Accounting and Finance

Accounting And Finance



Accounting And Finance

Introduction

The motivation for this paper is to celebrate the wealth of contributions to knowledge in the fields of accounting and finance in 2005 and to explore the international implications of some of the research that has been carried out. My aim in this paper is to review a selection of papers published in 2005, in journals having broad editorial policies that have the potential to attract contributions from any country, and to reflect on how the totality contributes to discovering the 'international' in accounting and finance research. I take the word international' in the literal sense of 'between nations' and 'transcending national limits'.

I use the categories 'parochial' (studies conducted in a particular country by researchers in that country), 'xenophilic' (studies conducted in one country by researchers from another country with a view to encouraging awareness of that country) and 'ethnocentric' (studies conducted in one country by researchers from other countries from the perspective of their home base).1 Such labels are value-laden and might be seen as having negative connotations. However I aim to show that, taken together, such studies provide a basis for wider international comparisons and contrasts. My approach in this paper is not to bemoan but rather to look for synergy in the parochial and ethnocentric, with occasional xenophilia, to form a meta-view of the wider contribution from the collective research output of a single year, 2005, to advance thinking on international comparisons and differences in issues relating to accounting and finance.

My reflections begin with two survey papers, Beattie (2005) and Jones and Roberts (2005), that indicate apparent parochiality in research. Beattie (2005, Table 1) notes a relationship between non-UK data and the home country of non-UK co-authors and concludes that UK researchers appear to be playing a significant role in developing the continental European research community, through co-authorship relationships. Jones and Roberts (2005), investigating 'international publishing patterns' find that the nationality of the authors' institutions matches relatively closely with the nationality of their data sources.

Is there any potential for transcending what might appear to be inward-looking? Hopwood (2005, p. 586) points to the complex hybrids of national and supranational influences observed in accounting itself and in the wider operations of the capital markets, concluding that the political dynamics of change are now much more complex and remain very largely unexplored and not understood.

The journals I chose for this survey are Abacus, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ), Accounting and Business Research (ABR), Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), British Accounting Review (BAR), European Accounting Review (EAR), International Journal of Accounting (IJA) and Journal of Business Finance and Accounting (JBFA). All have broad editorial policies that provide a wide range of subject matter and I enjoy browsing them. In selecting papers for the following discussion I have focused on the data of the papers because without data many research papers would not exist.

Cultural and institutional influences

I have found the idea of an accounting subculture, as set out by Gray (1988), to ...