The Winnowing Away of Behavioral Accounting Research in The US The Process For Anointing Academic Elites 2006 Accounting, Organizations and Society

The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research
in the US: The process for anointing academic elites

Paul F. Williams
a,
*
, J. Gregory Jenkins
b,1
, Laura Ingraham
c,2
a
Department of Accounting, Box 8113, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA
b
Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
c
Department of Accounting and Finance, 129 South 10th Street, BT 850, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 95192-0066, USA
Abstract
This paper reports the results of a study of the most prolic publishers in the four recognized most prestigious jour-
nals in accounting for the period 1963 through 1999. The focus is on learning whether the widespread perception that
behavioral accounting research (BAR) has diminished in signicance as a prominent paradigm in the US accounting
academy has any validity and to identify whether a new generation of US BAR researchers is emerging to join the aca-
demic elite. Based on the characteristics of persons who have appeared as authors ve or more times during the study
period, it seems that BAR is in recession in shaping the US academic agenda in accounting. The power of successful
individuals to shape the academic agenda as evidenced by service on editorial boards of prominent journals is domi-
nated by those individuals who are graduates of a set of elite schools utilizing a neoclassical economics based research
paradigm. The power of this group seems to be growing in the US. In spite of the interest in BAR among accounting
doctoral students and faculty, it is not a pursuit that now leads to academic status, which, in turn, diminishes its poten-
tial contribution towards the shaping of the accounting academic agenda.
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Dyckman (1998) documented the ascendancy of
the behavioral paradigm in accounting research
over the period 1978 through 1998. He noted that
in the two leading accounting journals (The
Accounting Review and Journal of Accounting
Research) the number of articles that rely upon a
behavioral paradigm has increased steadily over
0361-3682/$ - see front matter 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2006.07.003
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 919 515 4436; fax: +1 919
515 4446.
E-mail addresses: paul_williams@ncsu.edu (P.F. Williams),
jamesj@vt.edu (J.G. Jenkins), ingrah_l@cob.sjsu.edu (L. In-
graham).
1
Tel.: +1 540 231 2527; fax: +1 540 231 2511.
2
Tel.: +1 408 924 3476; fax: +1 408 924 3463.
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783818
the 20-year period of his observations. In addition,
the number of accounting faculty designating
themselves as behavioral researchers has grown,
as well as the number of schools who count among
their residents at least one behavioral researcher.
Dyckman tempered this sanguine view of behav-
ioral accounting research (BAR) with the acknowl-
edgement that funding for such research has
declined and that it requires considerable resources
to conduct meaningful behavioral research.
However, the number of persons employing a
particular paradigm or the number of faculties
that contain behavioral researchers is not the
only, or necessarily most instructive, way to
assess the status of BAR within the US academy.
The ultimate test of any paradigm
3
or research
program is the extent to which it denes the eld,
establishes the research agenda, or becomes a
root metaphor for the discipline (Crane,
1972; Hagstrom, 1965; Kuhn, 1970; Mulkay,
1979). The viability of a research genre in these
respects depends on the power its practitioners
have to set the agenda, determine the content
of accounting knowledge, dene the terms of suc-
cess in the eld, and control access to the elite
status required to do so. The purpose of this
paper is to assess the current status of BAR
within the process of elite formation in the US
accounting academy. Specically, we analyze the
productivity of individual scholars in Accounting,
Organizations and Society (AOS), Journal of
Accounting and Economics (JAE), The Accounting
Review (TAR), and the Journal of Accounting
Research (JAR) for the period 1963 through
1999. We determined who the elite have been,
who the new elite are likely to be, and to what
extent this new elite are BAR researchers. The
results indicate that the well-documented elite
structure of the US academy exists for BAR
researchers as for the other elites but that struc-
ture now makes BAR a much less likely avenue
to elite status within the US academy. The
increasing hegemony of neoclassical economics
over the US academy threatens to reduce BAR
to Behavioral Finance Research (BFR) with the
corresponding loss from the lexicon of US
accounting discourse premises, concepts, and
assumptions from other academic disciplines
besides economics. We demonstrate how the elite
formation process proceeds in the US academy
through documenting the changes in BAR elites
through time. The economic imperialism
described by Reiter (1998) is evident in the pro-
cess by which BAR elites are diminishing in num-
ber and signicance.
The remainder of the paper is presented in
four sections. The next section is devoted to
describing the real signicance of BAR to
accounting, dening what we mean by BAR,
and providing a brief history of the transforma-
tion of the US accounting academy over the past
40 years. Following this is a section describing
our methodology, followed by the section con-
taining the presentation of our analyses of
BAR elite formation. The nal section contains
our conclusions.
Overview of the problem
Why BAR matters: the signicance of social
sciences to academic accounting
Accounting is a practice, a human activity con-
structed from human values and intentions.
Accounting is a social, not a natural, phenomenon
(Searle, 1995). As we will discuss subsequently, as
accounting has become an autonomous discipline
within the academy, it has adopted various sche-
mata, other than the schemata aorded by
accounting practice itself, to explain or describe
accounting practice. The disciplinary methods of
history, law, philosophy, mathematics, literary
criticism and, most notably, various social sciences
have all been employed to provide understandings
of accounting. In the US, social sciences in partic-
ular have come to be regarded as a primary means
for providing deeper, more reliable, and more rig-
orous understanding of accounting. Principally,
3
Paradigm is the term used by Dyckman. We will try to
avoid using that term and, instead, use the term genre.
Paradigm is a term popularized by Kuhn (1970), which he
utilized with multiple meanings. Recently paradigm has
become a business buzzword bereft of content as is the case
for so many words subject to that fate.
784 P.F. Williams et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783818
the social sciences of economics, psychology,
social psychology, and sociology have been
imported into accounting just as they have been
in all other business disciplines (all of which are
also practices), in order to provide scientic rigor
and scientic understanding of these various
practices.
However, the social sciences have not been as
notably useful to business practices as the natural
sciences have been to practices like engineering
and medicine. The value of the natural sciences
to practices lies in their success in prediction; pre-
diction, in turn, enables the control that enables
practices like medicine and engineering to manipu-
late the world to achieve their particular desired
outcomes. Even biology and meteorology, which
are natural sciences dealing with exceedingly com-
plex phenomena, have made notable strides in
developing predictive theory. The social sciences
have been far less successful, i.e.,
After more than 200 years of attempts, one
could reasonably expect that there would
exist at least a sign that social science has
moved in the desired direction, that is,
toward predictive theory. It has not. . . . The
social sciences appear unable to demonstrate
the kind of progress which is to characterize
normal science (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 32).
The failure of the social sciences as normal science
does not mean they are not worthwhile activities
or that they do not lead us to useful understand-
ings of social life. It is that social life resists
axiomatization, a single theory, a univocal ap-
proach. Andrew Abbott analogizes the diculty
with explaining social phenomena via a concept
he labels syncresis. As Abbott puts it:
A syncresis is constituted of ambiguity; to
separate its parts is to destroy it. Syncreses
thus do have the fractal character that they
reappear irrespective of levels of reduction.
But unlike fractal distinctions they are not
oppositions that subdivide, but oppositions
that unify (Abbott, 2001, p. 43).
The problematic posed by syncresis for studying
human action is more prosaically described by
Flyvbjerg (2001), i.e.,
The problem in the study of human activity
is that every attempt at a context-free deni-
tion of an action, that is, a denition based
on abstract rules or laws, will not necessar-
ily accord with the pragmatic way an action
is dened by the actors in a concrete social
situation. Social scientists do not have a
theory (rules and laws) for how people they
study determine what counts as an action,
because the determination derives from situ-
ationally dened (context-dependent) skills,
which the objects of study are pro-
cient and experts in exercising, and because
theory by denition presupposes
context- independence (Flyvbjerg, 2001,
p. 42).
Thus, the study of human action is inherently a
pluralistic one; one that is multi-vocal.
4
As Abbott
opines:
What do we expect when a syncresis or any
other inherently multi-vocal concept is stud-
ied under a methodological manifold pre-
suming univocality? Of course we expect
disorder and misunderstanding (Abbott,
2001, p. 44).
The value of the social sciences to accounting does
not lie in their power to predict, i.e., to permit
engineering the world accountants have arbitrarily
roped o for themselves, but to provide multivo-
cality to the study of accounting. The various con-
icts among the social sciences can serve as
heuristics for developing new ideas germane to
accounting issues (Abbott, 2004). The social sci-
ences provide accounting with languages with
which to develop accountings conceptual struc-
ture. Disciplinary languages represent dierent
. . .metaphors and other linguistic tropes used in
a discipline (that) coalesce into a more or less
coherent knowledge structure that shapes how its
members and those they inuence construe reality
4
Abbott speaks from the perspective of a sociologist; for the
case that economic phenomena are no exception to plurality,
see Fullbrook (2001).
P.F. Williams et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 31 (2006) 783818 785
(Ferraro, Pfeer, & Sutton, 2005, p. 15). The
tropes of the social sciences, because all of the
social (and natural) sciences are value-laden
(including economics (Katouzian, 1980; McClos-
key, 1985)), also serve more than scientic pur-
poses, e.g.,
The contemporary social sciences, despite
occasional claims to the contrary, have
not done especially well as predictive sci-
ences. One reason they nonetheless con-
tinue to ourish is because they are a
particularly modern form of secular reli-
gion, involving, in their own idiosyncratic
language, fundamental questions of what
kind of people we who are modern are
(Wolfe, 1989, p. 7).
5
That is social sciences . . .still provide the vocabu-
laries through which we express our ultimate con-
cerns and thus articulate standards against which
contemporary society might be judged (Brown,
1989, p. 4). Thus, BAR is a concern to accounting
scholarship to the extent it constitutes competing
lexicons with which to express some potentially
interesting and constructive things about the prac-
tice of accounting.
Examples abound of dierences in fundamental
value assumptions underlying the various social
sciences; indeed the existence of multiple social sci-
ences is partly attributable to disparate value
judgements. Psychology and economics are nota-
bly at variance in their assumptions about what
human rationality means vis-a`-vis human action
(Simon, 1986).
6
Economics and sociology dier in
value assumptions about social objectives, e.g.,
Economic theory is a prescriptive science; its eth-
ical bias lies in its selectivity with respect to great,
and equally important, social objectives (Katouz-
ian, 1980, p. 156).
7
Were accounting to succumb
to speaking with only the voice of neoclassical eco-
nomics it would gain next to nothing in practical
predictive capability, but would lose signicantly
in the scope of its capacity to understand itself.
Our concern in this paper is to provide some evi-
dence on whether the social sciences other than
economics are signicant alternative discourses
available to describe, understand, and shape the
practice of accounting.
The problem of denition: what is BAR?
The behavioral paradigm referred to by
Dyckman (1998) pertains to a genre of accounting
research that emerged about 40 years ago. It relied
upon theories adopted (and, to some extent,
adapted) from the behavioral sciences other than
economics to provide explanations for accounting
phenomena or to provide solutions to practice
problems.
8
Birnberg and Shields (1989) date the
rst appearance in the accounting literature of
the term behavioral accounting as 1967. BAR
emerged out of the same circumstances that saw
all of the business disciplines scientize and
establish their autonomy from business practice
(Whitley, 1986). The mode for accomplishing the
transition of US academic accounting from prac-
tice dependent to an autonomous positive social
science was to adopt theories from the established
5
It is within the contemporary social sciences where the battle
for human nature is primarily being waged (Schwartz, 1986).
6
The recent popularity of laboratory economics and behav-
ioral nance are either a belated recognition of psychological
truths by economists or the hegemonic impulses of economists
to co-opt psychological insights to retain dominance of the
social sciences. The jury is still out.
7
Recently, Naim (2006) provided a practical example.
Brazils former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (a
sociologist), bewildered by the conicting advise from world
renowned economists rejected their disparate advise yet still
managed to avert a nancial crisis. As Naim observed about
economic science, Surveying which economies had the best
prospects for success, Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman,
concluded that in predicting superior performance, luck seems
as key as economic policies. A science that relies on luck to
explain the fate of billions of people is a dismal science indeed
(Naim, 2006, p. 2). The appeal of economic theory has more to
do with the ethical biases of economics than its explanatory
power. Eliding those ethical biases is made much more dicult
when other ethical biases are free to enter the conversation.
8
More aptly it has been the experimental or positivist
versions of the behavioral sciences other than economics that
comprise the BAR genre in the US. So, for example,
ethnographic studies are virtually non-existent in the US as
part of BAR, which is certainly not the case in accounting
outside the US.
social sciences and apply them in various account-
ing contexts. Ze (1978) and Flesher (1991) both
noted the signicance of the importation of social
science theories into accounting to transforming
the form of accounting scholarship into that of
empirical social science. The empirical shifts made
academic success in accounting increasingly
depend on ones ability to perform the scholarly
tasks typical of those types of social scientists
whose academic credentials were already well
established within the academy.
BAR emerged in accounting in multiple ways
depending upon which of the established social sci-
ences were employed as the theoretical template.
As Birnberg and Nath (1967) document, the earli-
est BAR studies relied on sociological insights,
notably about human behavior within organiza-
tions. One of the earliest books within the BAR
genre (Caplan, 1971) advocated modern
organization theory (March & Simon, 1958; Schi
& Lewin, 1970; Simon, 1957a, 1957b) as a model
for accountants interested in management
accounting. The early BAR work in accounting
was characterized by its emphasis on behavioral
science models and theories that did not share
the traditional assumptions about human motiva-
tion and behavior that characterize the standard,
positivist neoclassical economic models. The inad-
equacy of these standard economic characteriza-
tions was famously described by Carl Devine
(1960, p. 394): On balance it seems fair to con-
clude that accountants seem to have waded
through their relationships to the intricate psycho-
logical network of human activity with a heavy-
handed crudity that is beyond belief. Historically,
BAR has been the accounting academys response
to this shortcoming.
9
BAR, as we will use the term
in this paper, refers to this historical constitution,
i.e., as relying on the methods and insights of the
positive social sciences other than economics,
e.g., psychology, social psychology, sociology.
To a large extent the term BAR has fallen into
disuse outside the US. The behaviorism conno-
tations of the term, the limitations of the positivist
version of social science (Nonaka, 2006), and the
greater relevance of non-positivist methodologies
for understanding organizational and sociological
eects of accounting, have made BAR an inapt
descriptor for much of the work pertaining to
accounting/human being interactions. In the US
even the insights of social sciences other than
economics are still limited to a rather narrow
experimentalism. Methodologically, BAR is, like
conventional economic applications, largely still
conned to statistical causal modeling. We use
the term BAR advisedly, as a shorthand way to
delineate US research that falls under Dyckmans
rubric of behavioral paradigm from the neoclas-
sical economics inspired research. The relative nar-
rowness of behavioral accounting research in
the US, compared to that in the rest of the world,
is certainly an issue, but one outside the purview of
this particular study.
Of course there are still other modes of inquiry
that have been applied in accounting for some
time, e.g., legal, historical, and philosophical.
These modes are not included under the rubric of
BAR for purposes of this study. These non-social
science modes of understanding are no longer of
any relevance to the academic agenda in the US
since their application is not an avenue by which
to achieve any notable academic reputation (Rod-
gers & Williams, 1996).
Redening academic success: the transformation
of the US academy
It is well documented that scholarly disciplines
tend to be highly stratied, that is, they are hier-
archic with a small number of scholars produc-
ing the bulk of the disciplines scholarship
(Allison, 1980; Lotka, 1922). They are socially
organized (Whitley, 1984) and the form of orga-
nization aects what passes for knowledge in the
discipline and also how academic success is
achieved (Blisset, 1972; Bourdieu, 1988; Martin,
1978; Whitley, 1977, 1984). As an academic dis-
cipline in the US, accounting is likewise highly
stratied. It is hierarchically organized in a
9
AOS was explicitly created to provide a medium through
which a broad array of psychological, sociological, organiza-
tional, historical, etc. understandings of accounting could be
encouraged and communicated (Hopwood, 1988).
particular way and that organization aects who
may become a member of the scholarly elite with
the power to be a shaper of and a gatekeeper for
the discipline.
Fleming, Graci, and Thompson (2000) describe
the transformation of the US academy via an anal-
ysis of the changes that occurred in the nature of
articles published in The Accounting Review during
the period 1966 through 1985.
10
Notable features
of the transformation at TAR are the growth in
the popularity of nancial reporting topics, the
change to quantitative/empirical methods from
deductive ones, the signicant growth in inu-
ence of the behavioral sciences, and the University
of Chicago eect. The University of Chicago eect
derives from the fact that of the most cited 19
authors in TAR during the period 1966 through
1985, 15 of them were graduates of or faculty
members at the University of Chicago (Fleming
et al., 2000, p. 61).
The dominance of authors aliated with the
University of Chicago, from the earliest period of
the transition of academic accounting in the US,
has signicantly determined the nature of account-
ing knowledge in the US. What happened to the
accounting academy had its parallel in nance.
11
Whitley (1986) traces the transition of business
nance from practice oriented to scientic to
the movement to make all business disciplines
more scientic, which started after World War II
and gained signicant momentum during the
1960s. Whitley concluded (1986, p. 174), Essen-
tially, business nance had become transformed
into a branch of economics. . . The result of this
transformation of nance into nancial economics
was to lead the eld of nance into having a pres-
tige system that mimicked economics, i.e.,
Because the study of business nance became
dominated by academic economists, espe-
cially economists adhering to traditional
neo-classical conceptions of economic theory
and analysis, the transformed eld has devel-
oped an intellectual organizational structure
quite similar to orthodox economics (Whit-
ley, 1986, p. 180).
This orthodox economics is most closely identied
with the University of Chicago program of Stigler-
Friedman, which is . . .characterized by faithful
adherence to Neoclassical economics and main-
tained itself dead against the concept of market
failures. . . (CEPA, 2005, p. 2).
Whitley (1984) characterizes the structure of
orthodox economics as a patterned bureau-
cracy. Academic disciplines are reputation
systems organized in various ways to produce dis-
ciplinary knowledge and, consequently, academic
elites. Whitleys schema for classifying the organi-
zational structure of disciplines relies on the
degree of four features of academic work organi-
zations: functional dependence, strategic depen-
dence, technical task uncertainty, and strategic
task uncertainty (Whitley, 1984, p. 155). Because
orthodox or neoclassical economics is a
theoretically closed system (Chick & Dow, 2001)
because of its mathematical formalization, the
unreality of its premises (e.g., the nature of
humans (Jensen & Meckling, 1994)) lead to
explaining nothing (Fleetwood, 2002), which
obviously makes it highly susceptible to empirical
uncertainties. Empirical reality confronts theory
with uncertainties that can cause great skepticism
about the fundamental orthodoxy. According to
Whitley (1984), the analytical, closed structure
of orthodox economics must be protected from
the real economic world. This is accomplished
by partitioning the empirical realm of economics
into bureaucracies whose function is not to test
orthodox theory, but instead to apply orthodox
theory to explain an expanding domain of
social phenomena. Fuller (1988, p. 284) describes
the function of orthodox economic theory in a
similar way:
And so, from being evaluated (emphasis in
original) by the facts as false, neoclassical
economics managed to end up evaluating
(emphasis in original) those same facts as
10
The Accounting Review (TAR) is published by the American
Accounting Association, which is the organization of account-
ing academics in the US analogous, e.g., to the American
Economics Association or the American Finance Association.
TAR is the principal scholarly organ of the AAA and the oldest
academic accounting journal in the US.
11
Ferraro et al. (2005) document this hegemony of neoclas-
sical economics has extended over all business disciplines.
irrational. In light of the endless and often
aimless debates in the human sciences, one
is tempted to conclude that, generally speak-
ing, normative authority is the higher
ground to which disciplines retreat when
their theories are in danger of empirical
falsication.
12
Reiter and Williams (2002) analysis of the crisis
document produced by leaders of the US account-
ing academy (Demski et al., 1991) indicated that
the organization of the US academy parallels that
of economics, as well. Accounting as an academic
discipline in the US is a bureaucracy of orthodox
economics a sub-discipline of a sub-discipline.
13
Transformative criticism (Longino, 1990; Pera,
1994), the hallmark of scholarly disciplines whose
reputation systems are organized to produce scien-
tic progress, is very limited in the US accounting
academy. Ascendance to the elite ranks in the US
is largely determined by the ingenuity one demon-
strates in interpreting accounting phenomena to t
the neoclassical orthodoxy or interpreting neoclas-
sical phenomena as being accounting phenomena.
The sustaining feature of the neoclassical world-
view in accounting is its ideological power, not
its instrumental power for manipulating the world
via its predictive success (Mouck, 1992; Rosen-
berg, 1992; Stiglitz, 2002). This libertarian, neolib-
eral ideology of neoclassical economics gives it
imperialistic tendencies (Reiter, 1998). The imperi-
alist tendencies of orthodox economics extend well
beyond accounting, i.e.,
There is little doubt that economics has won
the battle for theoretical hegemony in acade-
mia and society as a whole and that such
dominance becomes stronger every year.
This dominance is especially strong in Wes-
tern countries, particularly in the United
States, but is spreading rapidly over the
globe (Ferraro et al., 2005, p. 11).
Reiter (1998) dates the emergence of neoclassical
orthodoxy in accounting (what Beaver (1981)
referred to as an accounting revolution) to the
period . . .between the 1966 Journal of Account-
ing Research Conference and the 1968 publica-
tion of the seminal Ball and Brown study
(Reiter, 1998, p. 145). The importance of the
Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) in aect-
ing the dominance of neoclassical orthodoxy in
US accounting cannot be underestimated. JAR
began as a joint venture between the University
of Chicago and the London School of Econo-
mics and Political Science. In the rst issue of
JAR the dean of the Chicago Graduate School
of Business and the Director of the London
School issued a joint statement proclaiming the
mission for JAR. They said, The Journal of
Accounting Research will be neither distracted
by the need to deal with non-research matters
nor subject to limitations of research interest; it
will be able to concentrate on general issues,
but also try to cover all such issues (Schultz &
Caine, 1964, p. 1). On the question of university
sponsorship they argued that:
12
Economic science is as much ideology as science. Rosenberg
(1992) characterizes it as mathematical politics. As a policy
science, economic ideas, values, and assumptions, because they
aect actions and decisions, have the reexive property of
becoming self-fullling (Ferraro et al., 2005, p. 12). For an
example of how this reexivity creates incoherent accounting
policy see Ravenscroft and Williams (2006). The ideological
character of orthodox economics is epitomized in the Journal of
Accounting and Economics (JAE), the third of the US trium-
virate of premier journals. JAE was created and currently edited
by individuals that introduced principal/agent theory into
accounting; both are physically and ideologically located in
the Rochester School named after William E. Simon. Roches-
ters Jensen and Mecklings (1978) published an article about
the threats to private property posed by government activism,
which was a polemic designed to motivate political action from
the business community. The transparent political agenda of
principal/agent theory is also evident in other works of the
Rochester school, e.g., Jensen and Meckling (1983, 1994),
Watts and Zimmerman (1979). The business school at Roches-
ter is named for William E. Simon who, for 23 years, was
president of the John M. Olin Foundation, a principal funding
source for right-wing causes. John J. Miller (a writer for
National Review, the conservative magazine founded by
William F. Buckley) notes that in 1977, . . .Mr. Simon called
for the creation of a counterintelligentsia (sic) to balance what
he saw as the liberal dominance of the universities, the news
media, non-prot organizations and government bureaucra-
cies (Miller, 2005).
13
Stephen Ze in a personal correspondence with one of the
authors characterized accounting scholarship in the US as not
being accounting scholarship so much as about about
accounting scholarship. Accounting research in the US is
now far removed from anything that resembles accountings
function or concerns of its practitioners.
A university is charged with the seeking of
knowledge for knowledges sake. University
sponsorship permits a detached and long-
range view of accounting developments not
swayed unduly by questions of results. In
addition it helps students of accounting prin-
ciples to maintain close contact with students
in economics, computational and statistical
techniques, social psychology, and other aca-
demic disciplines which may have allied
interests (Schultz & Caine, 1964, p. 1).
JAR was conceived as a scholarly journal whose
purpose was to focus on a wide array of general is-
sues, employing an array of research interests
within a multi-disciplinary perspective. In addi-
tion, A magazine devoted to the dissemination
of new developments and concepts in accounting
is by its very purpose international (emphasis
added) (Schultz & Caine, 1964, p. 2).
JAR did not turn out as Schultz and Caine envi-
sioned. Within just two years JAR began its rapid
transformation into the missal for neoclassical
doctrine in US accounting. In Sidney Davidsons
preface to the JAR issue containing the papers
from the 1966 JAR Conference, he stated that
Accounting is singularly (emphasis added) con-
cerned with the quantitative expression of eco-
nomic phenomena (Davidson, 1966, p. iii). This
proclaims a quite pronounced narrowing of
accounting as an academic discipline from that
implied by Schultz and Caine. Davidson also
adumbrated a positivist mission for JAR, i.e.,
Accounting thought will develop more eectively
by increased reliance on the testing of meaningful
(emphasis added) hypotheses. . .(Davidson,
1966). This rst JAR conference brought
together academics, practitioners, and persons
from related disciplines.
14
But as Reiter and Wil-
liams (2002) demonstrated, practitioners and per-
sons from related disciplines were eventually
excluded from participation and the only partici-
pants at JAR conferences today are those whose
scholarship reects a neoclassical world view.
JAR is now an extremely important shaper of
the US academic agenda and consequentially a
principal mechanism for identifying the academic
elite. In countless studies of journal prestige (e.g.
Bonner, Hesford, Van der Stede, & Young, 2006;
Brinn, Jones, & Pendlebury, 1996; Brown & Huef-
ner, 1994; Hasselback, Reinstein, & Schwan, 2000;
Houghton & Bell, 1984; Hull & Wright, 1990;
Nobes, 1985; Tahai & Rigsby, 1998; Schwartz
et al., 2005; Ze, 1996), JAR is always in the top
three. Trieschmann, Dennis, Northcraft, and
Niemi (2000) cited 13 studies of journal rankings
to determine the top accounting journals for con-
sideration in their study of the research prestige
of MBA faculties. They settled on only three:
JAR, TAR, and JAE. In all of the work Larry
Brown has done over the years investigating aca-
demic prestige/stature, he has used only three US
based accounting journals as the denitive reposi-
tories of quality accounting scholarship: JAR,
TAR and JAE.
JARs inuence on the oldest US academic
journal, TAR, is also quite signicant. TAR was
rst published in 1926. Until JARs creation in
1964, TAR was the principal medium for publish-
ing scholarly accounting papers in the US; few
accounting journals existed (Williams & Rodgers,
1995). In a study of TAR editorial boards, Wil-
liams and Rodgers (1995) tracked the scholarly
proles of TAR editorial board members from
1967 (the rst year the names of editorial board
members were published) through 1990. In 1967,
94% of the TAR editorial board had published
in TAR, while only 12% had published in JAR
(Williams & Rodgers, 1995, p. 276). By 1990
85% of the TAR board had published in JAR,
but only 74% had published in TAR. TAR board
membership was dependent more on success at
publishing in JAR than in the journal upon whose
editorial board they were serving. The only other
journals cited by more than 20% of board
members are Contemporary Accounting Research
(CAR) and JAE (Williams & Rodgers, 1995). No
other accounting publication outlets were impor-
tant as success indicators for selection to the
TAR board. JARs inuence on dening quality
at TAR is evident when success at publishing in
JAR is a more signicant criterion for selection
14
The year 1966 was also the year that the American
Accounting Association began both the Notable Contribution
to the Accounting Literature Award and the Competitive
Manuscript Award.
to the editorial board than publishing in any other
journal. Thus, all three US premier accounting
journals are infused with the same criteria of qual-
ity, one of which is adherence to a certain political
and economic orthodoxy.
The elite schools
The increasing dominance of US accounting by
the ideological commitments of JAR (and later
JAE) has been abetted by the existence of a set
of academic institutions that have been historically
the primary sources of Ph.D. educated faculty
the elite schools. It is no longer controversial that
all academic disciplines are stratied and a central
feature of that stratication is a prestige hierarchy
of academic institutions. All disciplines are oligar-
chic and the creation and maintenance of these oli-
garchies are political. Blisset (1972, p. 121)
described the features of the hierarchic structure,
i.e.,
These oligarchic characteristics, however, do
not represent the fortuitous combination of
knowledge and skill, as the hagiographers
of science suggest, but are largely the result
of structural features within the scientic
community itself. Elites do not happen; they
are created, and the chief creators are men at
prestigious institutions who control (1)
recruitment and membership into the high
echelons of scientic work, (2) the ow of
communication, (3) appointments, (4) special
subsidies, and (5) honoric awards.
The oligarchic structure of accounting in the US is
abetted by the AAA, which doles out prestige
through its awards, oces, journals, conferences,
etc. (Lee, 1995). The organization of the American
academy facilitates this oligarchic organization be-
cause the key to its structure is departments. The
signicance of departments to the American uni-
versity is described by Abbott (2001, pp. 125126):
American universities compromised by creat-
ing departments of equals. The Ph.D. degree,
borrowed from Germany, became special-
ized into a Ph.D. in something. This specic
disciplinary degree provided a medium of
exchange between particular subunits of dif-
ferent universities. There was thus completed
a subsystem of structures and exchanges
organizing universities internally while pro-
viding for extensive but structured career
mobility externally, between institutions.
Exactly coincident with this departmental-
ization of the university was the formation
of the national disciplinary societies, from
which academics gradually excluded the
amateurs of knowledge, even though the lat-
ter were often prominent among the socie-
ties founders.
In accounting certain departments constitute an
employment network whose universities were the
founding members of the AAA (Lee, 1995, 1997,
1999; Williams & Rodgers, 1995). Ph.D. candi-
dates from these schools were employed as faculty
at other of these schools initially because they were
the only schools awarding doctoral degrees. Wil-
liams and Rodgers (1995) demonstrated the domi-
nation of the editorial board of TAR by graduates
of a set of 15 of these schools.
15
For example, in
1967 when TAR rst published the names of its
editorial board, 75% of the board were graduates
of the 15 elite schools even while their percentage
of the population of Ph.D.s was only 59% (Wil-
liams & Rodgers, 1995, p. 271). This percentage
has persisted, Avogadros Number-like for nearly
40 years even as the elite percentage of the global
population of Ph.D. degrees has declined. The per-
centage of elite TAR board members reached a
low of 48% in 1985 under the editorship of Gary
15
The 15 schools are Illinois, Ohio State, Stanford, Texas-
Austin, Minnesota, Washington-Seattle, Rochester, Chicago,
Michigan State, California-Berkeley, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon,
Wisconsin, and Iowa. Other programs that orbit more or less
near this nucleus of elite schools are Northwestern, Indiana-
Bloomington, Florida, Pennsylvania, NYU, Arizona, Arizona
State, and Penn State. Because of the increased dominance of
nancial economics in accounting, Pennsylvania may shortly be
a permanent member of the persistent elite. Graduates of any
other doctoral programs, US or non-US are not substantive
participants in determining the scholarly agenda in the US. For
example, Browns (1996) citation study of accounting articles
identied 26 classics, articles that have had the most inuence
in accounting over the past 30 years. Of these articles, 75% of
them published in JAE, 97% published in JAR, and 95%
published in TAR were by graduates of the elite-15.
Sundem (Williams & Rodgers, 1995). Since then,
however, subsequent editors of TAR have restored
the proportion of elite school TAR board mem-
bers to previous levels. For 2005 the proportion
of elite school Ph.D.s on the TAR board was
71%.
16
Of the 74 persons comprising the TAR
board in 2005 only three had degrees from non-
US schools (Vienna, New England, and British
Columbia) and only three (all with elite school de-
grees) were domiciled at non-US schools (Water-
loo, Queens, and Nanyang Tech.). Five of the six
editors have elite degrees and four of the six
(including the editor) are students of the core
orthodox economics sites Stanford, Chicago, and
Rochester.
These same elite schools also dominate author-
ship in the leading US journals. For example,
Rodgers and Williams (1996) documented author-
ship in TAR for the period 1967 through 1993, the
same time period as their editorial board study.
The same pattern exists for authors as for editorial
board members. Sixty-four percent of authors with
accounting degrees were elite school graduates
during Trumbulls term as editor. During the edi-
torships of Ze and Sundem this proportion began
to fall: 52% under Ze, 47% under Sundem (Rod-
gers & Williams, 1996). However, under Kinneys
editorship the elite school proportion began to rise
once again. By 2005, the proportion of elite grad-
uate authors was 62%, back to where it was 38
years before.
17
School domination is also pronounced in the
awards the American Accounting Association
grants to acknowledge those persons producing
the highest quality research; these awards are a
very visible stratifying mechanism. Of the 58 per-
sons winning Competitive Manuscript Awards,
81% have been graduates of the 15 elite schools.
Of the Notable Contributions to the Accounting
Literature Awards that went to persons (a total
of 75), 88% were graduates of an elite-15 school.
However, most of the non-elite winners of this
award occurred in the early years of the awards
history. In the past 30 years, 96.3% of the winners
have been graduates of elite-15 schools. For the
Wildman Medal, of the 35 winners who are aca-
demics 85.7% are graduates of elite-15. The most
prestigious AAA award, the Seminal Contribu-
tions to Accounting Literature Award has been
given for only four works comprising seven
authors. Five of the authors are University of Chi-
cago graduates; two are California-Berkeley grad-
uates. All of the works have a University of
Chicago graduate as its lead author. No foreign
educated scholar has ever won an AAA award
for scholarship.
This persistent circumstance of school domi-
nation is the norm in academe. For example,
Yoels (1972) noted this same phenomenon in
American sociology and Klein (2005) in eco-
nomics. As Yoels (1972, p. 160) observed about
US sociology, . . .such schools are able to main-
tain their positions of dominance within the
prestige hierarchy of the discipline by virtue of
the fact that they control the very process by
which prestige is awarded. So long as such a
hierarchy is an organization that leads to pro-
gressivity in knowledge production in the disci-
pline, that organization is ecient. But if that
organization is a prestige system per se, then
the intellectual vitality of the discipline suers.
Reiter and Williams (2002) provide evidence that
in US accounting the situation is more the
latter.
BAR acquired a place in the prestige hierarchy
because of certain schools among the elite where
BAR, as Birnberg and Shields (1989) described
it, emerged as a reputable scholarly pursuit. These
schools notably included Ohio State, Washington-
Seattle, Texas-Austin, Illinois, and Carnegie-Mel-
lon, where Stedry (1960) did some of the earliest
work in accounting using insights from psychol-
ogy. JARs acceptance of accounting judgement
research informed by the linear modeling work in
psychology and the heuristics work of Kahneman
and Tversky provided a prestigious outlet for BAR
scholars (Dyckman & Ze, 1984). KPMGs pro-
gram of funding audit research also provided a
16
For JAR and JAE these percentages are even higher. In
Browns (2005) recent study of the importance of circulating
papers prior to publication, 81.4% of the individuals acknowl-
edged by authors were graduates of the elite-15. It is not simply
circulating papers, but circulating them to the right people, i.e.,
those who are powerful gatekeepers, that matters.
17
Just as for editorial board members, these elite school
authorship proportions are higher for JAR and JAE.
stimulus to BAR. The data we report below dem-
onstrate that the imperialist tendencies of neoclas-
sical economics have signicantly altered the status
of BAR in the US academy. The power that the
US reputation system aords the neoclassicists
has relegated BAR scholarship to the periphery
because . . .power suppresses that knowledge
and rationality for which it has no use (Flyvbjerg,
1998, p. 36).
Methodology
Identifying the recent BAR elite
The objective of this study is to identify the
emerging BAR elite to determine the extent that
BAR research remains an avenue for scholars to
eectively participate in the academic accounting
conversation. The question is whether the current
structure of the US academy is reproducing the
quantity of BAR scholars whose prestige and
power is sucient to aect the scholarly agenda
and to sustain at least some substantive multivocal-
ity to US accounting scholarship. Or is it now the
case that BAR is simply an appendix to an
academic body now largely transformed into a
sub-discipline of economics? Our inclination was
skepticism about Dyckmans (1998) sanguine
assessment of the ascendance of BAR within the
US academy. Anecdote and opinion suggest that
BAR is now marginalized in the US academy by
the economic orthodoxy just as more traditional
approaches were a few years previously.
A most ecacious way to identify emerging
elites is by identifying those persons who are
acquiring intellectual capital via publications in
the journals acknowledged by the elite as the most
prestigious journals in the eld. As Hargens (1988,
p. 139) observed the academic journal is . . .both a
means by which a community certies additions to
its body of accepted knowledge and a means
through which individual scientists compete for
priority and recognition. Historically the primary
role of the academic journal is to establish property
rights over scientic knowledge (Merton &Zucker-
man, 1973; Price, 1963; Ravetz, 1971). The practice
of citing, the opprobrium heaped upon plagiarists,
the illegality of violating copyright, all are explicit
rituals acknowledging the proprietary claim of
the original author. These claims, which through
publication are explicitly endorsed by ones peers,
are essential if one is to achieve status in ones eld
(see, e.g., Fuchs & Turner, 1986; Mulkay, 1979). In
the US the American Accounting Association
bases its most prestigious awards (Seminal Contri-
bution, Notable Contribution to the Accounting
Literature, and Competitive Manuscript Award)
on publications per se.
18
Bonner et al. (2006) note
the signicance of the most prestigious journals
to individual success, i.e., Publishing in the top
journals aects many facets of an accounting scho-
lars career, including reputation (emphasis added),
pay, and tenure and promotion (Bonner et al.,
2006, p. 2). In Bourdieus (1988) terms publishing
in the top journals is how one accumulates ones
social (scholarly) capital.
The review process at academic journals is an
archetype of what Laclau and Moue (1985) refer
to as nodal points of discourse. Nodal points, or
obligatory passage points (Clegg, 1989), are central
to the issue of problematization, which . . .involves
the attempt by agents to enrol others to their agency
by positing the indispensability of their solutions
for (their denition of) the others problems: this
is achieved when these others are channeled
through the obligatory passage points of practice
which the enrolling agency seeks to x (Clegg,
1989, p. 204). The premier US accounting journals
are the passage points through which one must pass
to be admitted to the elite ranks of the society of US
accounting scholars. This social system, both a rep-
utation system, but also potentially a system for
producing progress in the eld of accounting, has
developed . . .rules governing relations of meaning
and membership (Clegg, 1989, p. 226) that ossify
with age. And, according to Clegg (1989, p. 226),
Once a given conguration of an organization
eld has been stabilized, the pressures are such to
reproduce it that way. . . Thus analyzing what
gets published in academic journals through time
18
That is, the awards are given to published works. Though
persons receive the awards, they receive them for specic
published works or a collection of published work.
provides signicant insights into what the congu-
ration of the accounting academy is and whether
it has ossied into a stable pattern of reproducing
a predictable type of understanding.
In selecting the most prestigious journals for
our purposes we resorted to consulting conven-
tional wisdom. Numerous studies have been con-
ducted over the years putatively to determine
which accounting journals are the best. We
acknowledge that journal quality is a social con-
struction determined by many factors and that
alleging journal quality is fraught with danger
(e.g., Milne, 2002). The results of numerous studies
in the US of perceived prestige of US accounting
journals indicate there are three journals about
which there is no overt public dissensus as to their
status The Accounting Review (TAR), Journal
of Accounting Research (JAR), and Journal of
Accounting and Economics (JAE). In most studies,
Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) is
indicated as the fourth most prestigious account-
ing journal (Bonner et al., 2006; Brinn et al.,
1996; Brown & Huefner, 1994; Hasselback et al.,
2000; Houghton & Bell, 1984; Hull & Wright,
1990; Nobes, 1985; Tahai & Rigsby, 1998; Ze,
1996). A recent survey of UK accounting scholars
indicated that AOS was ranked as the number one
academic journal, followed by TAR, JAR and
JAE (Lowe & Locke, 2005). In the series of cita-
tion studies conducted by Brown and his cohorts
(Brown, 1996; Brown, Gardner, & Vasarhelyi,
1989; Brown & Gardner, 1985a, 1985b) these four
journals were the ones chosen to represent the
media through which the most prestigious
accounting scholars delivered their works.
19
In
addition, the Social Science Citation Index, which
contains very few accounting journals, includes a
complete citation history of these four journals.
JAR, TAR, and JAE are signicant as well in
establishing the prestige of business schools.
20
Tri-
eschmann et al. (2000) cited 13 studies of journal
rankings for determining the list of accounting
journals for determining the research prestige of
MBA faculties. They settled on only three: JAR,
TAR, and JAE. A study by Schwartz, Williams,
and Williams (2005) found that US doctoral stu-
dents familiarity with accounting journals was
diverse across doctoral programs except for three
journals JAR, TAR, and JAE; there is universal
familiarity with these three journals across doc-
toral programs in the US. A principal indicator
of a scholars prestige is the extent to which her
peers cite her work. Citation-wise an accounting
scholar is invisible to the larger community of
accounting scholars unless one publishes in TAR,
JAR, JAE, or AOS. The institutionalized percep-
tion of research quality is dominantly inuenced
by the extent to which scholars have published in
these four journals.
21
For the four journals we compiled a list of every
person who appeared as an author for the period
1963 through 1999. This comprises the modern
period of accounting scholarship when positivist
social science established itself as the paradigmatic
manner of constructing scholarly texts in account-
ing, at least in the US. To identify the most produc-
tive scholars, i.e., the potential pool of those who are
likely to become elite inuencing the scholarly
agenda, we selected individuals who appeared ve
or more times as an author in the four journals com-
19
The principal objective of Browns papers was to identify
the best accounting scholars, papers, or programs. The four
journals were deemed to be sucient to do that, i.e., no one
could be a prominent scholar who was not published in one of
these four journals.
20
One may question why we are including JAE since it does
not publish BAR. The reason is that our concern is with power
within the academy and the extent to which BAR provides the
discourses that condition how that power is wielded. For
example, Birnberg, Homan, and Moser (1998, p. 4) observe:
Thus, while current BAR in management accounting clearly is
derived from agency theory, future research may again go o in
other directions. How is it that BAR began largely under the
inuence of Herbert Simon, only to end up under the inuence
of Jensen and Meckling? JAE has been instrumental in
establishing the principal/agent model as the sine qua non of
how to understand human behavior in organizations. We are
concerned about power, not merely about individual scholars
access to journals.
21
For example, of the AAA Notable Contribution Awards
that were bestowed on journal publications, 17 were published
in TAR, 8 in JAR, 7 in JAE, and 1 each in AOS, Contemporary
Accounting Research, and Journal of Accountancy. The elite
school dominance also is evident, as we have previously noted.
binedfor the period 1963 through1999. We made no
adjustments for co-authorship; that is, we counted
appearances, not equivalent articles. Five was
selected as the cut-o number because, based on
Lotkas law (1922), it would capture only the top
510% of most productive scholars (see also Rod-
gers & Williams, 1996). As the number of appear-
ances decreases from ve, the number of authors
grows rapidly. The conclusions we reach from our
analysis are not sensitive to the number of publica-
tions being six or four. For each decade (1960s,
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) we identied all individuals
with ve or more publications. This allowed us to
identify an emergent group of potentially elite schol-
ars for each decade during the modern period.
For the individuals with ve or more appear-
ances in the decade of the 90s we compiled some
additional metrics that we used in our analyses of
the new BAR elite. A power index was calculated
for each person similar to the one utilized by Wil-
liams and Rodgers (1995) to ascertain the degree
an individual was involved in the gate keeping pro-
cess at the four journals. An individual received
one point for each year he or she was a member
of one of the four journals editorial boards during
the period 1963 through 2000. For example, if
someone was a member of the editorial board of
TAR and AOS in 1991 that person received two
points. Two points were assigned for each year that
someone was an associate or consulting editor since
gate keeping power is greater because these individ-
uals participate in deliberations on more papers in
a given year. Four points were awarded for being
an editor of one of these journals since the editor
has great gate keeping power since he or she ulti-
mately decides which papers are reviewed, who
does the reviewing, and which papers are accepted
for publication. Both total score and average yearly
score (total score divided by (2000 year of receiv-
ing Ph.D.)) were determined for each person.
We also did a literature prole for each person.
From the bibliographies of all papers published
during the decade of the 1990s (1990 through
1999), we counted the total citations to academic
journals by the discipline represented by each jour-
nal. We ignored citations to books, reports, work-
ing papers, government documents, newspaper or
magazine articles, etc. Our interest was in identify-
ing what other disciplines informed the authors as
they constructed their papers. The omission of
books is, admittedly, a shortcoming because some
disciplines, e.g., history or philosophy, use books
as a dissemination medium to a greater extent than
other disciplines. This is a more signicant prob-
lem for authors publishing in AOS since authors
in AOS tend to cite many more books than do
authors in the other three journals. However, since
our focus is on BAR, a singular focus on journals
is sucient to capture what we need. The disci-
pline categories that were cited at least once were:
Economics, Finance, Management/Administra-
tion, Marketing, Sociology, Psychology, Statistics,
Law, Personnel, Political Science, Engineering,
Mathematics, Science, Demography, Medicine/
Health Care, Public Relations, Communication,
Design/Art, Anthropology, Computer/Articial
Intelligence, Education, Archeology, Philosophy,
Humanities/Literature, and History. Accounting
borrows from many disciplines, however, most of
these disciplinary categories were cited only by
authors publishing in AOS. Of the above list 12
disciplines were cited only in AOS. The bibliogra-
phies in TAR, JAR, and JAE were more limited in
the range of disciplines consulted.
Based on these counts, we developed a disciplin-
ary prole for each person, which consisted of the
number of times a journal from a particular disci-
pline was cited divided by the total citations made
to all journal articles cited. We also included cita-
tions to the four journals and a category all other
accounting journals. Thus, for each individual the
prole consisted of the percentage of citations to
literature published in journals for each of TAR,
JAR, JAE, AOS, other accounting journals,
and various other disciplines. For example,
Joni Young published ve papers, all in AOS. Her
prole was (percentages less than 1% were treated
as zeros): TAR <1%; JAR 0%; JAE 0%;
AOS 28.3%; other accounting 28.3%; Econom-
ics <1%; Finance 14.2%; Mgt./Adm. 10.4%;
Sociology 5.7%; Political Science 1.9%;
Public Relations <1%; Communications 2.8%;
Design/Art 5.7%. These proles were cluster ana-
lyzed to determine how similar or dissimilar the
authors were and to determine how many dierent
identiable clusters there were based on the source
literatures utilized by the authors. We are interested
in determining groups of scholars who are similar or
dissimilar to other groups. These groups constitute
research genres, which are, in turn, research interests
(in the range of senses of the word interest), success
at which garners prestige. The results of the various
analyses follow. Two analyses are presented below.
One was for the emergent elite prior to the 1990s
and a more extensive analysis for those that emerged
in the 1990s.
Presentation of the analyses
Pre-1990 elites
Table 1 contains lists by decade through 1989 of
BAR scholars that emerged via ve or more pub-
lications in the four journals. We identied
whether someone was a BAR scholar in the man-
ner similar to that utilized by Dyckman (1998). If
the person indicated behavioral as a research inter-
est in Hasselbacks Directory (2002) we classied
them as a BAR researcher. In addition, we
inspected the titles, abstracts, and bibliographies
of the articles to determine if they were consistent
with what constituted BAR research as we dened
it based on the description provided by Birnberg
and Shields (1989). Only one genuine BAR scholar
emerges in the 1960s: Jacob Birnberg. Many of the
individuals who appeared ve or more times in the
period 1963 through 1969 were persons who were
continuing their careers from the pre-positive
social science era or were not utilizing positive
social science models in their work, e.g. Chambers,
Staubus, and Brief. Obviously, JAE and AOS did
not yet exist. The emergence of the neoclassicists
occurs during this same period. Birnberg is joined
by four economics elite Beaver, Demski, Ijiri,
and Dopuch. They (except Ijiri),
22
unlike Birnberg,
appear later on our list of most prolic publishers
in the 1990s as well. Each of these neoclassicists
has won at least one Notable Contribution to the
Literature Award and one (Beaver) has received
the Seminal Contribution Award. Three of these
individuals (Beaver, Demski, and Ijiri) became
Table 1
Publications by emergent behavioral elite by decade
Author Ph.D. school
and year
Appearances in:
JAE JAR TAR AOS
1960s
Birnberg
a
Minnesota, 62 0 0 6 0
1970s
R. Ashton
a
Texas, 73 0 2 4 0
Chesley
a
Ohio St., 73 0 4 1 0
Flamholtz
a
Michigan, 69 0 1 2 2
Kinney
a
Michigan St., 68 0 7 2 1
Libby
a
Illinois, 74 0 4 1 1
Lusk Northwestern, 72 0 2 4 0
Mock
a
Berkeley, 69 0 2 2 1
Rhode
a
Minnesota, 69 0 0 2 3
1980s
A. Ashton
a
Texas, 79 0 3 2 0
Casey
a
Ohio St., 78 0 3 3 0
Chow Oregon, 81 0 0 8 0
D. Cooper Manchester, 79 0 0 0 5
Covaleski Penn State, 79 0 0 0 6
Dirsmith Northwestern, 75 0 0 0 6
Dyckman
a
Ferris
a
Ohio St., 74 0 0 2 6
Hilton
a
Ohio St., 77 0 4 1 0
A. Hopwood
a
Chicago, 71 0 0 0 5
Jiambalvo
a
Ohio St., 77 1 1 2 3
Kida Massachusetts, 78 0 5 0 1
B. Lewis Penn St., 78 0 4 1 4
Merchant
a
Berkeley, 78 0 0 2 3
Pany
a
Pratt Indiana, 77 0 1 2 3
Reckers
a
Shields Pittsburgh, 78 0 2 1 8
Snowball
a
U. of
Washington, 75
0 0 3 2
I. Solomon
a
Texas, 79 0 2 3 2
Swieringa
a
Trotman New South
Wales, 84
0 3 1 2
Uecker
a
Texas, 73 0 5 4 1
Waller
a
U. of
Washington, 81
0 4 1 5
A. Wright U. of
S. California, 79
0 1 3 1
a
Denotes elite school graduate.
22
Unlike Beaver, Demski, and Dopuch, it could be argued
that Ijiri is not within the neoclassical category. That is a valid
observation. Ijiri resists easy classication since he brings to
accounting perspectives, e.g., legal, mathematical, that are quite
dierent from the perspectives of the other three persons. It
should be noted that Ijiri is the only one of the four
economists not still publishing in elite journals during the
1990s.
president of the AAA and the other (Dopuch)
became the editor of JAR.
During the next decade, the number of BAR
scholars increases. There were 30 persons in all,
eight were BAR (27%), 22 not BAR. All but
one of the BAR scholars were graduates of elite
schools, even though Northwestern (Lusk) is
one of the schools that was mentioned previ-
ously as a non-persistent elite. All of these
individuals published in JAR and/or TAR.
None of them appear on the list purely by vir-
tue of success at publishing in AOS. In the
1980s the number of emergent BAR scholars
increases to 25. AOS came into existence in
1976, which provided more opportunity for
BAR scholars to publish their work. There were
a total of 73 emergent scholars during the 1980s
so BAR scholars represented 34% of the total.
Of the 25, 21 published in JAR and/or TAR
(84%). Only 4 of the individuals appear exclu-
sively because of AOS. The number of non-elite
graduates is 10 (40%), which might be expected
given the substantial increase in the number of
doctoral programs created in the 1960s and
1970s. Through the 1980s the leading US jour-
nals sustained a BAR elite and enabled it to
grow slightly proportionally to the non-BAR
elite.
In order to provide some additional context for
the analysis of the 1990s elite to follow, we focused
attention on the individuals who emerged in the
1980s. This group would by now be in the middle
age of their careers when we could expect them to
be participating fully as shapers of the scholarly
agenda and performing signicant gate keeping
functions. Table 2 contains power index scores
by journal for BAR scholars that emerged during
the 1980s. A number of these individuals achieved
some high index numbers other than just by virtue
of AOS (obviously Hopwoods number is huge
since he is the founder and only editor of AOS).
But service to AOS is not the only source of high
scores. Hilton, Jiambalvo, Lewis, Merchant, Pratt,
Shields, Soloman, Swieringa, Trotman, and Waller
all were a signicant presence on the boards of US
journals. However, the number of those individu-
als serving on boards of US journals after 2000
has dropped quite signicantly. In parentheses
beside each score are the scores for each journal
for these persons post-2000. Only two have pro-
vided continuing service on TARs board (Jiam-
balvo and Pratt) and none now serve on the JAR
board. Though seven of the non-BAR elite who
emerged during the 1980s still serve on the JAR
board, none of the emergent BARs continue. This
strongly suggests that something happened during
the 1990s that changed the prospects for BAR
research as a potential shaper of the discipline. It
is to that we turn our attention.
The 1990 elites
During the period 1990 through 1999, 83 people
appeared ve or more times as authors in JAE,
JAR, TAR, and AOS combined. These individuals
are listed in Table 3. These persons include indi-
viduals who emerged as prominent scholars many
years prior to this period and their appearance in
Table 2
Power indexes for 1980s emergent behavioral elite (post-2000
index in parentheses)
Author JAE JAR TAR AOS Total
A. Ashton
a
0(0) 0(0) 2(0) 0(0) 2(0)
Casey
a
0(0) 0(0) 1(0) 0(0) 1(0)
Chow 0(0) 0(0) 4(3) 7(2) 11(5)
D. Cooper 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 33(5) 33(5)
Covaleski 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 6(5) 6(5)
Dirsmith 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 16(5) 16(5)
Dyckman
a
10(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 14(0)
Ferris
a
0(0) 0(0) 5(0) 11(0) 16(0)
Hilton
a
0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 0(0) 8(0)
A. Hopwood
a
0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 92(20) 92(20)
Jiambalvo
a
0(0) 0(0) 11(5) 0(0) 11(5)
Kida 0(0) 0(0) 3(0) 0(0) 3(0)
B. Lewis 0(0) 18(0) 9(0) 8(0) 35(0)
Merchant
a
0(0) 0(0) 10(1) 15(5) 25(6)
Pany
a
0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0)
Pratt 0(0) 0(0) 12(5) 0(0) 12(0)
Reckers
a
0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0) 0(0)
Shields 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 24(10) 32(10)
Snowball
a
0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)
I. Solomon
a
0(0) 0(0) 9(0) 6(3) 15(3)
Swieringa
a
0(0) 22(0) 19(0) 15(0) 56(0)
Trotman 0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 7(5) 15(5)
Uecker
a
0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)
Waller
a
0(0) 0(0) 8(0) 5(0) 13(0)
A. Wright 0(0) 0(0) 4(0) 0(0) 4(0)
a
Table 3
Authors with ve or more appearances in JAE, JAR, TAR, and AOS 1990 through 1999 (elite-15 in italics)
Author Ph.D. school and year Appearances in: Power index
JAE JAR TAR AOS Total Per year
Abernathy Latrobe, 89 0 0 0 5 0 0
Ali Columbia, 87 2 2 1
a
0 3 0.23
Amir Berkeley, 91 1 2 3 0 0 0
Baiman Stanford, 74 1
a
4
a
3
a
1
a
83 3.19
Banker Harvard, 80 2 0 4 0 0 0
Barth Stanford, 89 4 3 5
a
0 12 1.10
Bartov Berkeley, 89 2 0 3 0 0 0
Beaver Chicago, 65 4
a
0
a
2
a
0 111 3.17
Bloomeld Michigan, 92 0 1 3
a
1
a
8 1.00
Bonner Michigan, 88 0 2 5
a
2
a
17 1.42
Bushman Minnesota, 89 2 4
a
1
a
0 12 1.10
Chow Oregon, 81 0 0 0
a
7
a
11 0.58
Chua Sheeld, 83 0 0 0 5
a
6 0.35
Clinch Stanford, 88 3 2 1 0 0 0
Collins, D. Iowa, 73 3
a
0 2
a
0 59 2.19
Collins, J. Florida, 83 1 3 1
a
0 10 0.59
Cooper, D. Manchester, 79 0 0 0 5
a
33 1.57
Covaleski Penn State, 79 0 0 0 6
a
6 0.29
Cready Ohio State, 85 2 1 2
a
0 3 0.20
Datar, S. Stanford, 85 1 2 4
a
0 6 0.40
Dechow Rochester, 93 4 1 2
a
0 5 0.71
DeFond Washington, 87 4 0 1
a
0 1 0.08
Demski Chicago, 67 1 5 2
a
0 21 0.64
Dirsmith Northwestern, 75 0 0 0 9
a
16 0.64
Dopuch Illinois, 61 2 2
a
2
a
0 149 3.82
Dye Carnegie Mellon, 80 2
a
4
a
2 0 43 2.15
Elgers Maryland, 78 1 3 1
a
0 3 0.14
Feltham Berkeley, 67 4
a
1
a
2
a
0 70 2.12
Francis, Jen. Cornell, 87 2
a
7
a
1
a
0 17 1.31
Gaver, Jen. Arizona, 86 2 1 2
a
0 2 0.14
Gaver, K. Carnegie Mellon, 74 2
a
1 3
a
0 20 0.77
Gigler Minnesota, 92 0 4
a
1
a
0 9 1.13
Guenther Washington, 90 3 0 2
a
0 1 0.10
Hand Chicago, 87 2 2 3
a
0 4 0.31
Harris, T. Washington, 83 1 6 1
a
0 5 0.29
Harrison, G. Macquerie, 90 0 0 0 5 0 0.00
Hemmer Odense, 90 4
a
2
a
1 0 5 0.50
Holthausen Rochester, 80 4
a
0
a
1
a
0 73 3.65
Hughes, J.S. Purdue, 74 3
a
1 1
a
0 25 0.96
Indjejikian Pennsylvania, 89 3 4
a
1
a
0 14 1.27
Ittner Harvard, 92 0 3 1
a
2 4 0.50
Kang, S.-H. MIT, 88 2 3 1
a
0 3 0.25
Kennedy Duke, 92 0 4 1 0 5 0.63
Kim, O. Pennsylvania, 90 3 1 1 0 0 0
King, R. Arizona, 86 2 1 2
a
0 3 0.21
Koonce Illinois, 90 0 3 1
a
1 7 0.70
Kothari Iowa, 86 5
a
1 2
a
0 35 2.50
Lang Chicago, 90 1 6 1
a
0 4 0.40
Larcker Kansas, 78 3
a
7
a
1
a
1
a
59 2.68
Lev Chicago, 68 2
a
4
a
2
a
0 73 2.28
Libby Illinois, 74 0 6
a
3
a
4
a
54 2.08
Lundholm Iowa, 87 0 3 3
a
0 7 0.54
Table 3 is testament to their continued activity.
There are persons who received their doctorates
in the decade prior to 1990 and there are some that
received their doctorates post-1990. Degree dates
range from 1961 to 1992.
Cursory inspection of Table 3 conrms the con-
clusion that AOS is much more dissimilar to the
US journals than they are to each other. That is,
the US journals do not represent distinctly dier-
ent literatures; they are complementary, whereas
AOS represents a distinctly dierent literature
(Lee & Williams, 1999; Lowe & Locke, 2005). This
is evident from the number of zeros in the AOS
column relative to those in the US journal col-
umns. People who publish prolically in AOS tend
not to publish in the US journals, while people
who publish in one of the US journals tend to pub-
lish in one or more of the others 42 (50.6%) of the
1990 elites published in all three US journals.
However, 14 (53.8%) of those who published in
AOS published at least one article in a US journal.
But only 3 (7.1%) of those who published in all
three US journals were able to publish at least
one article in AOS.
Cluster analyses of bibliographic proles also
conrm the distinction between AOS and the US
journals. Table 4 contains the results of cluster
analyses based on bibliographic proles for vari-
ous numbers of cluster solutions to illustrate when
a reduction of groupings results in one group
Table 3 (continued)
Author Ph.D. school and year Appearances in: Power index
JAE JAR TAR AOS Total Per year
Lys Rochester, 82 4
a
1 0
a
0 31 1.72
Maydew Iowa, 93 2
a
2 1 0 2 0.29
McNichols UCLA, 84 2 2 1
a
0 12 0.75
Melumad Berkeley, 85 1 4 0
a
0 2 0.13
Miller, P. London, 83 0 1 0 7
a
29 1.71
Nelson, M. Ohio State, 90 0 1 7
a
2
a
18 1.80
Neu Queens, 89 0 0 0 7 0 0
Ohlson Berkeley, 72 1
a
4
a
2
a
0 50 1.79
Penno Northwestern, 82 0 2
a
4
a
0 15 0.83
Potter Wisconsin, 86 2 1 1 1 0 0
Power, M. Cambridge, 84 0 0 0 5
a
10 0.63
Pratt Indiana, 77 0 2 3
a
2 12 0.52
Preston Bath, 82 0 0 0 5
a
10 0.56
Rajan Carnegie Mellon, 90 0 4 4
a
0 5 0.50
Reichelstein Northwestern, 84 1 2 2
a
0 3 0.19
Robson Manchester, 88 0 0 0 5 1 0.08
Shackelford Michigan, 90 4
a
2 1
a
0 19 1.90
Shevlin Stanford, 86 2 2 1
a
0 13 0.93
Shields, M. Pittsburgh, 78 0 1 0
a
4
a
29 1.32
Sivarama-krishnan Northwestern, 88 0 3 4 0 0 0
Skinner Rochester, 89 5 2 1
a
0 19 1.73
Sloan Rochester, 92 7
a
1 4
a
0 6 0.75
Tan Michigan, 92 0 4 0 1 0 0.00
Trotman New South Wales, 84 0 1 1
a
3
a
15 0.94
Verrechia Stanford, 76 6
a
4
a
3
a
0 62 2.58
Wang, S.W. Michigan, 88 2 0 3 0 0 0.00
Watts Chicago, 71 1
a
2
a
2 0 116 4.00
Waymire Chicago, 84 0 3 2
a
0 4 0.25
Wild, J.J. Wisconsin, 83 1 2 2
a
0 5 0.29
Young, J. Illinois, 91 0 0 0 5 0 0.00
Zimmerman Berkeley, 74 3
a
0 2 0 88 3.38
a
Denotes service on editorial board.
Table 4
Cluster membership for authors for three to six cluster solutions
Author Cluster membership
Cluster three Cluster four Cluster ve Cluster six
Abernathy 1 1 3 3
Ali 3 4 5 4
Amir 3 4 5 4
Baiman 3 3 4 5
Banker 3 4 5 6
Barth 3 4 5 4
Bartov 3 4 5 6
Beaver 3 4 5 4
Bloomeld 3 3 4 5
Bonner 2 2 2 2
Bushman 3 3 4 5
Chow 1 1 3 3
Chua 1 1 1 1
Clinch 3 4 5 4
Collins, D. 3 4 5 4
Collins, J. 3 3 4 6
Cooper, D. 1 1 1 1
Covaleski 1 1 3 3
Cready 3 4 5 6
Datar, S. 3 3 4 5
Dechow 3 4 5 4
DeFond 3 4 5 4
Demski 3 3 4 5
Dirsmith 1 1 3 3
Dopuch 3 3 4 5
Dye 3 3 4 5
Elgers 3 4 5 4
Feltham 3 4 5 6
Francis, Jen. 3 4 5 6
Gaver, Jen. 3 4 5 4
Gaver, Ken 3 4 5 4
Gigler 3 3 4 5
Guenther 3 4 5 6
Hand 3 4 5 6
Harris, T. 3 4 5 6
Harrison, G. 1 1 3 3
Hemmer 3 3 4 5
Holthausen 3 4 5 4
Hughes, J.S. 3 4 5 6
Indjejikian 3 3 4 5
Ittner 1 1 3 3
Kang, S.-H. 3 4 5 4
Kennedy 2 2 2 2
Kim, O. 3 4 4 6
King, R. 3 3 4 5
Koonce 2 2 2 2
Kothari 3 4 5 4
Lang 3 4 5 6
Larcker 3 3 4 5
Lev 3 4 5 6
Libby 2 2 2 2
Lundholm 3 3 4 6
joining another. It is clear from Table 4 that there
are substantively only three groups: an AOS
group, a US BAR group, and an economics/
nance group, which is by far the largest. The most
stable anity is the US BAR group, since the indi-
viduals in this grouping remain together in every
solution. The nal cluster centers, i.e., the average
prole of all members in the clusters, for the 6-
group solution are presented in Table 5. These
data indicate that the AOS group contains two
subgroups: both are similar except that one cites
management/administration literature while the
other cites other accounting journals more heavily.
Both cite sociology, but the management group
cites psychology, as well. The US BAR people
(group 2 in Table 5) are together in all solutions
and their texts are characterized as relying heavily
on citations to JAR, TAR, other accounting jour-
nals and psychology journals. The economics
group consists of three variations on the genre: a
JAE dominated source literature, a JAR/econom-
ics literature, and a balanced, JAR, TAR,
JAE, economics and nance literature. Table 6
contains the nal cluster centers for the three
group solution in which we observe the three basic
types of literature being produced by the most
productive scholars in the four leading journals.
These groups are distinctly dierent. Cluster one
is the AOS cluster and the prole reects the phi-
losophy of the journal as enunciated by Anthony
Hopwood (1988). The non-accounting literature
most utilized is from the disciplines of manage-
ment/administration and sociology. The account-
ing literature is from AOS and other accounting
Table 4 (continued)
Author Cluster membership
Cluster three Cluster four Cluster ve Cluster six
Lys 3 4 5 4
Maydew 3 4 5 6
McNichols 3 4 5 6
Melumad 3 3 4 5
Miller, P. 1 1 1 1
Nelson, M. 2 2 2 2
Neu 1 1 3 3
Ohlson 3 4 5 6
Penno 3 3 4 5
Potter 2 2 2 2
Power, M. 1 1 1 1
Pratt 2 2 2 2
Preston 1 1 1 1
Rajan 3 3 4 5
Reichelstein 3 3 4 5
Robson 1 1 1 1
Shackelford 3 4 5 6
Shevlin 3 4 5 4
Shields, M. 1 1 3 3
Sivaramakrishnan 3 3 4 5
Skinner 3 4 5 4
Sloan 3 4 5 4
Tan 2 2 2 2
Trotman 2 2 2 2
Verrechia 3 4 4 6
Wang, S.W. 3 4 5 4
Watts 3 4 5 4
Waymire 3 4 5 6
Wild, J.J. 3 4 5 4
Young, J. 1 1 1 1
Zimmerman 3 4 5 4
journals (e.g., Critical Perspectives on Accounting;
Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal;
AAA section journals; etc.). Cluster three, the eco-
nomics group, illustrates the extent that all three
US journals are similar. The authors in this group
(the largest with 59 members, 71%) combine eco-
nomics and nance literature with literature pub-
lished in all three US journals. Of the three
groups this one is the least diverse in the literature
it cites (notably, other accounting journals). The
second cluster is the US BAR group that emerges
as a result of publishing BAR work in the US jour-
nals, which constructs its texts from other account-
ing journals save JAE and AOS and literature
from the discipline of psychology.
There is a notable sameness to the three US
journals. This is evident when comparing the pro-
les of the four journals in terms of the specic
journals cited. Table 7 provides a list of those spe-
cic journals whose citations comprised at least 1%
of total journal citations for the individuals listed
in Table 3. Citations in JAR, TAR, and JAE are
dominated by citations to just those three journals.
Citations to journals other than accounting jour-
nals are exclusively to nance and economics jour-
nals. The BAR presence in JAR and TAR is not
sucient to give them a citation prole that is dif-
ferent from JAE, which publishes no BAR schol-
arship. AOS, on the other hand, is quite dierent
with minimal citing of nance and economics,
but with substantial citing of sociology and man-
agement literature. The total percentage of cita-
tions accounted for by the journals listed in
Table 7 is also instructive. For AOS only 59% of
the total citations to journals are accounted for
by the journals whose citations exceeded 1% of
the total. For the three US journals citations are
much more heavily concentrated to that limited
set of journals. There is a greater homogeneity
and narrowness of the US journals when com-
pared to AOS. Ironically, AOS, a non-US journal
contains signicant citations to the major profes-
sional US journal, Journal of Accountancy. The
three US journals do not.
We also determined the frequency with which
specic articles were cited by the 83 persons in
our group of top publishers of the 1990s. The data
in Table 7 focuses on total citations to particular
journals. Exhibit 1, panels A, B, C, and D contain
lists of the top 20 articles (and ties) cited in TAR,
JAR, JAE, and AOS, respectively. The articles
cited most frequently by AOS authors are mark-
edly dierent from those of the three US journals,
which are very similar. One article from Econome-
trica is common to all three US journals and each
of the US journals has four articles in common
with the other two.
Of the articles cited in the three US journals all,
save three, are orthodox economics inspired. Only
three of the articles cited are BAR studies and two
of those, both involving Libby as an author,
appeared in JAR, which no longer has any BAR
scholars (elite or otherwise) on its editorial board.
Table 5
Cluster centers for six cluster solution
Sources Cluster groups
1 2 3 4 5 6
JAE 0.0 1.9 1.0 27.5 10.5 12.6
JAR 0.3 19.2 6.5 20.4 20.4 24.3
TAR 3.4 15.1 7.2 17.4 9.4 11.7
AOS 30.6 4.5 20.4 0.0 9.0 0.0
Other Accounting 24.3 15.2 9.9 7.6 8.7 10.8
Economics 1.6 3.2 2.9 8.1 29.2 13.2
Finance 3.2 2.1 1.9 14.1 6.5 22.2
Management/
Administration
6.2 4.7 25.9 3.8 6.7 2.9
Sociology 11.1 0.5 10.1 0.0 0.2 0.0
Law 1.2 0.6 0.3 0.8 4.9 1.2
Psychology 0.0 28.9 7.8 0.2 0.7 0.5
Political Science 1.6 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.1 0.1
Table 6
Cluster centers for three cluster solution
Sources Cluster groups
1 2 3
JAE 0.5 1.9 17.6
JAR 3.6 19.2 21.7
TAR 5.5 15.1 13.1
AOS 25.2 4.5 0.3
Other Accounting 16.6 15.2 9.0
Economics 2.3 3.2 15.9
Finance 2.5 2.1 14.6
Management/Administration 16.7 4.7 4.3
Sociology 10.6 0.5 0.1
Law 0.7 0.6 2.1
Psychology 4.2 28.9 0.4
Political Science 0.9 0.0 0.1
The JAR hegemony over the US literature being
produced by the most productive scholars is
apparent. JAR articles are cited 10, 8, and 7 times
in TAR, JAR, and JAE, respectively. Since there
were 50 cites in total to articles in accounting jour-
nals (including cites common among the four jour-
nals), citations to JAR articles comprise 50% of
accounting journal citations. Citations to JAE
articles in TAR, JAR, and JAE are 3, 2, and 12,
respectively, or 34% of the accounting journal cita-
tions. Citations to TAR articles in TAR, JAR, and
JAE are 4, 0, and 0, respectively, or only 8% of the
total. Thus, among the top US journals there is a
hierarchy established by this citation behavior of
the top publishers. JAR is ubiquitous, but articles
in the AAAs agship journal TAR are cited fre-
quently only in TAR. The citation behavior of
our group of top scholars indicates that JAR has
eectively established the standard for US
accounting scholarship and that standard speaks
loudest in the language of neoclassical economics.
Exhibit 1 also indicates which authors or cited
papers appearing in accounting journals received
their doctoral degrees from an elite US school.
The dominance of elite schools in the US journals
is pronounced. For the cited articles in JAR, TAR,
and JAE that were in accounting journals there
were 45 dierent authors. Of those authors, three
were not listed in Hasselback (2004) so their degree
schools were not ascertainable; 42 were accounting
academics. Of that 42, 37 (88.1%) received degrees
from an elite school; 16 of the 42 (38.1%) received
their degrees from just two schools Chicago (7)
and Stanford (9). There are only ve individuals
with non-elite accounting degrees among the
authors of most cited accounting articles.
Table 7
Journal citations of 1990s emerging elite greater than or equal to 1% of total journal citations
Journal cited Journal of interest
TAR JAR JAE AOS
TAR 16.3 10.7 12.0 8.9
JAR 20.2 25.1 18.3 7.0
JAE 12.5 10.3 25.1
AOS 1.0 1.3 23.4
Journal of Financial Econ. 3.8 2.4 7.6
Journal of Finance 3.7 3.6 5.1
Journal of Business 1.5 1.2
Econometrica 3.2 3.8 2.9
Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory 2.9 1.3
CAR 2.2 2.6 2.9
Bell/Rand Journal of Economics 1.6 3.0 1.6
Journal of Political Economy 1.6 1.6 2.1
Accounting Horizons 1.2 1.6
American Economic Review 1.1 1.7 1.4
Journal of Accounting Literature 1.2
Journal of Economic Theory 1.4
Academy of Management Journal 1.1
American Journal of Sociology 1.5
Academy of Management Review 2.2
Administrative Science Quarterly 4.9
American Sociological Review 1.3
Critical Perspectives on Accounting 1.1
Harvard Business Review 1.2
Journal of Accountancy 2.5
Journal of Personality and Social Psych. 1.1
Total percentage accounted for (out of 100) 71.3% 71.8% 80.1% 59.0%
Total Journal Citations per Journal 2103 2337 2026 2991
Exhibit 1
Most frequently cited articles by 1990s emerging elite in TAR, JAR, JAE, and AOS 1990 through 1999 (frequency of citation appears
in parentheses;
*
denotes elite graduate; ? denotes unknown)
Panel A: Articles published in The Accounting Review
1. (12) White, H. (?). 1980. A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity,
Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817838.
(12) Healy, P.M.(*) 1985. The eect of bonus schemes on accounting decisions,Journal
of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 7, No. 13, pp. 85107.
3. (9) Bernard, V.L.(*) and Thomas, J.K.(*) 1989. Post-earnings announcement drift: Delayed
price response or risk premium, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 136.
4. (8) Holmstrom, B. (?) 1979. Moral hazard and observability,Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 7491.
5. (7) Demski, J.(*) and Feltham, G.(*) 1994. Market response to nancial reports,
Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 17, No. 12, pp. 340.
(7) Dye, R.(*) 1985. Disclosure of nonproprietary information, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 123145.
(7) Patell, J.M.(*) 1976. Corporate forecasts of earnings per share and stock price behavior:
Empirical tests, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 246276.
(7) Libby, R.(*) 1985. Availability and the generation of hypotheses in analytical review,
Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 648667.
(7) Lambert, R.A.(*) and Larcker, D.F. 1987. An analysis of the use of accounting and
market measures of performance in executive compensation contracts,
(7) McNichols, M., Wilson, G.P.(*), and DeAngelo, L.(*) 1988. Evidence
of earnings management from the provision for bad debts, Journal of
Accounting Research, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 131.
(7) Barth, M.E.(*) 1991. Relative measurement errors among alternative pension
asset and liability measures, The Accounting Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 433463.
12. (6) Gjesdal, F.(*) 1981. Accounting for stewardship, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 208231.
(6) Bernard, V.L.(*) 1987. Cross-sectional dependence and problems in inference
z in market-based accounting research, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 148.
(6) Ball, R.(*) and Brown, P.(*) 1968. An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers,
(6) Frederick, D.M.(*) and Libby, R.(*) 1986. Expertise and auditor judgements in
conjunctive events, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 270290.
(6) Landsman, W.(*) 1986. An empirical investigation of pension fund property rights,
The Accounting Review, Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 662691.
17. (5) Verrechia, R.(*) 1983. Discretionary disclosure, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 5, pp. 179194.
(5) King, R., Pownall, G.(*) and Waymire, G.(*) 1990. Expectations adjustments via timely
management forecasts: Review, synthesis, and suggestions for future research,
Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 9, 113144.
(5) Wilson, G.P.(*) 1987. The incremental information content of the accrual and
funds components of earnings after controlling for earnings, The Accounting Review, Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 293322.
(5) Bernard, V.L.(*) and Stober, T.L.(*) 1989. The nature and amount of information
in cash ows and accruals, The Accounting Review, Vol. 65, No. 4, pp. 624652.
Panel B: Journal of Accounting Research
1. (17) White, H. (?) 1980. A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimation
and a direct test for heteroskedasticity, Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817838.
(17) Patell, J.M.(*) 1976. Corporate forecasts of earnings per share and stock
price behavior: Empirical tests, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol.14, No. 2, pp. 246276.
3 (11) Verrechia, R.(*) 1983. Discretionary disclosure, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 5, pp. 179194.
4. (10) Dye, R.A.(*) 1985. Disclosure of nonproprietary information, Journal of Accounting
Research, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 123145.
(10) Easton, P.D.(*) and Harris, T.S.(*) 1991. Earnings as an explanatory variable for
returns, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 1936.
Exhibit 1 (continued)
6. (9) Ohlson, J.A.(*) 1995. Earnings, book values, and dividends in equity valuations, Contemporary
(9) Holmstrom, B.(?) and Milgram, P.(?) 1987. Aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal
incentives, Econometrica, Vol. 55, No. 2., pp. 303328.
8. (8) Holmstrom, B.(?) 1979. Moral hazard and observability, Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 7491.
(8) Darrough, M.N. and Stoughton, N.M.(?) 1990. Financial disclosure policy in an entry game,
(8) Penman, S.B.(*) 1980. An empirical investigation of the voluntary disclosure of corporate earnings forecasts, Journal of
11. (7) Diamond, D.W.(?) 1985. Optimal release of information by rms, Journal of Finance, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 10711094.
12. (6) Milgram, P.R.(?) 1981. Good news and bad news: Representation theorems and applications,
Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 380391.
(6) Kyle, A.S.(?) 1985. Continuous auctions and insider trading, Econometrica, Vol. 53, No. 6, pp. 13151336.
(6) Davis, J.S. and Solomon, I.(*) 1989. Experience, expertise, and explicit-performance
research in public accounting, Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 8, pp. 150164.
(6) King, R., Pownall, G.(*) and Waymire, G.(*) 1990. Expectations adjustments via timely
management forecasts: Review, synthesis, and suggestions for future research,
Journal of Accounting Literature, Vol. 9, pp. 113144.
(6) Antle, R.(*) and Smith, A.(*) 1986. An empirical investigation of the
relative performance evaluation of corporate executives, Journal of
(6) Demski, J.S.(*) and Sappington, D.E.M.(?) 1987. Delegated expertise,
(6) Freeman, R.N.(*) and Tse, S.Y.(*) 1992. A nonlinear model of security
price responses to unexpected earnings, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 185209.
(6) Lev, B.(*) 1989. On the usefulness of earnings research: Lessons and directions
from two decades of empirical research, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 153192.
(6) Antle, R.(*) and Eppen, G.D.(?) 1985. Capital rationing and organizational slack
in capital budgeting, Management Science, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 163174.
Panel C: Journal of Accounting and Economics
1. (18) Healy, P.M.(*) 1985. The eect of bonus schemes on accounting decisions,
(18) Collins, D.W.(*) and Kothari, S.P.(*) 1989. An analysis of intertemporal and
cross- sectional determinants of earnings response coecients, Journal of Accounting and
Economics, Vol. 11, No. 23, pp. 143181.
3. (17) White, H.(?) 1980. A heteroskedasticity-consistent covariance matrix estimator and a direct test for heteroskedasticity,
Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 817838.
4. (13) Jones, J.J.(*) 1991. Earnings management during import relief investigations,
5. (12) Beaver, W.(*), Lambert, R.(*) and Morse, D.(*) 1980. The information content
of security prices, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 328.
(12) Ball, R.(*) and Brown, P.(*) 1968. An empirical evaluation of accounting income numbers,
7. (11) Lambert, R.A.(*) and Larcker, D.F. 1987. An analysis of the use of accounting and market
measures of performance in executive compensations contracts, Journal of Accounting Research,
Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 85125.
(11) Easton, P.D.(*) and Harris, T.S.(*) 1991. Earnings as an explanatory variable for returns,
(continued on next page)
9. (10) Holmstrom, B.(?) 1979. Moral hazard and observability, Bell Journal of Economics, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 7991.
(10) Easton, P.D.(*) and Zmiejewski, M.E. 1989. Cross-sectional variation in the stock
market response to accounting earnings announcements, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 11, No. 23, pp. 117141.
(10) Jensen, M.(?) and Murphy, K.(?) 1990. Performance pay and top-management incentives,
Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, o. 2, pp. 225264.
12. (9) Kothari, S.P.(*) and Sloan, R.G.(*) 1992. Information in prices about future earnings: Implications for earnings response
coecients, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 15, No. 23, pp. 143171.
(9) Sloan, R.G.(*) 1993. Accounting earnings and top executive compensation,
(9) Demski, J.(*) and Feltham, G.(*) 1994. Market response to nancial reports,
(9) Kormendi, R.(?) and Lipe, R.(*) 1987. Earnings innovations, earnings persistence, and stock returns,
Journal of Business, Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 323345.
(9) Weisbach, M.S.(?) 1988. Outside directors and CEO turnover, Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 20, pp. 431460.
17. (8) Murphy, K.J.(?) 1985. Corporate performance and managerial remuneration: An empirical analysis,
(8) Freeman, R.N.(*) 1987. The association between accounting earnings and security
returns for large and small rms, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 195228.
(8) Angelo, L.(*) 1988. Managerial competition, information costs, and corporate governance:
The use of accounting performance measures in proxy contests, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Vol. 10, pp. 336.
(8) Easton, P.F.(*), Harris, T.S.(*) and Ohlson, J.S.(*) 1992. Aggregate accounting earnings
can explain most of security returns: The case of long return intervals,
(8) Antle, R.(*) and Smith, A.(*) 1986. An empirical investigation of the relative
performance evaluation of corporate executives, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 139.
(8) Banker, R.D. and Datar, S.M.(*) 1989. Sensitivity, precision, and linear aggregation of signals in performance evaluation,
(8) Lev, B.(*) 1989. On the usefulness of earnings research: Lessons and directions from two
decades of empirical research, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 153192.
(8) Ball, R.(*) and Watts, R.(*) 1972. Some time series properties of accounting income,
Journal of Finance, Vol. 27. No. 3, pp. 663682.
Panel D: Accounting, Organizations and Society
1. (21) Hopwood, A.(*) 1987. The archeology of accounting systems, Accounting,
Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 207234.
2. (20) Burchell, S.(?), Clubb, C.(?), Hopwood, A.(*), Hughes, J.(?) and Nahapiet, J.(?) 1980.
The role of accounting in organizations and society, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 527.
3. (16) Miller, P. and OLeary, T. 1987. Accounting and the construction of the governable person,
Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 235265.
4. (13) Burchell, S.(?), Clubb, C.(?), and Hopwood, A.(*) 1985. Accounting and its social context:
Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom, Accounting, Organizations and Society,
Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 381413.
5. (12) DiMaggio, P.J.(?) and Powell, W.W.(?) 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism
and collective rationality in organizational elds, American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, 147160.
6. (11) Meyer, J.W.(?) and Rowan, B.(?) 1977. Institutionalized organizations:
Formal structure as myth and ceremony, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 83, No. 2, pp. 340363.
(11) Loft, A.(?) 1986. Towards a critical understanding of accounting:
The case of cost accounting in the UK, 19141924, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 137169.
(11) Lehman, C. and Tinker, T. 1987. The real cultural signicance of accounts,
(11) Miller, P. and Rose, N.(?) 1990. Governing the economy, Economy and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 130.
10. (10) Meyer, J.W.(?) 1986. Social environments and organizational accounting,
(10) Wilmott, H.(?) 1986. Organizing the profession: A theoretical and historical examination of the development of the
major accounting bodies in the UK, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 555580.
However, only one of them authored an article
without an elite co-author. For the 39 articles cited
(excluding common cites among the four journals),
38 (97.4%) had at least one elite author.
AOS, on the other hand, does not follow the
same pattern as do the three US journals. In terms
of degree schools of authors of the most cited
works, AOS is not dominated by the US elite
schools. Many authors degree schools could not
be ascertained because they are not listed in Has-
selback (2004); this directory is North America
centered for the most part and has very incomplete
information about accounting academics in the
rest of the world. Of the degree schools that could
be identied there were Ph.D.s from British, Cana-
dian, and both US elite and non-elite schools. The
literature cited is also much dierent. Indeed, cita-
tion behavior of the 83 people identied in Table 3
indicates that there are really only two top
accounting journals AOS and a single journal
of which JAR, TAR and JAE comprise the 10 or
so annual issues.
The 83 most prolic publishers during the 1990s
come from roughly three generations. Twenty-one
were persons who received their doctorates before
1980; by the 1990s these individuals were in the
second and third decades (and in a couple of cases
fourth) of their scholarly careers. Forty-three peo-
ple received their doctorates between 1980 and
1989 putting them on average in the middle of
the second decade of their scholarly careers. Nine-
teen of the people received their doctorates in 1990
or later; these are individuals who could be
regarded as very successful in the beginning of
their careers. Table 8, Panels A, B, and C contains
a breakdown of these individuals by time of Ph.D.,
average power index, cluster membership, and
Ph.D. degree school.
The proportions of individuals in clusters 1, 2,
and 3 are nearly the same in Panels A and B, but
in Panel C there is a slight decrease in the propor-
tion of cluster 3s and an increase in cluster 2s. In
Panel A, the researchers long in tooth and male,
the proportion that are in cluster 1 is 19%, in clus-
ter 2, 9.5%, and in cluster 3, 71.4%. For the indi-
viduals listed in Panel B, these proportions are
18.6%, 7.0% and 74.4%, respectively; and in Panel
C they are 15.8%, 21.0%, and 63.2%. If we con-
sider the premier journals as a mechanism for allo-
cating intellectual capital needed for creating
academic reputations in accounting, they have
operated fairly consistently over at least three
11. (9) Hoskins, K.W. and Macve, R.H. 1986. Accounting and the examination: Archeology of disciplinary power, Accounting,
Organizations and Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 105136.
(9) Armstrong, P.(?) 1987. The rise of accounting controls in British capitalist enterprises,
(9) Birnberg, J.G.(*) and Snodgrass, C.(?) 1988. Culture and control: A eld study,
(9) Brownell, P.(*) 1982. The role of accounting data in performance evaluation, budgetary participation, and organizational
eectiveness, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 1227.
15. (8) Puxty, A.G., Willmott, H.C.(?), Cooper, D.J. and Lowe, T.(?) 1987. Modes of regulation in advanced capitalism: Locating
accounting in four countries, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 273291.
(8) Hines, R.D.(?) 1988. Financial accounting: In communicating reality, we construct reality,
(8) Miller, P. 1991. Accounting innovation beyond the enterprise: Problematizing investment decisions
and programming economic growth in the UK in the 1960s, Accounting, Organizations and Society,
Vol. 16, No. 8, pp. 733762.
(8) Harrison, G.L. 1992. The cross-cultural generalizability of the relation between participation,
budget emphasis and job related attitudes, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 115.
(8) Scott, W.R.(?) 1987. The adolescence of institutional theory, Administrative Science Quarterly,
Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 493511.
(8) Child, J.(?) 1981. Culture, contingency and capitalism in the cross-national study of organizations,
Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 3, pp. 303356.
Table 8
Authors by length of time since receiving Ph.D. (cluster membership based on three cluster solution) (elite-15 schools in italics)
Author Average power index Cluster membership Degree school
Panel A: Ph.D. received before 1980
Cooper 1.57 1 Manchester
Covaleski 0.29 1 Penn State
Dirsmith 0.64 1 Northwestern
Shields 1.32 1 Pittsburgh
Libby 2.08 2 Illinois
Pratt 0.52 2 Indiana
Baiman 3.19 3 Stanford
Beaver 3.17 3 Chicago
Collins, D. 2.19 3 Iowa
Demski 0.64 3 Chicago
Dopuch 3.82 3 Illinois
Elgers 0.14 3 Maryland
Feltham 2.12 3 Berkeley
Gaver, K. 0.77 3 Carnegie Mellon
Hughes 0.96 3 Purdue
Larcker 2.68 3 Kansas
Lev 2.28 3 Chicago
Ohlson 1.79 3 Berkeley
Verrechia 2.58 3 Stanford
Watts 4.00 3 Chicago
Zimmerman 3.38 3 Berkeley
Panel B: Ph.D. received 19801989
Abernathy 0.00 1 LaTrobe
Chow 0.58 1 Oregon
Chua, W.F. 0.35 1 Sheeld
Miller 1.71 1 London
Neu 0.00 1 Queens
Power 0.63 1 Cambridge
Preston 0.56 1 Bath
Robson 0.08 1 Manchester
Bonner 1.42 2 Michigan
Potter 0.00 2 Wisconsin
Trotman 0.94 2 New South Wales
Ali 0.23 3 Columbia
Banker 0.00 3 Harvard
Barth 1.10 3 Stanford
Bartov 0.00 3 Berkeley
Bushman 1.10 3 Minnesota
Clinch 0.00 3 Stanford
Collins, J. 0.59 3 Florida
Cready 0.20 3 Ohio State
Datar 0.40 3 Stanford
DeFond 0.08 3 Washington
Dye 2.15 3 Carnegie Mellon
Francis, Jen. 1.31 3 Cornell
Gaver, J. 0.14 3 Arizona
Hand 0.31 3 Chicago
Harris 0.29 3 Washington
Holthausen 3.65 3 Rochester
Indjejikian 1.29 3 Penn
Kang 0.25 3 MIT
King 0.21 3 Arizona
decades. A substantial majority of the individuals
publishing the most, regardless of generation, do
so within an economic genre. Relative to that of
their economist colleagues, successive generations
of BAR researchers have not gained ground in
establishing their genre as preeminent. Of cluster
2 persons, US journals alone provided sucient
space for ve articles to both persons in Panel A,
one person in Panel B and two persons in Panel
C. The apparent increase in BAR indicated by
the changes in proportions in Panel C, however,
is less signicant than it appears as subsequent
analysis will demonstrate. Were we to believe that
the structure of the US academy made decisions
about genres on the basis of usefulness to advanc-
ing the intellectual development of the eld, then
this apparent proportional stando at the end of
the 1990s indicates that neither appears to be gain-
ing a decided scientic edge. Neither seems to have
persuaded the other of the superiority of its
approach. There seems to be an allocation rule
built into the structure of the academy that histor-
ically has rationed academic reputations in rather
stable proportions.
Table 8 also reects, once again, the structure of
degree school domination of the academic elite.
The proportion of individuals in Panel A with
degrees from one of the elite-15 is 62% (76.5% if
cluster 1, AOS people are excluded). In Panels B
and C the proportions are 53.5% (65.7%) and
Table 8 (continued)
Author Average power index Cluster membership Degree school
Kothari 2.50 3 Iowa
Lundholm 0.54 3 Iowa
Lys 1.72 3 Rochester
McNichols 0.75 3 UCLA
Melumad 0.13 3 Berkeley
Penno 0.83 3 Northwestern
Reichelstein 0.19 3 Northwestern
Shevlin 0.93 3 Stanford
Sivaramakrishnan 0.00 3 Northwestern
Skinner 1.73 3 Rochester
Wang, S.-W. 0.00 3 Michigan
Waymire 0.25 3 Chicago
Wild 0.29 3 Wisconsin
Panel C: Ph.D. received after 1989
Harrison 0.00 1 Macquarie
Ittner 0.50 1 Harvard
Young 0.00 1 Illinois
Kennedy 0.10 2 Duke
Koonce 0.70 2 Illinois
Nelson 1.80 2 Ohio State
Tan, HT 0.00 2 Michigan
Amir 0.00 3 Berkeley
Bloomeld 1.00 3 Michigan
Dechow 0.71 3 Rochester
Gigler 1.13 3 Minnesota
Guenther 0.10 3 Washington
Hemmer 0.50 3 Odense
Kim 0.00 3 Pennsylvania
Lang 0.40 3 Chicago
Maydew 0.29 3 Iowa
Rajan 0.50 3 Carnegie Mellon
Shackelford 1.90 3 Michigan
Sloan 0.75 3 Rochester
73.7% (81.3%), respectively. This degree school
eect is also apparent in the power indices of the
individuals in each cohort. There are two US
BAR people in Panel A, Libby and Pratt. Libby,
with an elite school degree, has a power index of
2.08, Pratt, with a non-elite degree, has an index
of only 0.52. This same phenomenon is evident
for the cluster 3 members as well. Elgers and
Hughes, both successful scholars over long careers
(through 1999 Hughes had published 17 times and
Elgers 10 times), have two of the four lowest indi-
ces of the cluster 3 cohorts that are less than one.
Indeed, the only exception to your-degree-school-
is-your-academic-destiny rule in accounting is
David Larcker. In Panel B every individual in clus-
ters 2 and 3 with a power index of 1.0 or more is a
graduate of an elite-15 school except Indjejikian,
a graduate of Penn (like Northwestern, historically
a non-persistent elite). Of the four persons listed in
Panel C with indexes of 1.0 or higher, all are elite
graduates.
The extent to which power is associated with
genre and degree school is evident when we con-
sider the results presented in Table 9. The columns
in Table 9 indicate average power indexes in incre-
ments of 0.5. In each column are presented the
degree schools and cluster group membership for
each of the 83 individuals falling into each incre-
ment of the power index. As we move from left
to right in the table we move to higher power
indexes.
Obviously, the power indexes are driven by
memberships on the editorial boards of the three
US journals. Since there are many individuals
who have served on more than one US journal edi-
torial board, but few who have served on AOS and
US journal boards, the last column is reective
entirely of US journals. Of the individuals with
the largest power indexes, all but one (Larcker)
are graduates of elite-15 schools and all, save one
(Libby), are economists (cluster 3). Indeed, if we
consider the last three columns, which represent
power indexes of one or greater, 82.8% are gradu-
ates of elite-15. If we eliminate the two cluster 1
persons from this group who are AOS editorial
board members only, the proportion that is elite-
15 graduates is 88.9%. Among the cluster 2 and
cluster 3 persons with a power index of one or
Table 9
Ph.D. degree schools of authors by power indexes (cluster membership in parentheses) (elite-15 schools in italic)
Power index
0 0.49 0.500.99 1.001.49 1.501.99 >2.00
LaTrobe (1) Columbia (3) Oregon (1) Stanford (3) Manchester (1) Stanford (3)
Berkeley (3) Penn St. (1) Florida (3) Michigan (2) London (1) Chicago (3)
Harvard (3) Ohio St. (3) Rochester (3) Minnesota (3) Ohio St. (2) Iowa (3)
Berkeley (3) Stanford (3) Chicago (3) Cornell (3) Berkeley (3) Illinois (3)
Stanford (3) Washington (3) Northwestern (1) Minnesota (3) Michigan (3) Carnegie Mellon (3)
Penn (3) Maryland (3) Harvard (1) Penn (3) Rochester (3) Berkeley (3)
Queens (1) Arizona (3) Duke (2) Michigan (3) Rochester (3) Rochester (3)
Wisconsin (2) Washington (3) Iowa (3) Pittsburgh (1) Iowa (3)
Northwestern (3) Chicago (3) UCLA (3) Kansas (3)
Illinois (1) Washington (3) Cambridge (1) Chicago (3)
Macquerie (1) Odense (3) Indiana (2) Illinois (2)
Michigan (3) MIT (3) Bath (1) Stanford (3)
Michigan (2) Chicago (3) Carnegie Mellon (3) Chicago (3)
Berkeley (3) Rochester (3) Berkeley (3)
Northwestern (3) Carnegie Mellon (3)
Manchester (1) Purdue (3)
Wisconsin (3) Northwestern (3)
Sheeld (1) Stanford (3)
Arizona (3) New South Wales (2)
Chicago (3) Illinois (2)
Iowa (3)
more, only 3 (10.3%) are BAR researchers. Of the
people that have been recently productive and
have become relatively powerful as gatekeepers,
the economic group is nearly seven times more
numerous than the BAR group.
Considering only the US BAR researchers, is
there any indication that an emergent generation
of elite exists that will continue the presence of
BAR research among the genres substantively
dening the eld of accounting? Table 10, Panels
A and B contains the list of BAR researchers
who emerged during the 1990s (Panel A), both in
AOS and the US journals, and the Table 3 data
for just the nine, cluster 2 or US BAR researchers
(Panel B). When we inspect the emergent BAR
scholars in Panel A there are some notable changes
that have occurred. Compared to the 1970s and
1980s, the proportion of emergent BAR scholars
to the total number of emergent scholars drops.
Only six US BAR scholars newly emerged in the
1990s (Libby, Pratt and Trotman emerged earlier),
which is less than a third of the number from the
previous decade. In the 1990s there were 59 schol-
ars who emerged in that decade (itself a decline
from previous periods). Sixteen (27%) are BAR
scholars, compared to 34% for the previous dec-
ade. Even more signicant is that of the 34%
BAR scholars who emerged for the rst time in
the 1980s (see Table 1) only four were exclusively
AOS people, i.e., 21 of the 25 persons (84%) had
published in JAR and TAR, as well. However, of
those 16 BAR scholars who emerged for the rst
Table 10
The 1990s BAR elite
Author Ph.D. school and year Appearances in
JAE JAR TAR AOS
Panel A: Publications by 1990s emergent behavioral elite
Abernathy Latrobe, 89 0 0 0 5
Bonner
a
Chua Sheeld, 83 0 0 0 5
Harrison Macquerie, 90 0 0 0 5
Ittner Harvard, 92 0 3 1 2
Kennedy Duke, 92 0 4 1 0
Koonce
a
P. Miller London, 83 0 1 0 7
Nelson
a
Ohio St., 90 0 1 7 1
Neu Queens, 89 0 0 0 7
Potter
a
Wisconsin, 86 2 1 1 1
Power Cambridge, 84 0 0 0 5
Preston Bath, 82 0 0 0 5
Robson Manchester, 88 0 0 0 5
Tan
a
Young
a
Author Ph.D. school and year Power index
Panel B: Power index for the 1990s cluster two (post-2000 average power index in parentheses)
Bonner
a
Michigan, 88 1.42(1.00)
Trotman New South Wales, 84 0.94(1.00)
Nelson
a
Ohio State, 90 1.80(2.40)
Libby
a
Illinois, 74 2.08(2.40)
Kennedy Duke, 92 0.63(1.60)
Pratt Indiana, 77 0.52(1.00)
Potter
a
Wisconsin, 86 0.00(0.00)
Koonce
a
Illinois, 90 0.70(1.00)
Tan
a
Michigan, 92 0.00(1.40)
a
time in the 1990s, nine were exclusively AOS peo-
ple, i.e., only seven had published in JAR or TAR
(Peter Miller is an AOS elite who is not truly a
member by virtue of his one controversial paper
in JAR). The 1980s saw JAR and TAR help create
an emergent BAR elite of 21 people; in the 1990s
the comparable number was seven (one of these
(Ittner) is a cluster one individual), a decline of
67%. Over half of the 1990s emergent BAR group
is comprised of only AOS publishers.
Six of the Panel B individuals, Bonner, Nelson,
Kennedy, Potter, Koonce, and Tan are the 1990s
newly emergent US BAR researchers. Five have
average power indexes greater than 0.5, post-
2000. They might be considered the next genera-
tion of elite BAR researchers not exclusively
AOS. However, three of these individuals were
co-authors with Robert Libby, the only US BAR
researcher among the 83 individuals with an aver-
age index greater than 2.0.
23
Two of the three US
BAR researchers who have not co-authored with
Libby have still managed to establish a presence
in the BAR editorial process.
24
The post-2000
average power index appears in parentheses for
all persons in Panel B of Table 10. With the excep-
tion of Potter, all of the 1990s US BAR scholars
are still active in the editorial process at AOS,
TAR, or both. However, 19 US BAR people
who emerged in the 1980s were members of the
TAR board; for the 1990s emergent persons, the
comparable number is only four. We cannot say
whether, at this point, the dramatic drop in the
presence of BAR persons at the major US journals
signals a continuing trend toward the eventual
disappearance of BAR in the US in any guise
other than experimental economics or behavioral
nance. The inexorable domination of the US
academy by the neoclassical ideologues is proving
itself out since the creation of JAR in the 1960s.
None of the rising BAR scholars serves on the
JAR editorial board by 2005. In fact, the JAR edi-
torial board at the beginning of 2005 contains
none of the BAR elite who emerged over the last
37 years. Only Robert Bloomeld on the current
JAR board indicates behavioral as an area of
interest in the Hasselback (2004) Directory and
then only fourth in a list of four interests. Bloom-
eld, though a co-author with Robert Libby, is a
member of cluster 3, the economics cluster. This
is because his behavioral work is behavioral eco-
nomics whose source literature is economics.
Increasingly, acceptable BAR research in the US
is that version that passes the assumptions and val-
ues test of neoclassical economics. By contrast, six
of the 12 cluster 3 rising scholars had served on
JARs editorial board by the end of 2000; by the
beginning of 2005 that number had grown to
nine.
25
Given JARs inuence on the academic
agenda in the US, the absence of any BAR pres-
ence there in the future does not bode well for
the extent to which BAR researchers will be able
to establish credentials to be members of an aca-
23
There is a signicant degree of interconnectedness among
the 83 persons identied in this study. Co-authoring is
extensive. Among the 83, one group consists of 38 people
who are connected through relationships their co-authors have
with others in the group. These 38 individuals comprise 62% of
the economics cluster 3. Of the individuals who were not
connected to the others through co-authors (17 persons) during
the study period only three had power indexes greater than one,
i.e., Francis (Jennifer), Miller, and Skinner. The elite school
dominance is evident among this group, as well. The 38
aliated cluster 3 persons have all published ve or more
articles in the top journals and they have co-authored them with
their peers. However, among this group of equals the average
power index for elite school graduates is 1.5, but for the non-
elite graduates it is only 0.7 (.49 if Larcker is excluded). For the
cluster 3 individuals not aliated with the 38 average power
indexes are: elite grad = 0.9; non-elite grad = 0.3. Even among
equally successful scholars, an elite school degree gives one a
decided edge in achieving academic power, further indication of
the sponsored mobility character of the US academy (Turner,
1960).
24
Libby is the only BAR person who emerges from our study
that also appeared in Browns (1996) list of 123 most cited
accounting authors.
25
The 12 cluster 3 individuals (see Table 8, Panels B and C)
are: Barth, Bloomeld, Bushman, Dye, Francis (Jennifer),
Gigler, Holthausen, Indejejikian, Kothari, Lys, Shackelford,
and Skinner.
demic elite.
26
Persons may still be able to publish
BAR work sucient to secure their personal
careers, but the trends leave little room for san-
guinity for BAR as a shaper of the intellectual
agenda for accounting, at least in the US. Just as
neoclassical economics has aggressively pursued
the colonization of the other social sciences
(Abbott, 2001) with some considerable success,
so it appears in microcosm to be occurring in
accounting (Reiter, 1998).
27
Academic success,
particularly in the US, is better characterized as
sponsored mobility, the diminishing number of
US BAR elite means diminished numbers of spon-
sors. Of the current US BAR elite, the migration
to AOS as the principal base seems apparent. US
elite that were formerly a presence in US journals,
e.g., Chow, Shields, Libby, Solomon, are now
(2005) members of only the AOS editorial board.
Libby, whose average power index increased
post-2000, did so by virtue of his becoming an
associate editor at AOS. AOS appears to be an
increasingly critical publication outlet for perpetu-
ating US BAR and creating a US BAR elite. With
its status as an elite journal, AOS is increasingly
important for sustaining non-economic discourses
within the elite US accounting academic commu-
nity. For example, the AOS editorial board at
the start of 2005 contained 16 persons listed in
Table 3; three hold the position of associate editor.
Members from all three disciplinary clusters are
represented: nine from cluster 1, four from cluster
2, and three from cluster 3. Also, four BAR indi-
viduals who emerged in prior decades, but were
not among the 1990s group of prolic scholars
(including Jacob Birnberg) are included on the
board. On the TAR board 19 individuals from
Table 3 are members of the editorial board at
the beginning of 2005. Fourteen (including the edi-
tor and two senior editors) are cluster 3 members,
ve (one a senior editor) are cluster 2 members,
and only one is a cluster 1 individual. The cluster
2 person who is a senior editor is, perhaps omi-
nously, the only non-elite graduate of the senior
editorial group. We say ominously because non-
elite graduates have never been aorded any signif-
icant power to shape the US academys agenda, at
least in the modern era. Seventeen (all cluster 3
members) are members of the JAR board at the
beginning of 2005. The same number, 17 (includ-
ing four editors), and all cluster 3 members, are
on the JAE board at the start of 2005. Thus, of
all the editorial boards, AOS has the most intellec-
tual diversity and the greatest representation of
BAR elite.
Concluding observations
In this paper we attempted to establish as a rea-
son to be concerned about the issue we investigate
is that the history of BAR acts in a manner analo-
gous to the canary in the coal mine. How an aca-
demic discipline is organized determines whether
its procession through time leads it to be progres-
sive or whether it simply stagnates. There are cer-
tainly reasons to question whether the research
enterprise in the US has been very useful. In light
of the recent reporting and auditing failures (e.g.,
Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, etc.) it is not frivo-
lous to question whether accounting has made
any progress at all as a scholarly discipline. After
35 years of extensive nancial reporting research,
26
The rather substantial change in the BAR presence on the
JAR board that has occurred over a short period of time is
consistent with our earlier analysis of the political origins of the
dominance of orthodox economics in accounting. The decision
to eliminate a signicant BAR presence from the JAR board
simply cannot be a decision made on the basis of scientic
criteria. No discernible scientic breakthrough during the 90s
occurred that suggests that a journal that promoted BAR
should remove from its board every elite BAR scholar. That
decision is a political decision; the decision criteria are
ideological, not scientic. The ascendance of EMH and Agency
theory to the dominant place they occupy in the academy was
not accomplished by dint of their superior power as explainers
of the world, but by the shrewd (and continuing) use of political
power to sustain that preeminence.
27
Walsh, Weber, and Margolis (2003, p. 872) document the
same colonization of management studies by neoclassical
economics, i.e., Since the 1970s, research on management
and organizations has shown an increasing trend to augment
the reliance upon the disciplines of psychology and sociology
with a focus on economics. Economics was slower to take hold
as a disciplinary base for organizational scholarship but it has
risen precipitously since the late 1970s. This illustrates the oft-
noted importance of political context on the form and content
of science (Feyerabend, 1987; Midgley, 1992; Toulmin, 1990).
The rise of conservative politics during the 1970s has aected all
business disciplines.
nancial reporting is no better and the case could
be made that it is worse than it was before all of
this research eort started (see, e.g., Ijiri, 2005;
McIntosh, Shearer, Thornton, & Welker, 2000;
Watts, 2006). Early in this paper we discussed
the general failure of the natural science model
to work in the social sciences. Adopting the ortho-
dox models of economics certainly has not
increased accountants ability to predict conse-
quences of accounting actions. There are good his-
torical reasons for believing accountants never will
have the power over their world that the predictive
success of the natural sciences gives over the natu-
ral world. However, the value of the various social
sciences lies primarily in their value as competing
discourses that give social studies a rigorous
multivocality.
Ideally the organization of the accounting acad-
emy is primarily important for the intellectual
development of the profession of accounting, not
for the success of scholars. Well organized disci-
plines (Longino, 1990) link individual scholars
successes to the success of the discipline. Progres-
sive disciplines are those in which success of indi-
vidual scholars is linked directly to methodological
improvements in the discipline. Progressive dis-
ciplines are not organized simply and purely as a
reputation system. The practice nature of account-
ing as an activity particularly recommends against
univocality in how we understand it. Our evidence
indicates the continuing narrowing of accounting
scholarship in the US to a single-minded focus
on the issue of informing the trader investigated
as a standard problem in neoclassical economics.
In the US BAR has historically served as the
other voice to that of orthodox economics. As psy-
chology, sociology, social psychology, political sci-
ence, etc. served as alternative discourses for
speaking about accounting, BAR, even though
limited to positive social science, brought some
possibility for multi-vocal understandings of the
practice. These various social sciences as our ear-
lier quote from Brown (1989, p. 4) indicated pro-
vide the vocabularies we in the academic
community use to discuss the problems and their
potential solutions of a modern society. However,
the results of our paper show that the decibel levels
of even the limited alternative voices in the US that
existed are being turned down by the increas-
ingly louder monologue of orthodox economics.
The capacity of BAR to substantively contrib-
ute to dening accounting and problematizing
the accounting eld has withered considerably
since the early enthusiasm for the contributions
psychology and organizational sociology could
make to our understanding of accounting. In the
Dyckman (1998) article referenced in the introduc-
tion to this paper a number of notable behavioral
researchers were listed as indication that BAR is
alive and well. But we have noted in this paper
that, with, perhaps, the exception of Robert Libby,
none of those individuals Dyckman identied are
sponsoring a new generation of elite BAR
researchers.
What we observed about the structure of the
accounting academy is consistent with previous
studies. The elite of the US academy is dominated
by graduates of an elite set of schools who have
demonstrated agility in employing the methods
of economics and monetarist nance. BAR as a
major dialect spoken among the US accounting
academic elite is diminishing in signicance
(thanks to AOS and other newer journals, such
is not the case in the rest of the world). Even
though there is considerable interest in behavioral
research evidenced by the ABO section of the
American Accounting Association and the crea-
tion of its journal dedicated to behavioral
research, that interest is not reected in the US
elite. Even the limited potentiality for understand-
ing accounting that inheres in BAR has been win-
nowed away.
The consequences of the increasing hegemony
of neoclassical thought in accounting are some-
thing to which accounting scholars in the US have
paid little attention. However, in the management
literature there have appeared recently some nota-
ble calls for serious consideration to be given to
the damage to management practice that has been
wrought by the neoclassicist hegemony. Ghoshal
(2005, p. 86), noting that, Nothing is as danger-
ous as a bad theory, attributes the bad manage-
ment practices that led to the recent spate of
corporate scandals to the conquest of the business
academy by the Chicago ideologues. As he
admonishes:
In essence, social scientists carry an even
greater social and moral responsibility than
those who work in the physical sciences
because, if they hide ideology in the pretense
of science, they can cause much more harm.
My contention here is that this is precisely
what business school academics have done
over the last 30 years (Ghoshal, 2005, p.
87).
28
Our results are consistent with Ghoshals time
frame the ascendance of neoclassicist dominance
over accounting in the US corresponds with resur-
gence of the conservative, free-market political
movement and the dominance of JAR in the estab-
lishment of scholarly standards in the US. Under
the guise of positive science, i.e., explaining
not prescribing, the neoclassicists have succeeded
in US accounting just as Ghoshal notes they have
in other business disciplines. The persistently
increasing dominance through time of the neoclas-
sicists, in the absence of any demonstrable ability
to explain, is testament to their ideological power
(Tinker, Merino, & Neimark, 1982).
29
In a recent issue of Accounting Horizons a group
of the accounting scholarly elite (notably not
including any BAR scholars) concluded that,
Foundational questions in accounting are far
from settled (Demski, Fellingham, Ijiri, & Sun-
der, 2002, p. 166). The authors call for continued
debates over foundations.
30
Yet as our paper sug-
gests the presence of multiple discourses with
which to carry out such debates have withered
away in the major US journals to be replaced by
a monologue in the language of neoclassical eco-
nomics. The ability to carry out foundational
debates to improve the intellectual integrity of
accounting (and perhaps improve the integrity of
accounting practice) requires a structure that
allows such debates to occur. If accounting is
about controlling behavior, decision-making,
administering social controls (e.g., taxes, securities
regulation), informing citizens about the nancial
behavior of their institutions, etc. then it seems
various behavioral sciences other than just eco-
nomics would share equal billing at the founda-
tional debates. But that is not currently the case.
BAR has increasingly been marginalized; to speak
of humans as beings other than idealized economic
ones appears to have been greatly discredited
within the academy as evidenced by the diminish-
ing opportunities for BAR scholars to join the aca-
demic elite. Tim Fogartys (2000) observation that
BAR researchers are second class citizens in the
US is reected in the results of our study. Given
the current status of the profession that the US
academy has served, there certainly seems to be a
serious need to vigorously debate foundational
assumptions with as much intellectual ammunition
as one can muster.
28
How these Chicago values that Ghoshal refers to have
impoverished the ethical capabilities of accounting have been
noted by, e.g., Shearer (2002) and Williams (2000). How
economics has been similarly impoverished is discussed by Sen
(1987).
29
Recently the Harvard Business Review published an article
by Bennis and OToole (2005) expressing sentiments similar to
Ghoshal. In short order, July 2005, two months after publica-
tion of the HBR article, a rebuttal by accounting elites
(DeAngelo, DeAngelo, & Zimmerman, 2005) claiming the real
problem with business schools wasnt them but competition for
media rankings. Their solution to substandard management
education is, of course, to divert more resources to the
production of even more neoclassical inspired research.
30
To be fruitful such debates must be far ranging and consider
the reasons for the call for debate in the rst place. When the
elites call for a debate about foundations that they built one
may be excused for their suspicions:
Deeply mistrustful of the dogmas of epistemology,
I loved to look now out of this window, now out of that;
I guarded against settling down with any of these
dogmas, considered them harmful and nally: is it
likely that a tool is able (emphasis in original) to criticize
its own tness? What I noticed was rather that no
epistemological skepticism or dogmatism had ever arisen
free from ulterior motives that it acquires a value of the
second rank as soon as one has considered what it was
that compelled (emphasis in original) the adoption of this
point of view (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 221).
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The Winnowing Away of Behavioral Accounting Research in The US The Process For Anointing Academic Elites 2006 Accounting, Organizations and Society

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The Winnowing Away of Behavioral Accounting Research in The US The Process For Anointing Academic Elites 2006 Accounting, Organizations and Society

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The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research

in the US: The process for anointing academic elites

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