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Provides a response to the comments by Joni Young and Alistair Preston and by Sue Llewellyn, and seeks to clarify the authors’ use of the term “rhetoric”. Argues that both sets of commentators rely on rhetoric to express their own arguments. While the authors recognize and agree with most of the concerns raised by Llewellyn, they do not accept many of Young/Preston’s criticisms of their paper. Emphasizes that, although the authors were arguing for more scholarship, they were not seeking to dismiss the work of others.

Computer based accounting information systems (AIS) have been a major force behind the current wave of corporate downsizing and reengineering (Deloitte & Touche LLP, 1996). While greater economy and competitiveness is typically associated with these changes, conventional AIS literature usually eschews a counter‐hypothesis: that this new technology may also degrade both the quality and quantity of work, and therefore people’s working lives. The advent of Accounting, Management, and Information Technologies in 1991, with an espoused aim of “critically analyzing the relationships among our information systems designs, the qualities of our social and economic life, and our practices of management and control” (Boland and O’Leary, 1991, p. 2) presents a major opportunity to redress this deficiency. This paper reviews the journal’s inaugural issue and ancillary literature to assess its likely contribution. This literature is found to lack a sufficient appreciation of the social and historical context of AIS developments and thus compromises the new journal’s ability to achieve its espoused aims. The paper calls for a better understanding of the upheavals currently under way in the accounting workplace and ways in which AIS technology (and ethnographers) may compound these instabilities. A different kind of ethnographic research is called for: one capable of recognizing the dysfunctionalities of AIS‐induced downsizing and restructuring, and more politically and socially self‐aware of AIS agency in social and technological change.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the literary authority of qualitative management accounting field research (QMAFR) and its interconnectedness with the scientific authority of this form of research.

The paper adopts a non‐positivist perspective on the writing/authoring of QMAFR. The paper illustrates its arguments by analysing how the field is written/authored in two well‐known examples of qualitative management accounting research, using Golden‐Biddle and Locke's framework as a way of initiating an understanding of how field research attains its “convincingness”.

The paper finds that these two examples of QMAFR attain their convincingness by authoring a strong sense of authenticity and plausibility, adopting writing strategies that signal the authority of the researcher and their figuration of the “facts”.

The paper argues for a more aesthetically informed consideration of the “goodness” of non‐positivist QMAFR, arguing that its scientific and aesthetic forms of authority are ultimately intertwined.

This paper has practical implications for informing the ways in which QMAFR is read and written, arguing for greater experimentation in terms of its narration.

The value of this paper lies in its recognition of the authorial and aesthetic nature of QMAFR, as well as it potential to encourage debate, reflection and changed practices within the community of scholars interested in this form of research.

Aims to promote concern and debate about the penetration of accounting and financial management in the health care sectors of several Anglo‐Saxon countries – the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Questions may be raised in several ways. For example, by highlighting how accounting concepts such as “costs” are not neutral notions but rather are sites for struggles of divergent interests or by commenting on how accounting may change or be changed by different organizational and societal rationalities. Concern may also be raised by questioning the effects of accounting change in terms wider than the purely instrumental and thereby arguing that its global spread is grounded more in faith than “factual” evidence regarding its efficacy.

Raises several points of contention with Humphrey and Scapens’ paper. Questions their chronology of the accounting research scene in the 1980s, points out the possible dangers of pursuing the eclecticism advocated by the authors, and finds a proper definition of accounting theory to be lacking. However, commends the authors for raising interesting questions which will benefit from further debate and lead to a greater understanding of accounting research and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of the “Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Community”, a flourishing international interdisciplinary accounting research community. This scholarly community has emerged over some 30 years from the publication in 1988 of the inaugural issue of AAAJ under the joint editorship of James Guthrie and Lee Parker. This historical account discusses the motivation for establishing the journal and the important publishing initiatives, developments and trends across this period. The study positions the journal as a key thought leader, the catalyst for other Community activities such as the Asia-Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting conference.

The investigation involved a selective review of the contents of AAAJ, particularly the annual editorials published since inception, and other relevant literature, analysis of the main research themes and the most cited papers, and oral history interviews with the joint editors. The future prospects for the AAAJ Community are addressed.

The AAAJ Community has shaped and led developments in interdisciplinary accounting research. Recognised for innovation and with a reputation for nurturing scholars, AAAJ continues to grow in stature as one of the world’s leading accounting journals, challenging the status quo and fostering inclusive scholarship.

The study does not examine the journal’s publication patterns nor assess in detail the research studies that have been published in the journal.

The study recognises AAAJ as central to the development of an interdisciplinary accounting research community, firmly located in the sociological, critical and interpretative tradition also associated with some other leading accounting journals.

Though it is not the first public library to install BookshelF, Dumfries & Galloway Regional Library Service is the first public library to use the system for an authority‐wide, multi‐ site network. BookshelF was originally developed as part of a project investigating the uses of true multi‐user microcomputers in small academic and research libraries. Subsequently, the software has been acquired by Specialist Computer Systems & Software (SCSS) who have sold and installed the system in a wide range of organisations, including medical, academic, government and public libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the background to the special issue and to provide an introduction to the articles on case studies included in the issue.

The paper uses a review of developments in both the qualitative tradition and case studies in management research to provide a backdrop for the articles that are included in the issue. The articles discuss: the merits of unique cases and singular forms of evidence within a single case; the comparability of case studies with tools in other areas; and methods of theorising from case studies.

The merits of case studies have often been understated. The articles in this issue highlight a broader variety of uses of case study research than is commonly recognized.

This guest editorial introduces the papers in this issue, which may be read either as individual contributions that have merits per se, or as part of a collection that this introductory paper helps to knit together.

The purpose of the paper is to outline the development of academic research in the discipline of accounting, paying particular attention to the important contribution made by qualitative research projects.

Provision of a historical trajectory based on a review of developments in academic journals, the size and breadth of the academic community and other dimensions of the academic discipline of accounting.

The review indicates that accounting has developed into a pluralist discipline in the UK. Qualitative research features in many sub‐disciplinary areas of accounting.

The paper identifies the sibling discipline of finance as an area where qualitative research has not developed fully. It makes some suggestions and provides some indicators of how qualitative research in the areas of accounting and finance may develop in the future.

The paper provides the only attempt to date to analyse and review developments of qualitative research in accounting.

This investigation/report/reflection was motivated largely by the occasion of the first Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) “Summer School” in North America.¹ But its roots reach down as well to other recent reflection/investigation pieces, in particular, Mathews (1997), Gray (2002, 2006), and Deegan and Soltys (2007). The last of these authors note (p. 82) that CSEAR Summer Schools were initiated in Australasia, at least partly as a means to spur interest and activity in social and environmental accounting (SEA) research. So, too, was the first North American CSEAR Summer School.² We believe, therefore, that it is worthwhile to attempt in some way to identify where SEA currently stands as a field of interest within the broader academic accounting domain in Canada and the United States.³ As well, however, we believe this is a meaningful time for integrating our views on the future of our chosen academic sub-discipline with those of Gray (2002), Deegan and Soltys (2007), and others. Thus, as the title suggests, we seek to identify (1) who the SEA researchers in North America are; (2) the degree to which North American–based accounting research journals publish SEA-related research; and (3) where we, the SEA sub-discipline within North America, might be headed. We begin with the who.