Research diversity in accounting doctoral education: survey results from the German-speaking countries

Abstract

US positivistic accounting research is increasingly perceived as having come to be the point of reference for researchers in other countries, including the German-speaking area where formerly normative research was widespread. In this paper, we present the survey results retrieved from 293 doctoral students in accounting in 2009, a period of transition in which old and new approaches to doctoral education co-existed. Specifically, doctoral students were subject to institutional change in the form of more structured doctoral studies and a focus on internationalisation and attempts to publish in academic journals. We find that at that time there was diversity with regard to both the set of accounting journals considered by doctoral students and the methods employed by the latter in their dissertations. With respect to research methods, we show that factors of the institutional setting reflecting a more structured and international approach to doctoral education are in particular linked to empirical quantitative, and to a lesser extent qualitative, research.

Mapping of internal audit research in China: A systematic literature review and future research agenda

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Mapping of internal audit research: a post-Enron structured literature review

“…Shields (1997) also suggests a number of reasons, which may also apply to IA research, including: the lack of access to good sites; the lack of knowledge of qualitative methods; the lack of colleagues to collaborate with; the focus on annual performance reviews, which leads to a lack of incentives to perform a time-consuming case study; and the possible reluctance of journals to publish qualitative research. The positivist approach, which is mostly pursued in studies employing quantitative methods, is the most common paradigm in the US and is increasingly becoming so in other countries (Pelger and Grottke, 2017). VIII provides a categorisation of the theoretical approaches adopted in the papers.…”

Instrumentalism and the publish-or-perish regime

“…accounting academe more and more orients itself towards the North American mainstream and how this phenomenon again impacts accounting doctoral education in German universities (Pelger & Grottke, 2017). Komori (2015; see also Kamla & Komori, 2018) notes that this may even extend to the empirical phenomena studied and research traditions mobilised when there is a de facto censorship which only accepts topics and traditions as legitimate and publishable when they are related to, or even supplemented with, North American perspectives, concepts, or data.…”