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The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the life of Tony Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the University of Sheffield, who died on 5 March 2014. It celebrates Tony Lowe’s considerable direct contributions to accounting knowledge and, possibly more significantly, his indirect contribution through his enabling of a range of those associated with him at Sheffield to become scholars of distinction in their own right.

Publication review, personal reflections and argument.

Apart from providing insight into Tony Lowe's direct contribution to accounting knowledge through an analysis of a range of significant sole authored and joint authored publications, the paper gives rather more attention to his more indirect enabling contribution. In this regard it traces the development of initially the Management Control Association and subsequently the “Sheffield School” to Tony Lowe, clarifying the values that underlie these groups. It also clarifies how some of the key elements that have allowed the now global Interdisciplinary and Critical Perspectives on Accounting (ICPA) Project to exist and flourish are traceable to Tony Lowe and the “Sheffield School” he created.

This paper provides an important historical analysis of the direct and indirect influence of a unique scholar on the beginnings and development of particularly the now global ICPA Project. This history is personal and maybe selective and possibly limited because of this but hopefully will encourage others to investigate the claims further.

The history of the ICPA Project has only partially been told before. This is another part of this history that has not been analysed before on which further work can build.

A reply to responses by Prem Sikka and Tony Willmott (“The withering of tolerance and communication in interdisciplinary accounting studies”) and Robert Scapens (“Reactions on reading ‘The withering of criticism’”) to Tony Tinker's initial paper, “The withering of criticism”.

The paper employs argument and discourse to critique the responses and defend the author's position.

The paper offers the authors' view of the comparative research approaches of Briloff, Sikka and Willmott.

The paper extends critical debate on North American and UK contributions and approaches to critical accounting scholarship.

The litmus test of asynchronous learning lies not in supporting small groups of elite groups, who are well endowed with computer and communications resources, but in providing for oversized classes, whose students are stretched by competing demands of work, family, and academic life, and who have — at best — modest experience and access to computer technology. This case study shows that a hybrid design — of synchronous and asynchronous methods — improves the quality of learning among large classes of undergraduate accounting students. Far from auguring the end of “education‐as‐we‐know‐it” (where a face‐to‐face community is replaced by a server‐in‐a‐box) this mixed strategy provides a useful tool in augmenting traditional learning methods.

Accounting history has tended to ignore the accounting research enterprise, focusing instead on particular episodes or periods, such as histories of standards setting or histories of the accounting profession. In effect, methodological and theoretical differences within the accounting research discipline have so profoundly divided the discipline that researchers working in one area are relatively unable or unwilling to understand the key issues in other areas. This chapter seeks to shed some light on the greatest divide in accounting research: the divide between positive and critical accounting research. This chapter argues that both positive and critical accounting research can trace their origins to certain key figures who were doctoral students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter employs Foucault’s concept of genealogy to examine the origins of the positivist and critical paradigms in accounting research.

According to Best (1995, p. 270), ours “is an age devoid of emancipatory vision” (cited in Gallhofer & Haslam, 2003, p. ix). In Accounting and Emancipation we aim to impact upon the present in that our concern is to explore how accounting may be positively aligned with a (positive) notion of emancipation. In the process of exploration, we draw upon and intervene in debates from the social sciences and humanities (especially debates pertaining to emancipation), radically question existing practices and ways of seeing and engage with multiple accountings and agencies in various modern contexts. Aside from the motivating concern to search out an emancipatory vision vis-à-vis accounting, we hold that the relation between accounting and emancipation and how it may constitute a positive alignment are matters that are complex, multifariously shaped and notably fluid. Thus, another factor motivating our study is the need to keep such matters under review.

A reply to Tony Tinker's paper, “The withering of criticism”.

The paper employs argument and discourse to critique Tinker's paper and defend the author's position.

The paper shows how oddly our work has been represented, and that Tinker's claims are unsupported. It rejects Tinker's reading of classical texts as the only valid one, and argues that his reductionist critique could hinder the advancement of interdisciplinary accounting research. We conclude our reply by urging scholars to intervene in worldly affairs by ensuring that intellectual activity is diverse, not stereotypical or predictable.

Argues the importance of scholars' engagement in worldly affairs, including matters of policy and practice, from diverse perspectives.

The paper outlines my reactions on reading Tony Tinker's paper: “The withering of criticism”.

It describes how I read the paper with increasing feelings of frustration.

In the end I was quite negative about the prospects for critical accounting research and feel that this is unfortunately a lost opportunity.

I point out that Tinker's paper contains a number of new avenues to be explored and new insights which can be gained, but these are in danger of being lost amid continuing internecine strife.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the core meaning of critical research.

It begins by noting the frequent divergence between “Real” history (which always marches to its own beat) and academic reflection that often fails to follow the beat of a progressive drum. Indeed, rather than facilitating a productive historical movement, scholarship may, at times, window‐dress brutality. These questions are examined by drawing on pertinent literature in social theory and cultural analysis. This work cautions that only continuous, unconditional, self‐reflective criticism provides a navigational path between barbarism and enlightenment. It proposes harnessing our full repository of critical scholarship to renew ever‐relevant forms of praxis (This is not the same notion of “practical” that involves berating workers in suits and white shirts.)

Unfortunately, an examination of contemporary progressive accounting literature exposes fundamental departures from these standards for criticism; that many fields have lapsed into a form relativism, enabling highly conservative political agendas. This degeneration is instigated at the outset of research, through an inappropriate choice of initial object for analysis (or “root metaphor”).

To address the predicament, this paper proposes a greater self‐awareness in framing the initial starting point, using a procedure drawn from Hegel and Marx's dialectics. To “test’ this methodology, the paper examines four streams of progressive accounting research: professional (e.g. Brilovian) analysis, Foucauldian (culturalist) studies, ethnographic studies, and epistemic contributions.

Each review offers suggestions for a dialectical reconstruction of the original, including a revised initial starting point (object) for the analysis.

Sustainability – in the sense of a system of deep‐rooted social justice and a fair and responsible allocation and use of ecological resources – requires a political philosophy adequate to its unique task in effecting change. Traditional Cartesian epistemes, that rely on formalistic policy declarations and which appeal to morality, are seen as inadequate without a rigorous historical and politically informed praxis, wherein our own cognitive, spiritual, and aesthetic development is seen as integral to developing processes “out there”. Several examples of attempts to form organic ties are provided to illustrate the use of praxis as a methodology of intervention.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.