The manufacture of the academic accountant

Abstract

This paper uses observation and semi-structured interviews, informed by limited auto-ethnography, to examine the experiences of accounting doctoral students at a North American business school. Analyzing the findings with a theoretical approach to understanding scientific activity (Knorr-Cetina, 1981), this study investigates the influence of networks of academic supervisors, colloquia facilitators, and other doctoral students on the socialization of developing accounting academics as they learn the research process. The paper demonstrates that these resource-relationships play a key role in the formation of the doctoral student in relation to their respective field. The paper also demonstrates the influence of the particular methodology they are learning, as part of the socialization process. The degree of the field-specific methods’ indeterminacy influences the students’ perception of limits to their freedom and innovation. Building on previous research, the paper challenges the opposition of interpretive accounting research to a positivist/functionalist mainstream: the paper shows that despite the potential provided by the Inter-disciplinary stream’s indeterminacy of what constitutes “good research”, such opposition limits innovation and freedom.