A Scrapbook on What's Wrong with the Past, Present and Future of Accountics Science

Abstract

For operational convenience I define accountics science as research that features equations and/or statistical inference. Historically, there was a heated debate in the 1920s as to whether the main research journal of academic accounting, The Accounting Review (TAR) that commenced in 1926, should be an accountics journal with articles that mostly featured equations. Practitioners and teachers of college accounting won that debate.TAR articles and accountancy doctoral dissertations prior to the 1970s seldom had equations. For reasons summarized below, doctoral programs and TAR evolved to where in the 1990s there where having equations became virtually a necessary condition for a doctoral dissertation and acceptance of a TAR article. Qualitative normative and case method methodologies disappeared from doctoral programs.What’s really meant by “featured equations” in doctoral programs is merely symbolic of the fact that North American accounting doctoral programs pushed out most of the accounting to make way for econometrics and statistics that are now keys to the kingdom for promotion and tenure in accounting schools.The purpose of this paper is to make a case that the accountics science monopoly of our doctoral programs and published research is seriously flawed, especially its lack of concern about replication and focus on simplified artificial worlds that differ too much from reality to creatively discover findings of greater relevance to teachers of accounting and practitioners of accounting. Accountics scientists themselves became a Cargo Cult.