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The industrial relations tradition values empirical analysis and research usable for policy making. Considerations about epistemology and ontology and their consequences for the research are not integrated in the tradition. Just as daily research only very seldom relates to higher‐level theorising, a case in point being the development of a common theoretical framework, theoretical discussions are mostly separated from daily research into special rooms where discussion and development takes places among a few specialists. The industrial relations tradition also keeps women and research in gender in the periphery. This has consequences not only for the visibility of women’s labour market participation and for the status of the research in gender, but also for the industrial relations tradition, as it will become less able to see new tendencies and developments at the labour market and in industrial relations. The first part of the article discusses how the tradition – in spite of a growing acceptance of gender research – is still influenced by a male norm. In the second part the article endeavours to relate the under‐theorising of the IR tradition and the marginalisation of a gender perspective. The last part of the article introduces an integrated gender perspective as one – although incomplete – way to overcome these problems.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework of external accounting communication in the form of a typology based on perspectives, traditions, and theories from the discipline of communication studies. The focus is accounting communication with external audiences via public written documents outside the audited financial statements, i.e., annual reports, press releases, CSR reports, websites, conference calls, etc.

The theoretical framework is based on two broad research perspectives on accounting communication: (A) a functionalist-behavioural transmission perspective and (B) a symbolic-interpretive narrative perspective. Eight traditions of communication research are introduced which provide alternative ways of conceptualising accounting communication, namely (1) mathematical tradition, (2) socio-psychological tradition, (3) cybernetic/systems-oriented tradition, (4) semiotic tradition, (5) rhetorical tradition, (6) phenomenological tradition, (7) socio-cultural tradition, and (8) critical tradition. Exemplars of each tradition from prior accounting research, to the extent they have been adopted, are discussed. Finally, a typology is developed, which serves as a heuristic device for viewing similarities and differences between research traditions.

Prior accounting studies predominantly focus on the role of discretionary disclosures in accounting communication in the functioning of the relationship between organisations and their audiences. Research is predominantly located in the mathematical, the socio-psychological, and the cybernetic/systems-oriented tradition. Accounting communication is primarily viewed as the transmission of messages about financial, environmental, and social information to external audiences. Prior research is mainly concerned with the communicator (e.g. CEO personality) and the message (e.g. intentions and effects of accounting communication). Research from alternative traditions is encouraged, which explores how organisations and their audiences engage in a dialogue and interactively create, sustain, and manage meaning concerning accounting and accountability issues.

The paper identifies, organises, and synthesises research perspectives, traditions, and associated theories from the communication studies literature in the form of a typology. The paper concludes with an extensive agenda for future research on accounting communication.

This paper examines the influence of the normal science tradition, epitomized by the notion that “theory is king”, on contemporary accounting research and the epistemological tensions that may emerge as this idea is applied to particular ways of studying accounting. For illustrative purposes, the authors focus on research informed by actor-network theory (ANT) which can be seen as an “extreme case” in the sense that it is, in principle, difficult to reconcile with the normal science aspirations.

The paper offers an analysis based on a close reading of how accounting scholars, using ANT, theorize, and if they do engage in explicit theorizing, how they deal with the tensions that might emerge from the need to reconcile its epistemological underpinnings with those of the normal science tradition.

The findings of this paper show that the tensions between normal science thinking and the epistemological principles of ANT have, in a few cases, been avoided, as researchers stay relatively faithful to ANT and largely refrain from further theory development. However, in most cases, the tensions have ostensibly been ignored as researchers blend the epistemology of ANT and that of normal science without reflecting on the implications of doing so.

The paper contributes to emerging debates on the role of the normal science tradition in contemporary accounting research, and also extends recent discussions on the role of theory in accounting research inspired by ANT. The paper proposes three reasons for the observed blending of epistemologies: unawareness of tensions, epistemological eclecticism and various political considerations.

Purpose — The purpose of this discussion is, first, to review the concept of truth claim and how it forms the framework for four research traditions: science, social science, law, and judgments of excellence. Then, the operational mechanisms of networks are reviewed. The discussion concludes by introducing three philosophic perspectives that might deepen the meanings nascent in the concept of “search.”

Methodology/approach — The methodology includes a historical approach to outline brief but sufficient definitions for how truth claims are built in four established research traditions. Each tradition is then analyzed with a view to testing its methods. The tests suggest a number of pathways to reframe search engine results in order to evaluate their relationship to the previously established types of truth claims.

Findings — The findings constitute an outline of the research traditions in the four areas of science, social science, law, and judgments of excellence. These are followed by a review of the current configurations of networks, their infrastructures, and their capabilities, including a brief section on the importance of search engine mechanisms. Crawling, indexing, and then ranking form the operational mechanisms that search engines employ in delivering search results. It is clear that each operation introduces logical problems. Then, the final sections outline three widely ranging philosophic perspectives on the nature of search: (1) an aesthetic theory of indexing, (2) understanding search from the psychology of learning, and (3) an exploration of the relationship between performativity and recent economic models of how data accumulates in today's world.

Research implications — It is suggested that exploration of a deeper philosophical perspective will assist library and information science (LIS) scholars to reframe Web search in ways that allow linkages to the established research traditions.

Originality/value of the paper — The idea of testing the “truth claim” as connected to traditional research methods was presented initially by Rall (2002, 2004). This area has been neglected in the literature as many Internet scholars find that the philosophy of research methodologies remains outside of their knowledge base. Overall, LIS scholars have focused on information seekers, on the politics of search engines, as well as documenting the computational problems that are present in search engine results. The consideration of how truth claims are formed and subsequently tested will allow LIS researchers to explore the linkages between their current studies and the established frameworks of scholarly research.

Scandinavian research in systems development can be grouped into three major traditions, based on quite different ideologies and theories: the systems theoretical school, the socio‐technical school and the critical school. The differences between these schools are closely related to the historical and social contexts in which they developed. External political, economic and cultural factors have strongly influenced research in this field. In particular, the basic theoretical differences between the schools reflect their different interpretations of the relationship between capital and labour.

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control research in their native countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This paper offers an auto-ethnography to demonstrate the lack of diversity in accounting, accountability and management control research.

Global developments in accounting and accountability reforms entail not only about how developing countries being governed through these reforms but also about how accounting research itself can be pursued alternatively. In the past several decades, a camp of British accounting researchers initiated a programme of research in this direction. Inspired by post-positivistic traditions, they aimed to explore how these reforms are predicated upon cultural-political milieus in developing countries. However, the academia in most accounting and management researchers from local universities in these countries are blindly bombarded with positivistic traditions.

The authors unpack how this hegemony formed and how attempts were made towards some emancipatory potentials.

Based on the 1991 Shirley Lerner Memorial Lecture, a discussion is conducted of the challenges and opportunities facing teachers and researchers arising from the rapidly changing practice of industrial relations. A widening of the scope of the subject, to include its individual as well as collective aspects, it is argued, is fully compatible with seeing the main focus as the employment relationship. The challenge to the subject′s research tradition of empirical enquiry, multi‐disciplinarity and above all, its integrity, is much more fundamental. Maintaining this tradition is not only vital for industrial relations, but also for the future direction of the business schools in which most industrial relations teachers and researchers find themselves.

We analyze how institutional persistence unfolds. Building on an historical analysis of 3,307 bottle labels in the Bordeaux wine community, France, between 1924 and 2005, we find that the persistence of a chateau tradition requires considerable effort at maintenance. Instead of greater compression and taken-for-grantedness, we propose that expansion along multimodal carriers provides a marker of a deepening institutionalization. We underscore the role of community organizations in enabling a wine tradition to persist. The implications of our findings for institutional theory and multimodality research are discussed.

This chapter highlights the personal side of research methods. We begin with an overview of Hans-Georg Gadamer's insights into the general problem of method in the social sciences and hermeneutics. This is followed by an overview of Michael Polanyi's explanation of the practice of scientific investigation. The second half of the chapter considers implications of the personal side of methods for how we conduct management research. This section discusses critical realism as a philosophy of science consistent with the assumptions of our field, the reasons for methodological pluralism and possible responses, and management research as a social practice.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the boundaries separating strategic and comparative institutional perspectives on human resource systems and employment relations. Each research tradition has investigated the role and outcomes of corporations as they operate in an increasingly global economy. Researchers in these traditions, however, ask different research questions and draw on distinct social science disciplines, theoretical assumptions, and research methodologies. While they have pursued parallel but separate tracks, we argue that they have important lessons for each other. In this paper, we review the core characteristics and critiques of each research tradition, provide a series of examples of efforts to bridge their differences, and offer suggestions for future integration.