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The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the paper entitled “Towards a paradigmatic foundation for accounting practice” by Nørreklit, Nørreklit and Mitchell as a way to open a debate about whether a “paradigm of accounting practice” exists and, if so, the nature of the methodological approach that would be needed to discover its nature.

The paper employs a critical, reflective discursive analysis.

The main finding is that there is a confusion in the paper by Nørreklit et al. about the nature of a “paradigm of accounting practice”, which, if it exists, should be a “skeletal theory” (Laughlin), rather than a methodology. The conclusion of the commentary is that a “paradigm of accounting practice”, using this understanding, might exist, but that Nørreklit et al.'s argument for the use of “pragmatic constructivism”, as a methodology for its discovery, is open to question.

The implication of the argument of this commentary is that the search for “paradigm of accounting practice” is important and should be pursued but the choice of an appropriate methodology for this discovery still needs further consideration.

Nørreklit et al., and this commentary, re‐energise an important debate and concern about paradigms in accounting that was present in the literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The search for a “paradigm of accounting practice” and how best it can be discovered is an important consideration for the future development of accounting thought.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of economic performance for decision-making.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with local business actors, in this case, families from seven financially successful Danish dairy farms. The casework and the analysis have been informed by pragmatic constructivism.

The local business actors do not use the official accounting system for ongoing cost-management-related decision-making. Instead, they use several epistemic methods that include locally developed decision models, experiences, rules of thumb and intuition. The farmers use these vernacular accountings to compensate for the cost management illusion that the formal accounting system tends to create. What the study suggests is that when management accountants engage as business partners, they are likely to enter a space where accounting is already present.

This paper argues that local business actors practice epistemic methods where they develop and use vernacular accountings to support their managerial practice, also in the absence of a professional management accountant. These vernacular accountings may lead the local actors into an illusion because the vernacular accountings do not necessarily have an inherent economic logic and theoretical reliability. The role of the management accountant in such a setting is hence to understand, support and advance local epistemic methods. Becoming a business partner requires a combination of management accounting analytical skills and a sense of empathy and sensitivity regarding what is already at play and how this can become an object of discussion without violating the values of the other.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive theory as to why academic research in accounting is said not to help practice.

The authors (1) present a comprehensive literature review in the academic/practitioner gap arena, and (2) develop a theoretical background for it. Further, they identify (3) the different information needs of these groups using value group theory and (4) the inherent factors and personality traits that influence career choice. Next, they (5) evaluate the values of each subgroup. They then (6) theorize what types of accounting research would interest each. They argue that (7) individuals who enter the academy differ from those who enter practice, and (8) the socialization processes and the impact of the professional setting (practice or academe) on behaviors further the separation of academic research from practitioner needs.

This paper is theoretical. It suggests that bridging the gap will be difficult. The study is theoretical. The limitation is that it does not empirically test the relationships hypothesized. By providing a comprehensive model of factors underlying the gap, however, it can be a fruitful source of research ideas for years to come. The implications are that it will be difficult to bridge the gap between accounting practitioners and academics. Having a greater understanding of the causes of the gap, however, may be very useful in fostering thought as to how to overcome it.

Prior literature on the topic is largely atheoretical. This paper is the first to develop a broad theory of the gap.

This paper compares and contrasts practice-based perceptions of the research–practice gap in the United States (US) with those in Australia.

The current study extends the work of Tucker and Lowe (2014) by comparing and contrasting their Australian-based findings with evidence from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with senior representatives of 18 US state and national professional accounting associations.

The extent to which academic research informs practice is perceived to be limited, despite the potential for academic research findings to make a significant contribution to management accounting practice. We find similarities as well as differences in the major obstacles to closer engagement in the US and Australia. This comparison, however, leads us to offer a more fundamental explanation of the divide between academic research and practice framed in terms of the relative benefits and costs of academics engaging with practice.

Rather than following conventional approaches to ‘bridging the gap’ by identifying barriers to the adoption of research, we suggest that only after academics have adequate incentives to speak to practice can barriers to a more effective diffusion of their research findings be surmounted.

This study makes three novel contributions to the “relevance literature” in management accounting. First, it adopts a distinct theoretical vantage point to organize, analyze, and interpret empirical evidence. Second, it captures practice-based views about the nature and extent of the divide between research and practice. Third, it provides a foundational assessment of the generalizability of the gap by examining perceptions of it across two different geographic contexts.

Purpose: The current study aims to cast light on the divide between academic research in management accounting and its applicability to practice by examining, from the standpoint of nursing, how this gap is perceived and what challenges may be involved in bridging it.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The current study compares the findings of Tucker and Parker (2014) with both quantitative as well as qualitative evidence from an international sample of nursing academics.

Findings: The findings of this study point to the differing tradition and historical development in framing and addressing the research–practice gap between management accounting and nursing contexts and the rationale for practice engagement as instrumental in explaining disciplinary differences in addressing the research–practice gap.

Research Implications Despite disciplinary differences, we suggest that a closer engagement of academic research in management accounting with practice “can work,” “will work,” and “is worth it.” Central to a closer relationship with practice, however, is the need for management accounting academics to follow their nursing counterparts and understand the incentives that exist in undertaking research of relevance.

Originality/value: The current study is one of the few that has sought to look to the experience of other disciplines in bridging the gap. Moreover, to our knowledge, it is the first study in management accounting to attempt this comparison. In so doing, our findings provide a platform for further considering how management accounting researchers, and management accounting as a discipline might, in the spirit of this study’s title, “Learn from the Experience of Others.”

The purpose of this study is to provide a harmonisation framework for the diverse accounting practices by extractive industries.

The study takes a three-stage approach. The first involves a comprehensive literature review of the historical evolution of accounting regulations by extractive industries. The second involves constructing an accounting practice index for extractive industries. The third involves constructing a harmonisation framework.

The accounting practice index provides empirical evidence of the wide diversity of accounting practices by extractive industries. Analysis of the literature review addresses the several attempts by accounting and regulatory bodies to standardise the diverse practices of accounting by extractive industries and reasons for the lack of successful standardisations. The authors extract lessons from these previous attempts and propose a harmonisation framework.

The proposed harmonisation framework can be used to align together the diverse accounting practices by extractive industries and enhance comparability and consistency of accounting figures and statements produced by these industries. Harmonising the diverse accounting practices is crucial for investment decision-making.

The harmonisation framework is the first of its kind that could enhance the comparability of accounts of extractive industries’ firms and be used to harmonise diverse accounting practices by other industries.

This study aims to explore how management accounting practices act as drivers of organizational change in situations of institutional complexity.

A case study was carried out in a small company with a strongly rooted social culture, which was acquired by a large conglomerate and underwent a process of strategic change as part of a new control logic. Based on this, the study analyzes the evolution of this change, with a particular focus on the efforts to construct the meaning of the performance through the inscription of objects from the cultural system to which it is attached and the “situated rationality” of the managers who are involved in its production.

The authors show how managers link their own concepts of performance to accounting practices. At the same time, the authors show how accounting practices unfold through representational gaps that their production generates.

This study acknowledges that bias may arise from reliance on retrospective views of past processes and events, gathered primarily through interviews, documentation and observations.

This study highlights that the way in which the performance concept is presented by accounting practices can have a constructive effect on the organization through the aspirations that its representations entail, thus having the potential to stimulate change in organizations.

This study contributes to the organizational literature by clarifying that accounting practices drive change by providing spaces for debates and questions that affect the way organizations understand and report their performance.

A gap between research and practice is commonly perceived throughout accounting academia. However, empirical evidence on the magnitude of this detachment remains scarce. The authors provide new evidence to the ongoing debate by introducing a novel topic-based approach to capture the research-practice gap and quantify its extent. They also explore regional differences in the research-practice gap.

The authors apply the unsupervised machine learning approach Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to compare the topical composition of 2,251 articles from six premier research, practice and bridging journals from the USA and Europe between 2009 and 2019. The authors extend the existing methods of summarizing literature and develop metrics that allow researchers to evaluate the research-practice gap. The authors conduct a plethora of additional analyses to corroborate the findings.

The results substantiate a pronounced topic-related research-practice gap in accounting literature and document its statistical significance. Moreover, the authors uncover that this gap is more pronounced in the USA than in Europe, highlighting the importance of institutional differences between academic communities.

The authors objectify the debate about the extent of a research-practice gap and stimulate further discussions about explanations and consequences.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to deploy a rigorous machine learning approach to measure a topic-based research-practice gap in the accounting literature. Additionally, the authors provide theoretical rationales for the extent and regional differences in the research-practice gap.

Innovation in fintech presents great opportunities and huge challenges for accounting practices around the world. This paper aims to examine the impact of Fintech on accounting practices including financial reporting, performance management, budgeting, auditing, risk and fraud management. Fintech is proxied by the adoption of AI and big data analysis in accounting practices.

We chose African countries as our focus countries and surveyed chartered and qualified accountants in both Ghana and Nigeria. With 201 questionnaires qualified for our final analyses, we adopted the structural equation modelling to analyse the impact of Fintech on accounting practices.

The empirical results show that the impact of AI and big data on accounting practices is positive and significant, indicating that fintech could potentially mitigate the agency problem in accounting practices and lead to better accounting practices. Interestingly, we find that, in general, the impact of AI is larger than that of big data.

Our results provide significant insights to regulators, policymakers and managers about the future development of adopting fintech in the regulation and governance framework at both macro and micro levels for accounting practice.

The purpose of this study is to augment an understanding of the importance and relevance of a proposed new definition of accounting to reset, inform and develop accounting education, professional practice and research, from tomorrow, for the purpose of shaping a better world. In the process of setting an agenda, we outline, discuss, and analyse the eight articles which follow depicting complementary and insightful scenarios during COVID-19.

This study applies an original informing framework for discussion and analysis purposes, described as Framework of the Multidimensional Nature of Accounting. The proposed, multidimensional definition is “Accounting is a technical, social and moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders to enable the flourishing of organisations, people and nature” (Carnegie et al., 2021a, p. 69, 2021b).

Accounting is conceived, understood and examined in the research portrayed as a combined technical, social and moral practice concerned with shaping a better world to enable the flourishing of organisations, people and nature. To the contrary, accounting is not recognised as a mere neutral, benign, technical practice.

While this paper examines the other articles, there is no substitute for carefully reading, and reflecting on, all the articles published. Importantly, each contribution provides unique and comprehensive insights on accounting during the initial global pandemic period.

Accounting is studied in different organisational and social contexts against the backdrop of a global pandemic, among other “wicked problems” worldwide.