Abstract
Commenting on our study “Accountability and ideology: The case of a German university under the Nazi regime", published in 2020 in Accounting History, Fülbier recently outlined a research agenda on the manifold ways in which the Nazi doctrine affected institutions of higher education, going beyond the scope of our original article. With this reply, we seek to reflect on research considerations emanating from such an agenda, relating to (i) conducting historical case-based research, (ii) questions of ontology and epistemology in interpretive accounting research, and (iii) the notion of what constitutes accounting in a specific research context. We hope that our reply, along with Fülbier’s commentary, inspires further research on accounting’s role in totalitarian regimes.
Highlights
We welcome Fülbier’s (2021) commentary on our study of the Handelshochschule Leipzig under the Nazi regime (Detzen and Hoffmann, 2020), and we fully endorse his call for a more comprehensive review of academics and universities during that period
We need to know more about the history of universities and colleges operating under totalitarian regimes, for example in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Communist USSR, which may elicit a better understanding of both historical as well as contemporary settings
The idea of our original paper was to look at a specific academic institution in detail
Summary
We welcome Fülbier’s (2021) commentary on our study of the Handelshochschule Leipzig under the Nazi regime (Detzen and Hoffmann, 2020), and we fully endorse his call for a more comprehensive review of academics and universities during that period This call is highly relevant because higher education is a key driver for the social and cultural evolution of a country (Gibbons, 1998). Studying the Nazi regime’s influence on academia at the various institutional and individual levels is a venture that is too broad to be thoroughly addressed in a research project yielding a single paper-length article Engaging in such a project inevitably entails a focusing that makes the research viable and, at the same time, confines it. The methodological nuances underlying one’s research predetermine which questions can and which cannot be addressed by the chosen approach
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