Understanding and improving the language of business: How accounting and corporate reporting research can better serve business and society

Abstract

Financial accounting, the core of corporate reporting, is often characterized as the ‘language of business’. Over the last roughly 100 years, and using an evolving set of theories, methods, and data, scholarly work in this area has been contributing to our understanding of this language and how to improve it. This paper seeks, first, to characterize the field with a focus on its evolution in the German-speaking area, where, like elsewhere, normative research traditions interested in improving practice have been making way for positivist approaches that seek a detached understanding of ‘what is.’ Second, we discuss the changing users and institutional parameters that are reshaping corporate reporting, followed by our personal view of ‘wicked’ societal problems and challenges that corporate reporting might be able to help alleviate. Finally, we discuss directions in which research might evolve in order to address these issues, in order to make corporate reporting more useful for serving not only economic actors, but also society and the environment more broadly.

Research-practice gap in accounting journals? A topic modeling approach

“…Autonomy and independence of research choices might be valuable; however, the discrimination of more applied types of research in the research evaluation seems questionable at the same time. It also seems justified to discuss the role and societal relevance of accounting research (F€ ulbier and Sellhorn, 2023), especially if the research is publicly funded. Much harder to answer is the connected question of whether we can really assess the relevance and impact of research papers, even if the related topics are far from practice.…”