Discussion of: “ Accounting and the Epistemology of Ignorance”

1. Discussion of:“Accounting and the Epistemology of Ignorance” Discussant: Sven Modell Manchester Business School

2. Focus and Interest of Paper • Accounting scholars don’t “practise what they preach” when it comes to making their research findings auditable, verifiable and replicable. • This is primarily manifest in a dearth of efforts to conduct and publish replication studies. • It is also manifest in poorly developed routines for data sharing (despite editorial policies emphasising this). • Hence our discipline suffers from an “epistemology of ignorance”. • Accounting may be falling into disrespute as a “science”. • What, if anything, can we learn from other disciplines?

3. Key Arguments/Findings • Replication is the scientific “gold standard” in many disciplines, especially medicine, but practices vary across disciplines (e.g., psychology, behavioural sciences). • There is also a tradition of researchers facilitating replications by sharing data in many of these discipline. • Without replication there is no “truth”. • But established journals across a range of disciplines still display a “novelty/originality bias” in their publication standards. • Lack of closely replicated studies also hampers proper meta-analyses and more cumulative development of knowledge • Economics is a particularly poor benchmark in these respects, but at least there is a debate on the topic.

4. Key Arguments/Findings:How Does Accounting Research Fare in Relation to These Standards? • Not very well! • Paucity of closely replicated studies, despite at least some, major journals officially welcoming such studies. • Bias against publishing null results. • Clear evidence of “originality/novelty bias”. • Hardly any proper meta-analyses, despite long tradition of publishing more “qualitative” review articles (the “correctness” of which can be questionable). • Very little debate on the topic.

5. Reflections/Discussions • Is this really a “fair” critique even of mainstream accounting research given its espoused standards of knowledge formation (cf. emphasis on falsifiability and exploration of anomalies in Watts & Zimmerman, 1986). • Should we expect strict replications to be ontologically feasible or meaningful given the nature of accounting as a social and changeable phenomenon (although this is often neglected by the mainstream)? • In other words, is accounting research really a “science” and should it be evaluated as such? • Are there alternative and more relevant criteria for evaluating the “truth” of accounting research?

6. Reflections/Discussions • Can an evaluation of truth claims really be detached from the epistemic premises conditioning such truth claims (as the authors seem to do in this paper, see pp. 6-7)? • In other words, who decides what is “knowledge” and “ignorance” and how are such standards maintained and challenged? • What is the role of epistemic relativism in determining what is worth replicating and not? • If replication is still the key concern, then alternative bases for how to conceptualise it that are potentially more relevant to accounting research may be explored (e.g., Tsang & Kwan, AMR, 1999, on critical realism and replications). • But this requires much more engagement with issues of ontology than is the case in this paper.

7. In Conclusion • The paper targets a well-known, but little debated topic in the accounting research literature. • But is it shooting at the right target? • The discussion of replication can be extended considerably beyond the “scientific” standards that are now employed. • Issues of ontology and epistemic relativism would seem to be key to this end.