.D. degree school.

The proportions of individuals in clusters 1, 2,and 3 are nearly the same in Panels A and B, butin Panel C there is a slight decrease in the propor-tion of cluster 3s and an increase in cluster 2s. InPanel A, the researchers long in tooth and male,the proportion that are in cluster 1 is 19%, in clus-ter 2, 9.5%, and in cluster 3, 71.4%. For the indi-viduals listed in Panel B, these proportions are18.6%, 7.0% and 74.4%, respectively; and in PanelC they are 15.8%, 21.0%, and 63.2%. If we con-sider the premier journals as a mechanism for allo-cating intellectual capital needed for creatingacademic reputations in accounting, they haveoperated fairly consistently over at least three

Table 8Authors by length of time since receiving Ph.D. (cluster membership based on three cluster solution) (elite-15 schools in italics)

Author Average power index Cluster membership Degree school

Panel A: Ph.D. received before 1980

Cooper 1.57 1 ManchesterCovaleski 0.29 1 Penn StateDirsmith 0.64 1 NorthwesternShields 1.32 1 PittsburghLibby 2.08 2 Illinois

Pratt 0.52 2 IndianaBaiman 3.19 3 Stanford

Beaver 3.17 3 Chicago

Collins, D. 2.19 3 Iowa

Demski 0.64 3 Chicago

Dopuch 3.82 3 Illinois

Elgers 0.14 3 MarylandFeltham 2.12 3 Berkeley

Gaver, K. 0.77 3 Carnegie Mellon

Hughes 0.96 3 PurdueLarcker 2.68 3 KansasLev 2.28 3 Chicago

Ohlson 1.79 3 Berkeley

Verrechia 2.58 3 Stanford

Watts 4.00 3 Chicago

Zimmerman 3.38 3 Berkeley

Panel B: Ph.D. received 1980–1989

Abernathy 0.00 1 LaTrobeChow 0.58 1 OregonChua, W.F. 0.35 1 SheffieldMiller 1.71 1 LondonNeu 0.00 1 QueensPower 0.63 1 CambridgePreston 0.56 1 BathRobson 0.08 1 ManchesterBonner 1.42 2 Michigan

Potter 0.00 2 Wisconsin

Trotman 0.94 2 New South WalesAli 0.23 3 ColumbiaBanker 0.00 3 HarvardBarth 1.10 3 Stanford

Bartov 0.00 3 Berkeley

Bushman 1.10 3 Minnesota

Clinch 0.00 3 Stanford

Collins, J. 0.59 3 FloridaCready 0.20 3 Ohio State

Datar 0.40 3 Stanford

DeFond 0.08 3 Washington

Dye 2.15 3 Carnegie Mellon

Francis, Jen. 1.31 3 Cornell

Gaver, J. 0.14 3 ArizonaHand 0.31 3 Chicago

Harris 0.29 3 Washington

Holthausen 3.65 3 Rochester

Indjejikian 1.29 3 PennKang 0.25 3 MITKing 0.21 3 Arizona


Table 8 (continued)

Author Average power index Cluster membership Degree school

Kothari 2.50 3 Iowa

Lundholm 0.54 3 Iowa

Lys 1.72 3 Rochester

McNichols 0.75 3 UCLAMelumad 0.13 3 Berkeley

Penno 0.83 3 NorthwesternReichelstein 0.19 3 NorthwesternShevlin 0.93 3 Stanford

Sivaramakrishnan 0.00 3 NorthwesternSkinner 1.73 3 Rochester

Wang, S.-W. 0.00 3 Michigan

Waymire 0.25 3 Chicago

Wild 0.29 3 Wisconsin

Panel C: Ph.D. received after 1989

Harrison 0.00 1 MacquarieIttner 0.50 1 HarvardYoung 0.00 1 Illinois

Kennedy 0.10 2 DukeKoonce 0.70 2 Illinois

Nelson 1.80 2 Ohio State

Tan, HT 0.00 2 Michigan

Amir 0.00 3 Berkeley

Bloomfield 1.00 3 Michigan

Dechow 0.71 3 Rochester

Gigler 1.13 3 Minnesota

Guenther 0.10 3 Washington

Hemmer 0.50 3 OdenseKim 0.00 3 PennsylvaniaLang 0.40 3 Chicago

Maydew 0.29 3 Iowa

Rajan 0.50 3 Carnegie Mellon

Shackelford 1.90 3 Michigan

Sloan 0.75 3 Rochester


decades. A substantial majority of the individualspublishing the most, regardless of generation, doso within an economic genre. Relative to that oftheir economist colleagues, successive generationsof BAR researchers have not gained ground inestablishing their genre as preeminent. Of cluster2 persons, US journals alone provided sufficientspace for five articles to both persons in Panel A,one person in Panel B and two persons in PanelC. The apparent increase in BAR indicated bythe changes in proportions in Panel C, however,is less significant than it appears as subsequentanalysis will demonstrate. Were we to believe thatthe structure of the US academy made decisionsabout genres on the basis of usefulness to advanc-

ing the intellectual development of the field, thenthis apparent proportional standoff at the end ofthe 1990s indicates that neither appears to be gain-ing a decided scientific edge. Neither seems to havepersuaded the other of the superiority of itsapproach. There seems to be an allocation rulebuilt into the structure of the academy that histor-ically has rationed academic reputations in ratherstable proportions.

Table 8 also reflects, once again, the structure ofdegree school domination of the academic elite.The proportion of individuals in Panel A withdegrees from one of the elite-15 is 62% (76.5% ifcluster 1, AOS people are excluded). In Panels Band C the proportions are 53.5% (65.7%) and


73.7% (81.3%), respectively. This degree schooleffect is also apparent in the power indices of theindividuals in each cohort. There are two USBAR people in Panel A, Libby and Pratt. Libby,with an elite school degree, has a power index of2.08, Pratt, with a non-elite degree, has an indexof only 0.52. This same phenomenon is evidentfor the cluster 3 members as well. Elgers andHughes, both successful scholars over long careers(through 1999 Hughes had published 17 times andElgers 10 times), have two of the four lowest indi-ces of the cluster 3 cohorts that are less than one.Indeed, the only exception to your-degree-school-is-your-academic-destiny rule in accounting isDavid Larcker. In Panel B every individual in clus-ters 2 and 3 with a power index of 1.0 or more is agraduate of an elite-15 school except Indjejikian,a graduate of Penn (like Northwestern, historicallya non-persistent elite). Of the four persons listed inPanel C with indexes of 1.0 or higher, all are elitegraduates.

The extent to which power is associated withgenre and degree school is evident when we con-sider the results presented in Table 9. The columns

Table 9Ph.D. degree schools of authors by power indexes (cluster membersh

Power index

0 0–.49 0.50–0.99

LaTrobe (1) Columbia (3) Oregon (1)Berkeley (3) Penn St. (1) Florida (3)Harvard (3) Ohio St. (3) Rochester (3)Berkeley (3) Stanford (3) Chicago (3)Stanford (3) Washington (3) Northwestern (1)Penn (3) Maryland (3) Harvard (1)Queens (1) Arizona (3) Duke (2)Wisconsin (2) Washington (3) Iowa (3)Northwestern (3) Chicago (3) UCLA (3)Illinois (1) Washington (3) Cambridge (1)Macquerie (1) Odense (3) Indiana (2)Michigan (3) MIT (3) Bath (1)Michigan (2) Chicago (3) Carnegie Mellon (3)

Berkeley (3) Rochester (3)Northwestern (3) Carnegie Mellon (3)Manchester (1) Purdue (3)Wisconsin (3) Northwestern (3)Sheffield (1) Stanford (3)Arizona (3) New South Wales (2)Chicago (3) Illinois (2)Iowa (3)

in Table 9 indicate average power indexes in incre-ments of 0.5. In each column are presented thedegree schools and cluster group membership foreach of the 83 individuals falling into each incre-ment of the power index. As we move from leftto right in the table we move to higher powerindexes.

Obviously, the power indexes are driven bymemberships on the editorial boards of the threeUS journals. Since there are many individualswho have served on more than one US journal edi-torial board, but few who have served on AOS andUS journal boards, the last column is reflectiveentirely of US journals. Of the individuals withthe largest power indexes, all but one (Larcker)are graduates of elite-15 schools and all, save one(Libby), are economists (cluster 3). Indeed, if weconsider the last three columns, which representpower indexes of one or greater, 82.8% are gradu-ates of elite-15. If we eliminate the two cluster 1persons from this group who are AOS editorialboard members only, the proportion that is elite-15 graduates is 88.9%. Among the cluster 2 andcluster 3 persons with a power index of one or

ip in parentheses) (elite-15 schools in italic)

1.00–1.49 1.50–1.99 >2.00

Stanford (3) Manchester (1) Stanford (3)Michigan (2) London (1) Chicago (3)Minnesota (3) Ohio St. (2) Iowa (3)Cornell (3) Berkeley (3) Illinois (3)Minnesota (3) Michigan (3) Carnegie Mellon (3)Penn (3) Rochester (3) Berkeley (3)Michigan (3) Rochester (3) Rochester (3)Pittsburgh (1) Iowa (3)

Kansas (3)Chicago (3)Illinois (2)Stanford (3)Chicago (3)Berkeley (3)


more, only 3 (10.3%) are BAR researchers. Of thepeople that have been recently productive andhave become relatively powerful as gatekeepers,the economic group is nearly seven times morenumerous than the BAR group.

Considering only the US BAR researchers, isthere any indication that an emergent generationof elite exists that will continue the presence ofBAR research among the genres substantivelydefining the field of accounting? Table 10, PanelsA and B contains the list of BAR researcherswho emerged during the 1990s (Panel A), both inAOS and the US journals, and the Table 3 datafor just the nine, cluster 2 or US BAR researchers(Panel B). When we inspect the emergent BARscholars in Panel A there are some notable changes

Table 10The 1990s BAR elite

Author Ph.D. school and year Appear

JAE

Panel A: Publications by 1990s emergent behavioral elite

Abernathy Latrobe, 89 0Bonnera Michigan, 88 0Chua Sheffield, 83 0Harrison Macquerie, 90 0Ittner Harvard, 92 0Kennedy Duke, 92 0Kooncea Illinois, 90 0P. Miller London, 83 0Nelsona Ohio St., 90 0Neu Queens, 89 0Pottera Wisconsin, 86 2Power Cambridge, 84 0Preston Bath, 82 0Robson Manchester, 88 0Tana Michigan, 92 0Younga Illinois, 91 0

Author Ph.D. school and ye

Panel B: Power index for the 1990s cluster two (post-2000 average po

Bonnera Michigan, 88Trotman New South Wales, 8Nelsona Ohio State, 90Libbya Illinois, 74Kennedy Duke, 92Pratt Indiana, 77Pottera Wisconsin, 86Kooncea Illinois, 90Tana Michigan, 92

a Denotes elite school graduate.

that have occurred. Compared to the 1970s and1980s, the proportion of emergent BAR scholarsto the total number of emergent scholars drops.Only six US BAR scholars newly emerged in the1990s (Libby, Pratt and Trotman emerged earlier),which is less than a third of the number from theprevious decade. In the 1990s there were 59 schol-ars who emerged in that decade (itself a declinefrom previous periods). Sixteen (27%) are BARscholars, compared to 34% for the previous dec-ade. Even more significant is that of the 34%BAR scholars who emerged for the first time inthe 1980s (see Table 1) only four were exclusivelyAOS people, i.e., 21 of the 25 persons (84%) hadpublished in JAR and TAR, as well. However, ofthose 16 BAR scholars who emerged for the first

ances in

JAR TAR AOS

0 0 52 5 20 0 50 0 53 1 24 1 03 1 11 0 71 7 10 0 71 1 10 0 50 0 50 0 54 0 10 0 5

ar Power index

wer index in parentheses)

1.42(1.00)4 0.94(1.00)

1.80(2.40)2.08(2.40)0.63(1.60)0.52(1.00)0.00(0.00)0.70(1.00)0.00(1.40)


time in the 1990s, nine were exclusively AOS peo-ple, i.e., only seven had published in JAR or TAR

(Peter Miller is an AOS elite who is not truly amember by virtue of his one ‘‘controversial’’ paperin JAR). The 1980s saw JAR and TAR help createan emergent BAR elite of 21 people; in the 1990sthe comparable number was seven (one of these(Ittner) is a cluster one individual), a decline of67%. Over half of the 1990s emergent BAR groupis comprised of only AOS publishers.

Six of the Panel B individuals, Bonner, Nelson,Kennedy, Potter, Koonce, and Tan are the 1990snewly emergent US BAR researchers. Five haveaverage power indexes greater than 0.5, post-2000. They might be considered the next genera-tion of elite BAR researchers not exclusivelyAOS. However, three of these individuals wereco-authors with Robert Libby, the only US BARresearcher among the 83 individuals with an aver-age index greater than 2.0.23 Two of the three USBAR researchers who have not co-authored withLibby have still managed to establish a presencein the BAR editorial process.24 The post-2000

23 There is a significant degree of interconnectedness amongthe 83 persons identified in this study. Co-authoring isextensive. Among the 83, one group consists of 38 peoplewho are connected through relationships their co-authors havewith others in the group. These 38 individuals comprise 62% ofthe economics cluster 3. Of the individuals who were notconnected to the others through co-authors (17 persons) duringthe study period only three had power indexes greater than one,i.e., Francis (Jennifer), Miller, and Skinner. The elite schooldominance is evident among this group, as well. The 38affiliated cluster 3 persons have all published five or morearticles in the top journals and they have co-authored them withtheir ‘‘peers.’’ However, among this group of equals the averagepower index for elite school graduates is 1.5, but for the non-elite graduates it is only 0.7 (.49 if Larcker is excluded). For thecluster 3 individuals not affiliated with the 38 average powerindexes are: elite grad = 0.9; non-elite grad = 0.3. Even amongequally successful scholars, an elite school degree gives one adecided edge in achieving academic power, further indication ofthe sponsored mobility character of the US academy (Turner,1960).24 Libby is the only BAR person who emerges from our study

that also appeared in Brown’s (1996) list of 123 most citedaccounting authors.

average power index appears in parentheses forall persons in Panel B of Table 10. With the excep-tion of Potter, all of the 1990s US BAR scholarsare still active in the editorial process at AOS,

TAR, or both. However, 19 US BAR peoplewho emerged in the 1980s were members of theTAR board; for the 1990s emergent persons, thecomparable number is only four. We cannot saywhether, at this point, the dramatic drop in thepresence of BAR persons at the major US journalssignals a continuing trend toward the eventualdisappearance of BAR in the US in any guiseother than experimental economics or behavioralfinance. The inexorable domination of the USacademy by the neoclassical ideologues is provingitself out since the creation of JAR in the 1960s.None of the rising BAR scholars serves on theJAR editorial board by 2005. In fact, the JAR edi-torial board at the beginning of 2005 containsnone of the BAR elite who emerged over the last37 years. Only Robert Bloomfield on the currentJAR board indicates behavioral as an area ofinterest in the Hasselback (2004) Directory andthen only fourth in a list of four interests. Bloom-field, though a co-author with Robert Libby, is amember of cluster 3, the economics cluster. Thisis because his behavioral work is behavioral eco-nomics whose source literature is economics.Increasingly, acceptable BAR research in the USis that version that passes the assumptions and val-ues test of neoclassical economics. By contrast, sixof the 12 cluster 3 rising scholars had served onJAR’s editorial board by the end of 2000; by thebeginning of 2005 that number had grown tonine.25 Given JAR’s influence on the academicagenda in the US, the absence of any BAR pres-ence there in the future does not bode well forthe extent to which BAR researchers will be ableto establish credentials to be members of an aca-

25 The 12 cluster 3 individuals (see Table 8, Panels B and C)are: Barth, Bloomfield, Bushman, Dye, Francis (Jennifer),Gigler, Holthausen, Indejejikian, Kothari, Lys, Shackelford,and Skinner.


demic elite.26 Persons may still be able to publishBAR work sufficient to secure their personalcareers, but the trends leave little room for san-guinity for BAR as a shaper of the intellectualagenda for accounting, at least in the US. Just asneoclassical economics has aggressively pursuedthe colonization of the other social sciences(Abbott, 2001) with some considerable success,so it appears in microcosm to be occurring inaccounting (Reiter, 1998).27 Academic success,particularly in the US, is better characterized assponsored mobility, the diminishing number ofUS BAR elite means diminished numbers of spon-sors. Of the current US BAR elite, the migrationto AOS as the principal base seems apparent. USelite that were formerly a presence in US journals,e.g., Chow, Shields, Libby, Solomon, are now(2005) members of only the AOS editorial board.Libby, whose average power index increasedpost-2000, did so by virtue of his becoming anassociate editor at AOS. AOS appears to be anincreasingly critical publication outlet for perpetu-ating US BAR and creating a US BAR elite. Withits status as an elite journal, AOS is increasingly

26 The rather substantial change in the BAR presence on theJAR board that has occurred over a short period of time isconsistent with our earlier analysis of the political origins of thedominance of orthodox economics in accounting. The decisionto eliminate a significant BAR presence from the JAR boardsimply cannot be a decision made on the basis of scientificcriteria. No discernible scientific breakthrough during the 90soccurred that suggests that a journal that promoted BARshould remove from its board every elite BAR scholar. Thatdecision is a political decision; the decision criteria areideological, not scientific. The ascendance of EMH and Agencytheory to the dominant place they occupy in the academy wasnot accomplished by dint of their superior power as explainersof the world, but by the shrewd (and continuing) use of politicalpower to sustain that preeminence.27 Walsh, Weber, and Margolis (2003, p. 872) document the

same colonization of management studies by neoclassicaleconomics, i.e., ‘‘Since the 1970s, research on managementand organizations has shown an increasing trend to augmentthe reliance upon the disciplines of psychology and sociologywith a focus on economics. Economics was slower to take holdas a disciplinary base for organizational scholarship but it hasrisen precipitously since the late 1970s.’’ This illustrates the oft-noted importance of political context on the form and contentof science (Feyerabend, 1987; Midgley, 1992; Toulmin, 1990).The rise of conservative politics during the 1970s has affected allbusiness disciplines.

important for sustaining non-economic discourseswithin the elite US accounting academic commu-nity. For example, the AOS editorial board atthe start of 2005 contained 16 persons listed inTable 3; three hold the position of associate editor.Members from all three disciplinary clusters arerepresented: nine from cluster 1, four from cluster2, and three from cluster 3. Also, four BAR indi-viduals who emerged in prior decades, but werenot among the 1990s group of prolific scholars(including Jacob Birnberg) are included on theboard. On the TAR board 19 individuals fromTable 3 are members of the editorial board atthe beginning of 2005. Fourteen (including the edi-tor and two senior editors) are cluster 3 members,five (one a senior editor) are cluster 2 members,and only one is a cluster 1 individual. The cluster2 person who is a senior editor is, perhaps omi-nously, the only non-elite graduate of the senioreditorial group. We say ominously because non-elite graduates have never been afforded any signif-icant power to shape the US academy’s agenda, atleast in the modern era. Seventeen (all cluster 3members) are members of the JAR board at thebeginning of 2005. The same number, 17 (includ-ing four editors), and all cluster 3 members, areon the JAE board at the start of 2005. Thus, ofall the editorial boards, AOS has the most intellec-tual diversity and the greatest representation ofBAR elite.

Concluding observations

In this paper we attempted to establish as a rea-son to be concerned about the issue we investigateis that the history of BAR acts in a manner analo-gous to the canary in the coal mine. How an aca-demic discipline is organized determines whetherits procession through time leads it to be ‘‘progres-sive’’ or whether it simply stagnates. There are cer-tainly reasons to question whether the researchenterprise in the US has been very useful. In lightof the recent reporting and auditing failures (e.g.,Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, etc.) it is not frivo-lous to question whether accounting has madeany progress at all as a scholarly discipline. After35 years of extensive financial reporting research,


financial reporting is no better and the case couldbe made that it is worse than it was before all ofthis research effort started (see, e.g., Ijiri, 2005;McIntosh, Shearer, Thornton, & Welker, 2000;Watts, 2006). Early in this paper we discussedthe general failure of the natural science modelto work in the social sciences. Adopting the ortho-dox models of economics certainly has notincreased accountants’ ability to predict conse-quences of accounting actions. There are good his-torical reasons for believing accountants never willhave the power over their world that the predictivesuccess of the natural sciences gives over the natu-ral world. However, the value of the various socialsciences lies primarily in their value as competingdiscourses that give social studies a rigorousmultivocality.

Ideally the organization of the accounting acad-emy is primarily important for the intellectualdevelopment of the profession of accounting, notfor the success of scholars. Well organized disci-plines (Longino, 1990) link individual scholar’ssuccesses to the success of the discipline. ‘‘Progres-sive’’ disciplines are those in which success of indi-vidual scholars is linked directly to methodologicalimprovements in the discipline. ‘‘Progressive’’ dis-ciplines are not organized simply and purely as areputation system. The practice nature of account-ing as an activity particularly recommends againstunivocality in how we understand it. Our evidenceindicates the continuing narrowing of accountingscholarship in the US to a single-minded focuson the issue of ‘‘informing the trader’’ investigatedas a standard problem in neoclassical economics.

In the US BAR has historically served as theother voice to that of orthodox economics. As psy-chology, sociology, social psychology, political sci-ence, etc. served as alternative discourses forspeaking about accounting, BAR, even thoughlimited to positive social science, brought somepossibility for multi-vocal understandings of thepractice. These various social sciences as our ear-lier quote from Brown (1989, p. 4) indicated pro-vide the vocabularies we in the academiccommunity use to discuss the problems and theirpotential solutions of a modern society. However,the results of our paper show that the decibel levelsof even the limited alternative voices in the US that

existed are being ‘‘turned down’’ by the increas-ingly louder monologue of orthodox economics.

The capacity of BAR to substantively contrib-ute to defining accounting and problematizingthe accounting field has withered considerablysince the early enthusiasm for the contributionspsychology and organizational sociology couldmake to our understanding of accounting. In theDyckman (1998) article referenced in the introduc-tion to this paper a number of notable behavioralresearchers were listed as indication that BAR isalive and well. But we have noted in this paperthat, with, perhaps, the exception of Robert Libby,none of those individuals Dyckman identified aresponsoring a new generation of elite BARresearchers.

What we observed about the structure of theaccounting academy is consistent with previousstudies. The elite of the US academy is dominatedby graduates of an elite set of schools who havedemonstrated agility in employing the methodsof economics and monetarist finance. BAR as amajor dialect spoken among the US accountingacademic elite is diminishing in significance(thanks to AOS and other newer journals, suchis not the case in the rest of the world). Eventhough there is considerable interest in behavioralresearch evidenced by the ABO section of theAmerican Accounting Association and the crea-tion of its journal dedicated to behavioralresearch, that interest is not reflected in the USelite. Even the limited potentiality for understand-ing accounting that inheres in BAR has been win-nowed away.

The consequences of the increasing hegemonyof neoclassical thought in accounting are some-thing to which accounting scholars in the US havepaid little attention. However, in the managementliterature there have appeared recently some nota-ble calls for serious consideration to be given tothe damage to management practice that has beenwrought by the neoclassicist hegemony. Ghoshal(2005, p. 86), noting that, ‘‘Nothing is as danger-ous as a bad theory,’’ attributes the bad manage-ment practices that led to the recent spate ofcorporate scandals to the conquest of the businessacademy by the Chicago ideologues. As headmonishes:


In essence, social scientists carry an evengreater social and moral responsibility thanthose who work in the physical sciencesbecause, if they hide ideology in the pretenseof science, they can cause much more harm.My contention here is that this is preciselywhat business school academics have doneover the last 30 years (Ghoshal, 2005, p.87).28

Our results are consistent with Ghoshal’s timeframe – the ascendance of neoclassicist dominanceover accounting in the US corresponds with resur-gence of the conservative, free-market politicalmovement and the dominance of JAR in the estab-lishment of scholarly standards in the US. Underthe guise of ‘‘positive science,’’ i.e., explainingnot prescribing, the neoclassicists have succeededin US accounting just as Ghoshal notes they havein other business disciplines. The persistentlyincreasing dominance through time of the neoclas-sicists, in the absence of any demonstrable abilityto explain, is testament to their ideological power(Tinker, Merino, & Neimark, 1982).29

In a recent issue of Accounting Horizons a groupof the accounting scholarly elite (notably notincluding any BAR scholars) concluded that,‘‘Foundational questions in accounting are farfrom settled’’ (Demski, Fellingham, Ijiri, & Sun-der, 2002, p. 166). The authors call for continued

28 How these Chicago values that Ghoshal refers to haveimpoverished the ethical capabilities of accounting have beennoted by, e.g., Shearer (2002) and Williams (2000). Howeconomics has been similarly impoverished is discussed by Sen(1987).29 Recently the Harvard Business Review published an article

by Bennis and O’Toole (2005) expressing sentiments similar toGhoshal. In short order, July 2005, two months after publica-tion of the HBR article, a rebuttal by accounting elites(DeAngelo, DeAngelo, & Zimmerman, 2005) claiming the realproblem with business schools wasn’t them but competition formedia rankings. Their solution to substandard managementeducation is, of course, to divert more resources to theproduction of even more neoclassical inspired research.

debates over foundations.30 Yet as our paper sug-gests the presence of multiple discourses withwhich to carry out such debates have witheredaway in the major US journals to be replaced bya monologue in the language of neoclassical eco-nomics. The ability to carry out foundationaldebates to improve the intellectual integrity ofaccounting (and perhaps improve the integrity ofaccounting practice) requires a structure thatallows such debates to occur. If accounting isabout controlling behavior, decision-making,administering social controls (e.g., taxes, securitiesregulation), informing citizens about the financialbehavior of their institutions, etc. then it seemsvarious behavioral sciences other than just eco-nomics would share equal billing at the founda-tional debates. But that is not currently the case.BAR has increasingly been marginalized; to speakof humans as beings other than idealized economicones appears to have been greatly discreditedwithin the academy as evidenced by the diminish-ing opportunities for BAR scholars to join the aca-demic elite. Tim Fogarty’s (2000) observation thatBAR researchers are second class citizens in theUS is reflected in the results of our study. Giventhe current status of the profession that the USacademy has served, there certainly seems to be aserious need to vigorously debate foundationalassumptions with as much intellectual ammunitionas one can muster.

30 To be fruitful such debates must be far ranging and considerthe reasons for the call for debate in the first place. When theelites call for a debate about foundations that they built onemay be excused for their suspicions:

Deeply mistrustful of the dogmas of epistemology,I loved to look now out of this window, now out of that;I guarded against settling down with any of thesedogmas, considered them harmful – and finally: is itlikely that a tool is able (emphasis in original) to criticizeits own fitness? —What I noticed was rather that noepistemological skepticism or dogmatism had ever arisenfree from ulterior motives – that it acquires a value of thesecond rank as soon as one has considered what it wasthat compelled (emphasis in original) the adoption of thispoint of view (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 221).


References

Abbott, A. (2001). Chaos of disciplines. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Abbott, A. (2004). Methods of discovery. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Allison, D. (1980). Processes of stratification in science. NewYork: Arno Press.

Beaver, W. H. (1981). Financial reporting: An accounting

revolution. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Bennis, W. G., & O’Toole, J. (2005). How business schools lost

their way. Harvard Business Review(May), 1–10.Birnberg, J. G., Hoffman, V. B., & Moser, D. V. (1998).

Comparing and contrasting two new resources for the

behavioral accounting researcher. Behavioral Research in

Accounting, 10, 1–22.Birnberg, J. G., & Nath, R. (1967). Implications of behavioral

science for managerial accounting. The Accounting Review,

42(3), 468–479.Birnberg, J. G., & Shields, J. F. (1989). Three decades of

behavioral accounting research: A search for order. Behav-

ioral Research in Accounting, 1, 23–74.Blisset, M. (1972). Politics in science. Boston: Little, Brown and

Company.Bonner, S. E., Hesford, J. W., Van der Stede, W. A., & Young,

S. M. (2006). The most Influential journals in academic

accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 31(7),663–685.

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus. Padstow: Polity Press.Brinn, T., Jones, M. J., & Pendlebury, M. (1996). UK

accountants perceptions of research journal quality.Accounting and Business Research, 26(2), 223–232.

Brown, R. H. (1989). Social science as civic discourse. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.

Brown, L. D. (1996). Influential accounting articles, individu-

als, Ph.D. granting institutions and faculties: A citation

analysis. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 723–754.Brown, L. D. (2005). The importance of circulating and

presenting manuscripts: Evidence from the accounting

literature. The Accounting Review, 80(1), 55–84.Brown, L. D., & Gardner, J. C. (1985a). Applying citation

analysis to assess the impact of journals and articles on

contemporary accounting research (CAR). Journal of

Accounting Research(Spring), 84–109.Brown, L. D., & Gardner, J. C. (1985b). Applying citation

analysis to evaluate the research contributions of accounting

faculty and doctoral programs. The Accounting Review,

60(2), 262–277.Brown, L. D., Gardner, J. C., & Vasarhelyi, M. A. (1989).

Accounting research directory. New York: Marcus WienerPublishing.

Brown, L. D., & Huefner, R. J. (1994). The familiarity with and

perceived quality of accounting journals: Views of senior

accounting faculty in leading US MBA programmes.Contemporary Accounting Research, 11(1), 223–250.

Caplan, E. H. (1971). Management accounting and behavioral

science. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley PublishingCompany.

Center for Economic and Policy Analysis (2005). The ChicagoSchool, p. 2. Available from http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/Chicago.htm.

Chick, V., & Dow, S. C. (2001). Formalism, logic and reality: A

Keynsian analysis. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 25,705–721.

Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of power. London: SAGEPublications.

Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Davidson, S. (1966). Editor’s preface. Journal of Accounting

Research: Empirical Research in Accounting, 4, iii.DeAngelo, H., DeAngelo, L., & Zimmerman, J. L. (2005).

What’s really wrong With US business schools? Workingpaper, University of Rochester.

Demski, J. S., Dopuch, N., Lev, B., Ronen, J., Searfoss, G., &Sunder, S. (1991). A statement on the state of academicaccounting. Statement to the Research Director of theAmerican Accounting Association.

Demski, J. S., Fellingham, J. C., Ijiri, Y., & Sunder, S. (2002).Some thoughts on the intellectual foundations of account-

ing. Accounting Horizons, 16(2), 157–168.Devine, C. T. (1960). Research methodology and accounting

theory formation. The Accounting Review, 35(3), 387–399.Dyckman, T. R. (1998). The ascendancy of the behavioral

paradigm in accounting: The last 20 years. Behavioral

Research in Accounting, 10(Supplement), 1–10.Dyckman, T. R., & Zeff, S. A. (1984). Two decades of the

Journal of Accounting Research. Journal of Accounting

Research, 22(1), 225–297.Ferraro, F., Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2005). Economics

language and assumptions: How theories can become self-

fulfilling. Academy of Management Review, 30(1), 9–24.Feyerabend, P. (1987). Farewell to reason. London: Verson.Fleetwood, S. (2002). Why neoclassical economics explains

nothing. Post-Autistic Economics Review, 17, article 2.Available fromhttp://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue17.htm.

Fleming, R. J., Graci, S. P., & Thompson, J. E. (2000). The

dawning of the age of quantitative/empirical methods in

accounting research: Evidence from the leading authors of

The Accounting Review, 1966–1985. Accounting Historians

Journal, 27, 43–72.Flesher, D. L. (1991). The third quarter century of the American

Accounting Association 1966–1991. Sarasota: AmericanAccounting Association.

Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power: Democracy in

practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making social science matter. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Fogarty, T. (2000). President’s letter. The ABO Reporter(Sum-

mer), 1–2.

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/Chicago.htm

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/Chicago.htm

http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue17.htm



Fuchs, S., & Turner, J. H. (1986). What makes a science

mature? Patterns of organizational control in scientific

production. Sociological Theory(Fall), 143–150.Fullbrook, E. (2001). Real science is pluralistic. Post-autistic

Economics Newsletter: Issue no. 5 March, article 5. Avail-able from http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue5.htm.

Fuller, S. (1988). Social epistemology. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.

Ghoshal, S. (2005). Bad management theories are destroying

good management practices. Academy of Management

Learning & Education, 4(1), 75–91.Hagstrom, W. O. (1965). The scientific community. New York:

Basic Books.Hargens, L. L. (1988). Scholarly consensus and journal

rejection rates. American Sociological Review, 139–151.Hasselback, J. R. (2002). Accounting Faculty Directory 2002–

2003. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Hasselback, J. R. (2004). Accounting Faculty Directory 2004–

2005. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Hasselback, J. R., Reinstein, A., & Schwan, E. S. (2000).

Benchmarks for evaluating the research productivity of

accounting faculty. Journal of Accounting Education, 18,79–97.

Hopwood, A. G. (1988). Accounting from the outside. NewYork: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Houghton, K. A., & Bell, R. (1984). Evaluations of accounting

and finance journals: The Australian view. The International

Journal of Accounting Education and Research, 20(1),179–187.

Hull, R. P., & Wright, G. B. (1990). Faculty perceptions of

journal quality: An update. Accounting Horizons, 4(1),77–98.

Ijiri, Y. (2005). US accounting standards and their environ-

ment: A dualistic study of their 75-years of transition.Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, 24, 255–279.

Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1978). Can the corporation

survive. The Financial Analysts Journal, 34(January/Febru-ary), 1–31.

Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1983). Corporate gover-nance and economic democracy: An attack on freedom. InC. J. Huizenga (Ed.), Proceedings of corporate governance:

A definite exploration of the issues, January 8–9, 1981,

UCLA, Los Angeles.Jensen, M. C., & Meckling, W. H. (1994). The nature of man.

Journal of Applied Corporate Finance(Summer), 4–19.Katouzian, H. (1980). Ideology and method in economics. New

York: New York University Press.Klein, D. B. (2005). The Ph.D. circle in academic economics.

Econ Journal Watch, 2(1), 133–148.Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist

strategy. London: Verso.Lee, T. A. (1995). Shaping the US academic accounting

research profession: The American Accounting Association

and the social construction of an elite. Critical Perspectives

on Accounting, 6(3), 241–261.Lee, T. A. (1997). The editorial gatekeepers of the accounting

academy. Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal,

10(1), 11–30.Lee, T. A. (1999). Anatomy of a professional elite: A history of

the executive committee of the American Accounting

Association. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 10(2),247–264.

Lee, T. A., & Williams, P. F. (1999). Accounting from the

inside: Legitimizing the accounting academic elite. Critical

Perspectives on Accounting, 10(6), 867–895.Longino, H. (1990). Science as social knowledge. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.Lotka, A. J. (1922). The frequency distribution of scientific

productivity. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sci-

ences(June), 317–323.Lowe, A., & Locke, J. (2005). Perceptions of journal quality

and research paradigm: Results of a web-based survey of

British accounting academics. Accounting, Organizations

and Society, 30(1), 81–98.March, G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. New York:

Wiley.Martin, B. R. (1978). Radio astronomy revisited: A reassess-

ment of the role of competition and conflict in the

development of radio astronomy. Sociological Review,27–55.

McCloskey, D. N. (1985). The rhetoric of economics. Madison,WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

McIntosh, N. B., Shearer, T., Thornton, D. B., & Welker, M.(2000). Accounting as simulacrum and hyperreality: Per-

spectives on income and capital. Accounting, Organizations

and Society, 25(1), 13–50.Merton, R. K., & Zuckerman, H. (1973). Institutional patterns

of evaluation in science. In R. K. Merton (Ed.), The

sociology of knowledge. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

Midgley, M. (1992). Science as salvation: A modern myth and its

meaning. London: Routledge.Miller, J. J. (2005). The very foundation of conservatism. The

New York Times, 2005.Milne, M. J. (2002). The construction of journal quality: No

engagement detected. Accounting Forum, 26(1), 72–86.Mouck, T. (1992). The rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of

revolt in the story of positive accounting theory. Accounting,

Auditing and Accountability Journal, 5(4), 35–56.Mulkay, M. (1979). Science and the sociology of knowledge.

London: George Allen and Unwin.Naim, M. (2006). Economist class. Foreign Policy(March/

April), 1–2. Available fromhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/story.cms.php?story_id=3389& print=1.

Nietzsche, F. (1967). In W. Kaufmann (Ed.), The will to power.New York: Vintage Books.

Nobes, C. W. (1985). International variations in perceptions of

accounting journals. The Accounting Review, 60(4),702–705.



http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story.cms.php?story_id=3389&print=1

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story.cms.php?story_id=3389&print=1


Nonaka, I. (2006). Managing organizational knowledge:

Theoretical and methodological foundations. In K. G.Smith & M. A. Hitt (Eds.), Great minds in management: The

process of theory development. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Pera, M. (1994). The discourses of science (Translated by

Clarissa Botsford). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Price, D. J. D. (1963). Little science, big science. New York:

Columbia University Press.Ravenscroft, S., & Williams, P. F. (2006). Making imaginary

worlds real: The case of SFAS 123R. Working paper, IowaState University.

Ravetz, J. R. (1971). Scientific knowledge and its social

problems. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Reiter, S. A. (1998). Economic imperialism in accounting.

Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 9(2), 143–171.Reiter, S. A., & Williams, P. F. (2002). The structure and

progressivity of accounting research: The crisis in the

academy revisited. Accounting, Organizations and Society,

27(6), 575–607.Rodgers, J. L., & Williams, P. F. (1996). Patterns of research

productivity and knowledge creation at The Accounting

Review: 1967–1993. Accounting Historians Journal(June),51–88.

Rosenberg, A. (1992). Economics – Mathematical politics or

science of diminishing returns? Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Schiff, M., & Lewin, A. Y. (1970). The impact of people on

budgets. The Accounting Review, 45(2), 259–268.Schultz, G. P., & Caine, S. (1964). A statement. Journal of

Accounting Research, 1(1), 1–2.Schwartz, B. (1986). The battle for human nature. New York:

W.W. Norton Company.Schwartz, B. N., Williams, S., & Williams, P. F. (2005). US

doctoral students familiarity with accounting journals:

Insights into the structure of the US academy. Critical

Perspectives on Accounting, 16(2), 327–348.Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New

York: Free Press.Sen, A. (1987). On ethics and economics. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing.Shearer, T. (2002). Ethics and accountability: From the for-

itself to the for-theother. Accounting, Organizations and

Society, 27(6), 541–573.Simon, H. A. (1957a). Administrative behavior (second ed.).

New York: MacMillan.Simon, H. A. (1957b). Models of man. New York: Wiley.Simon, H. A. (1986). Rationality in psychology and economics.

In R. M. Hogarth & M. W. Reder (Eds.), Rational choice:

The contrast between economics and psychology. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Stedry, A. C. (1960). Budget control and cost behavior. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). There is no invisible hand. The Guardian,

20(December), 2002.Tahai, A., & Rigsby, J. T. (1998). Information processing using

citations to investigate journal influence in accounting.Information Processing and Management, 34(2/3), 341–359.

Tinker, A. M., Merino, B. D., & Neimark, M. D. (1982). The

normative origins of positive theories: Ideology and

accounting thought. Accounting, Organizations and Society,

7(2), 167–200.Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of moder-

nity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Trieschmann, J. S., Dennis, A. R., Northcraft, G. B., & Niemi,

A. W. Jr., (2000). Serving multiple constituencies in business

schools: M.B.A. program versus research performance.Academy of Management Journal, 43(6), 1130–1141.

Turner, R. H. (1960). Sponsored and contest mobility and the

school system. American Sociological Review, 855–867.Walsh, J. P., Weber, K., & Margolis, J. D. (2003). Social issues

and management: Our lost cause found. Journal of Man-

agement, 29(6), 859–881.Watts, R. L. (2006). What has the invisible hand achieved.

Working paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Watts, R. L., & Zimmerman, J. (1979). The demand for and

supply of accounting theories: The market for excuses. The

Accounting Review, 54(2), 273–305.Whitley, R. (1977). The sociology of scientific work and the

history of scientific developments. In S. S. Blume (Ed.),Perspectives in the sociology of science. Chichester: JohnWiley and Sons.

Whitley, R. (1984). The intellectual and social organization of the

sciences. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Whitley, R. (1986). The transformation of business finance into

financial economics: The roles of academic expansion and

changes in US capital markets. Accounting, Organizations

and Society, 11(2), 171–192.Williams, P. F. (2000). A social view on accounting ethics.

Research on Accounting Ethics, 6, 259–272.Williams, P. F., & Rodgers, J. L. (1995). The Accounting

Review and the production of accounting knowledge.Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 6(3), 263–287.

Wolfe, A. (1989). Whose keeper? Social science and moral

obligation. Berkeley: University of California Press.Yoels, W. C. (1972). On the social organization of American

sociology. Paper presented at the Midwestern SociologicalMeeting, April, Kansas City.

Zeff, S. A. (1978). On communicating the results of research.The Accounting Review, 53(2), 470–474.

Zeff, S. A. (1996). A study of academic research journals in

accounting. Accounting Horizons, 10(3), 158–177.

The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in … · The winnowing away of behavioral...

Documents

Transcript of The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in … · The winnowing away of behavioral...