Abstract
This paper is a by-product of my unpublished PhD thesis which I submitted to the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, and obtained my PhD in 2016. When I first joined the University of Hull to pursue my PhD studies under the supervision of Danture Wickramasinge, I was astonished by hearing that a social theory can be used in doing a management accounting research. When Dan joined the University of Glasgow, I followed his foot-step and joined Glasgow with my desire to follow that novel tradition of research. In this paper, I illustrate how Bruno Latour and his follows’ ideas of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) challenged my way of thinking, informed my way of doing research, shaped my analytical instruments. I hope this illustration may guide emerging researchers who want to take a constructionist approach to management and accounting research which ANT has promoted, enacted and popularised around the globe.
Highlights
Some theories are symmetrical with methodologies, and vice versa
Given the nature of the research questions, which are theoretically informed by strings from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), two research methodologies have been employed in this thesis: literature review and case study
I can assert that ANT is useful for a qualitative researcher as a specific epistemological approach
Summary
Some theories are symmetrical with methodologies, and vice versa. Some argue that ANT is of this kind. It is because in taking ANT, a researcher needs to follow both human and non-human actors to see how things such management practices are constructed in a given circumstance. He/she may see how actors network in the construction of that thing. Until the researcher finds it, knowledge of that “thing” is uncertain: ANT guides us to explore new knowledge which is always ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable. ANT defines what constitutes knowledge (epistemology) and provides a set of assumptions about the nature of the world’s reality (ontology)
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