Abstract
Qualitative accounting research is a consolidated field with a tradition dating back to the 1980s (Annisette et al., 2017). The area has now its own spaces concerning conferences and journals despite its uneasy trajectory (Lee and Humphrey, 2006). Indeed, the consolidation of the field is a result from engagement of several accounting scholars committed to sustaining this tradition strong and alive even facing the growing advancement of positivism in neoliberal times that happened in several research realms (Denzin and Giardina, 2017). Indeed, a companion on qualitative research in accounting is more than welcomed considering its potential to contribute to the most needed formation of new qualitative scholars in accounting. Standing from this position, I present this book review based on my experience of teaching a course on Introduction to Qualitative Research in Accounting, to first semester PhD students.
For the last 3 years, the organization of this course was an intricate task. I used to have several papers and some textbooks from accounting and management scholars, but they did not fill this role adequately. My previous syllabus was more extensive than necessary repeating some arguments throughout the collection, and the course became slow and difficult to pursue. The Routledge Companion filled the gap of having one leading material and helped to organize a syllabus around its main chapters. Indeed, it was necessary to add some few specific textbooks and papers as additional literature, primarily, to have research from Brazilian authors or to some particular topics that may demand more deepness.
Throughout its 29 chapters, the companion provides contributions that were organized around worldviews and paradigms, methodologies and strategies, data collection and analysis, and personal reflections on qualitative field research. A summary of the chapters can be found in the introductory chapter. The book started by providing a full-length discussion on social constructionist, interpretive, and critical accounting research in the first three chapters. However, one hiatus became apparent: a previous debate on accounting research paradigms (Hopper and Powell, 1985; Ryan et al., 2002) not adequately addressed in the introductory chapter. The connection of onto-epistemic traditions, organized into paradigms, may subsidize the development of alternative reasoning in a field dominated by mainstream traditions. That is necessary for students who were previously trained in positivistic terms to become operators of quantitative techniques. My way of solving this gap was to add re-readings of this classic paradigmatic discussion focused on the Brazilian context (see Lourenço and Sauerbronn, 2016; Wanderley and McCullen, 2011).
From chapters 5 to 17, the authors offered significant contributions on methodologies and strategies of qualitative accounting research. It is important to notice that I would have repositioned chapters 5 to 8 (historiography, grounded theory, visual methods, appreciative inquiry) as belonging to the second part of the book, whereas its content should not assume the status of accounting paradigms or worldviews if compared to next nine chapters. Despite this editorial particularity, the following sections engage in significant discussions to students’ formation on different research approaches—ethnography, case studies, narrative approaches, oral history, autoethnography, action research, discourse analysis, interventionist research, and reflexivity. The book also provides relevant contents on data collection and analysis regarding mixed methods, interviews, participant observation, content analysis, focus group, and the use of qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. The content provided a sense in which doing of qualitative research is a disciplined and reflexive process. It highlighted that “qualitative research methods are particularly well suited to studies that seek to understand the origins and role of accounting in its specific historical, social and organisational context” (Lee and Humphrey, 2006: 183).
It was beneficial to have an organized material that helped to reveal the potential of qualitative accounting research within a range of paradigms, strategies, and methodologies. However, it is important to advise the readers that the authors did not provide any sort of methodological and analytical checklists for good qualitative field research regarding any specific method. As pointed out by Ahrens and Chapman (2006, p. 820) any form of checklist would be “at best indirectly helpful and potentially counterproductive” to the development of qualitative accounting research.
As pointed out by Homero (2017), Brazilian accounting scholars, in general, have a mongrel complex that praises international authors and publications in leading journals as superior knowledge. In that context, each chapter consolidated the international literature on specific qualitative research aspect, being a road map to enter the field. The experiences and personal reflections presented by leading authors likewise may encourage students to go further and challenge, at least a little bit, their preconceived bias against qualitative research. Meanwhile, the companion could embrace qualitative research done by authors from other countries and, somewhat, confirming the more inclusive side of our community. Some essential contributions could also come from emerging paradigms like postcolonial and decolonial perspectives.
Undoubtedly, organizing the course syllabus around the companion helped to undermine the idea in which qualitative research is content-free, mechanical, and abstract. Similarly, it provided space to keep teaching and researching as a creative and spontaneous act in the accounting field.