The practical relevance of management accounting research and the role of qualitative methods therein

Citation

ter Bogt, H. and van Helden, J. (2012), "The practical relevance of management accounting research and the role of qualitative methods therein", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 9 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qram.2012.31409caa.001

The practical relevance of management accounting research and the role of qualitative methods therein

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Volume 9, Issue 3

In recent years the practical relevance of management accounting research has been addressed in special sections of accounting journals (Management Accounting Research, 2010, Vol. 20 No. 2; Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2012, Vol. 23 No. 1), in more or less “isolated” papers in these journals (Mitchell, 2002; van Helden and Northcott, 2010) and in special issues of journals in the more general field of management (Academy of Management Review, Vol. 50 No. 2).

This special issue of Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management (QRAM) aims to continue the debate on the practical relevance of management accounting research through a specific focus on the contribution of qualitative research to this topic. So apart from discussing the subject in a more general sense, we will raise some particular questions about the role of qualitative methods therein. We present four papers. The first is a traditional research paper in the sense that it is a theoretically informed empirical study that makes use of qualitative methods. The other three papers have a more reflective character. The second paper advocates a multi-case research method and an interpretive theoretical framework that includes political and economic insights as well as elements from practice. The third paper discusses the focus of the practice-relevance debate, which according to the authors is often too instrumental. The fourth and final paper deals with various themes that might play a role when considering (the need to increase) the practical relevance of management accounting research and the role of qualitative research therein. This paper includes short commentaries with the opinions of the editors of eight academic accounting journals about these themes.

However, before introducing the four papers of this special issue, we – as its editors – would like to express our gratitude to the editor of QRAM, Deryl Northcott. She was the one who encouraged us to start our collection of papers and organize the review process. She also stimulated us to enrich the practice-relevance debate by including the role of qualitative research methods. Furthermore, we would like to thank the authors of the papers as well as the journal editors who contributed to this special issue by giving their views on the importance of practice-relevance, as included in the fourth paper.

The first paper is authored by Jan van Helden, Anders Grönlund, Riccardo Mussari and Pasquale Ruggiero. It examines the reasons why public sector managers approach either consultants or academics to help them solve problems related to public sector accounting and management reforms. The research is based on a field study of 24 public sector managers’ reactions to real-life constructs and their answers to questions about their experiences. The public sector managers selected came from central government agencies in Italy, The Netherlands and Sweden. The paper shows that in the case of well-defined practical technical problems, public sector managers tend to approach consultants because of their experience-based knowledge. This so-called tacit knowledge is typically transferred through a strong interaction between the public sector manager and the consultant, denoted as socialization. In accordance with their expectations, the authors found that public sector managers particularly turn to academics in the case of specific value-laden problems in their organization. Although they are also knowledgeable about practical and technical issues (the primary domain of consultants), academics’ know-how is usually only asked for when impartiality is required. Furthermore, with respect to the transfer of knowledge, the authors expected a detached approach by the academic: an indirect exchange of information between the academic and the client (indicated as interiorization). This assumption was, however, not corroborated by their study; generally academics work closely together with their counterparts in the client organization. This paper has contributed to the formulation of a better articulated set of preferences of public sector managers as regards the choice between a consultant and an academic as an advisor. Moreover, this research makes use of an innovative form of data collection through so-called real-life constructs. These constructs explore the reactions of respondents to a concrete agenda of advisory projects on, for example, a new cost allocation system or a repositioning of the organization’s strategy. Then subsequently the research moves outwards from the construct, thus facilitating connections with more general organizational processes.

Will Seal’s paper shows how management control researchers can improve their practical impact through research designs that recognize the multiple dimensions of organizational reality. The author points at a possible breach between the managerial knowledge in universities and managerial practice, resulting, for example, from the fact that practitioners and academics are influenced by different literatures or have different ideas about “legitimacy”. The author argues, however, that management accounting researchers can increase their critical engagement skills through what is labelled as pragmatic constructivism. The ideas of pragmatic constructivism help explain how managers in practice construct their reality via logics, facts, values and communication. The adoption of an interpretive theoretical framework and a multi-case research method could help the academic researcher understand how the specific organizational context influences the local logics, values and facts in an organization. It is argued that management consultants have implicitly adopted this way of working, as they also learn from their clients and apply their accumulated knowledge to other clients, which suggests that in fact they also use multiple cases. Academic researchers can replicate the pragmatic constructivist ontology whilst adopting more explicitly theoretical and critical approaches. The main difference between the multiple case research of management consultants and that of academic researchers is probably that academics interpret data via theory, which enables them to identify “patterns”. Seal proposes that academic research could increase its contribution to management control in practice by integrating parts of the consultants’ knowledge creation process without undermining the standards of theoretical rigour and academic values.

The paper by Jeltje Van-der-Meer-Kooistra and Ed Vosselman claims that the practical relevance of management accounting research is too instrumentally constrained. In addition to relevance in an instrumental sense, these authors distinguish two other aspects of practical importance: conceptual relevance, which refers to the framing of the decision (and control) situation in practice, and legitimative relevance, which supports processes of legitimization and enforcing decisions. The authors’ call for increasing the domain of practical relevance of management accounting knowledge interrelates with a debate on the desirability of theoretical pluralism and paradigm diversity in management accounting research. The paper argues that theoretical pluralism enhances relevance in a conceptual rather than in an instrumental manner, which is desirable. Enhancing the conceptual relevance of the research may be achieved by adopting an interpretive research perspective in which qualitative methods are central. Interpretive research produces knowledge of how change in accounting and control (and, more broadly, in organizations) is an interactive effect of complex and unpredictable relations among multiple entities, including social, cultural, political and economic conditions. It thus acknowledges the complexity and context-specificity of practice. This type of research has the potential to challenge the performativity of the mainstream management accounting knowledge, without opposing the pursuit of efficiency as such. These authors’ claim is that instrumental relevance is typically associated with the mainstream management accounting research, which de-contextualizes and oversimplifies the actual reality of management accounting practices.

The final paper in this special issue presents the opinions of the editors of a number of highly valued academic journals that publish articles on management accounting research. The editors express their views about the practical relevance of the research in this area as well as the role of qualitative methods in this context. We invited several journal editors to respond to a short note containing some questions and discussion themes. To our delight almost all of them agreed to participate. We received contributions from the editors of eight journals: James Guthrie and Lee Parker, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ); Stewart Jones, (Abacus); Christopher Chapman and Anja Kern, Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS); Christine Cooper and Marcia Annisette, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA); Salvador Carmona, European Accounting Review (EAR); Irvine Lapsley, Financial Accountability & Management (FAM); Ramsji Balakrishnan, Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR); and Bob Scapens, Management Accounting Research (MAR). An overall conclusion drawn from the journal editors’ contributions about the importance of practice-relevance in the management accounting research and the role of qualitative methods is that these two topics do not seem to be regarded as crucial in the research debate. In our reflection about the editors’ views, we make some suggestions for how to move ahead. First, since the field of management accounting is intrinsically a practice-oriented discipline, we propose a larger focus of the research on topics relevant to practitioners, such as management accountants and managers using management accounting information. Second, we argue that researchers should be encouraged to collaborate more with practitioners, as is the case in action and interventionist research. Third, we emphasize that research findings should be communicated to practitioners via communication channels that are easily accessible to them. Fourth, in our view, academic journals should also pay attention to the practical implications of research findings. In this way, a future research agenda could be set which is also interesting to practitioners. Finally, we would like to encourage a further debate about the role of qualitative methods used in research on topics that are of practical relevance, a discussion that should go beyond some text-book views about the differences between quantitative and qualitative research in management. We share the opinion of Baldvinsdottir et al. (2010, p. 80), who observe that:

[…][m]anagement accounting research has moved from a predominant focus on the technical to a predominant focus on the social. There has been a neglect of research which seeks to balance both aspects and which therefore reflects the real world nature of the accounting discipline.

We believe that the collection of papers in this special issue is an interesting one, as each paper adopts its own perspective in discussing the practice-relevance of management accounting research and the role of qualitative research therein. We hope that this variety will contribute to the further discussion of these themes. We think that such a discussion is an important one and that it will shed more light on the actual existence of a gap between academia and practice, on the nature of this gap and on the extent to which this situation is regarded as a problem by the various parties involved. If it is concluded that such a gap indeed exists and that it is undesirable, the discussion might ideally lead to initiatives to narrow it without losing academic quality and “rigour” (rigour being a concept which might deserve some further discussion too). But, whatever the results of this discussion may be, academics might consider explicit attempts to contribute to practice as an end in itself; for example, because they enjoy contributing to solving concrete problems in organizations or because they think that academic research should (also) be related to practice. However, they might also be interested in contributing to practice because they want to show that academics are not primarily interested in “art for art’s sake”; for example, to retain the support of various stakeholders in society for the work done in universities. Regardless of the precise reasons for the discussion, the fact that in recent years several papers and special issues/sections of journals have been devoted to the theme of practice-relevance does suggest that at least some academics feel a little bit uncomfortable as regards the topic. This level of discomfort will hopefully stimulate academics to engage in pluriform types of future management accounting research in which academic values as well as practical relevance receive balanced attention.

Henk ter Bogt, Jan van HeldenGuest Editors