“…Classical accounting research is often attacked as offering only piecemeal and inconsistent theorising, methodologically primitive at best and vacuous at worst (see Rutherford, 2019, for sources). Rutherford (2019) shows that a pragmatist perspective enables us to see how the theorising undertaken by classical thinkers – both scholars and practitioners designing policies, including, latterly, standard-setters – hangs together in the way it relates to the resolution of accounting's problem situation. The study draws on Nancy Cartwright's metaphysical nomological pluralism (Cartwright, 1999), which argues that epistemology should follow from an understanding of how knowledge building achieves its successes, proposing a dappled world , rich in its variety of objects, natures and behaviours, so that the laws describing it operate as a patchwork rather than an elegant, structured hierarchy.…”