Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management :       the Emerging Agenda

Lee D. Parker

University of Adelaide, Australia

Abstract   Contemporary interdisciplinary research in accounting and more recently, management, is increasingly employing qualitative research methodologies. This paper examines the unique features and relevance of qualitative research and addresses its critics. A select group of methodologies are examined with respect to their utility for and approach to accounting and management research questions. The features of historical research, field based case study, ethnography, grounded theory, and action research are considered with reference to contemporary accounting and management research and the development of the qualitative research agenda is advocated.

Qualitative research (QR) has experienced an upsurge in the accounting and management (A&M) fields of inquiry in the recent past. It has increasingly found favour with researchers as an adjunct to quantitative empirical research and more importantly as a research approach in its own right. Conferences are increasingly including or specialising in QR and more journal editors are now publishing such studies. Yet it must be said that the majority of A&M researchers remain unacquainted with or resistant to such methodologies. This presents the A&M field with several dilemmas. First, subject areas and avenues of inquiry of potential significance to business, government and society are being virtually neglected. Second, a ‘glass ceiling’ syndrome faces qualitative researchers working or aspiring to work in predominantly positivist academic research environments. Third, an inadequate pool of expertise is available for training doctoral students and emerging new researchers in these methodological traditions.

This paper sets out to offer a fundamental rationale and justification for the expanded application of QR methodologies in A&M research, and argues for its ongoing relevance and development. To these ends, it identifies the unique features and capabilities of QR and positions it in relation to the positivist research paradigm that dominates A&M research. QR’s relevance to contemporary research and policy issues are considered, particularly through an evaluation of the potential of selected QR methodologies with reference to the A&M domains. The selected qualitative methodologies of historical research, field based case study, ethnography, grounded theory, and action research are considered as examples of developing and emerging research traditions in contemporary A&M research literature and the development of the QR agenda is advanced.

Defining Qualitative Research

QR involves the study of subjects in their natural settings whereby the researcher conducts a systematic enquiry into meanings, attempting to interpret and make sense of phenomena and the meanings that people attribute to them (Shank, 2002). So QR studies a situated world, considering phenomena in their specific macro and micro, social, institutional, political, economic and technological contexts. The qualitative researcher is particularly focussed upon understanding process and context and employs a variety of methods in an attempt to interpret and understand the world. These include interviews, observations, field notes, memos, recordings, transcriptions, document copies, historical texts, photographs, artefacts, etc. These offer multiple perspectives of the world, all of which incrementally add to our understanding of its operation and its implicit meanings (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000).

So QR is most often carried out via the researcher engaging directly in intense, prolonged contact and experience in the field amidst ‘live’ situations that make up the everyday activities and processes of people and organisations. Whatever the object of study, it is investigated from a holistic viewpoint in order to access activities, events and relationships in their whole context. Many of the methods employed attempt to capture the perceptions and understandings of the actors ‘from the inside’ so as to better understand how they make sense of, act in and manage their daily work and situations (Miles and Huberman, 1994).

Thus QR is inherently multi-method. It tries to obtain an in-depth understanding of phenomena, recognising that an existential objective reality cannot be captured. Instead, in penetrating and articulating multiple constructed realities of actors and researchers, the qualitative researcher employs multiple methods in pursuit of complexity, depth, richness and rigour. Observation, conversation, participation and interpretation form the fundamental diet. These may be applied to the tasks of exploration of phenomena hitherto ignored or neglected, interpretation of phenomena that have not been well understood, or explanation of phenomena in terms of context, process and outcomes. The researcher may adopt a particular meta-theory or paradigm to inform their investigation, or abjure pre-commitment to any one particular meta-theory or paradigm. So in pursuit of processual understanding of the meanings underlying beliefs and practices, QR embraces complexity, uncertainty, context, rich/thick description, and a range of approaches to analysis. All of these are oriented towards the pursuit  of meaning (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000; Shank, 2002).

A Case of Resistance and Neglect

In the A&M disciplines, as in other disciplinary fields, QR has been criticised, rejected or ignored for a variety of reasons:

1. That it is akin to ‘soft science’ or journalism.
2. That it is simply ‘humanism’ in disguise.
3. That it is ‘unscientific’ and ‘subjective’.

4. That it breaks the ‘value free’ assumptions of scientific research.

5. That it cannot produce verifiable truth statements.

6. That it cannot produce statistically generaliseable findings.

7. That it lacks rigour.

(Denzin and Lincoln, 2000; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995; Yin, 1989)

All of these criticisms spring fundamentally from a lack of familiarity with and awareness of the methodological philosophies and principles that inform the methods employed. Labels such as applied in 1. and 2. above are arbitrary and ill-informed classifications that serve no productive purpose for researcher or critic. They are best answered by the qualitative researcher’s ability to apply, justify and articulate the appropriateness of their choice of informing methodologies and methods employed.

The accusation of subjectivity presumes that the world can be entirely conceived and explained as an existential reality which exists independently of the observer and is restricted to a tangible world of things that can be seen, touched and measured. Instead, the qualitative researcher recognises and investigates a world of intangible relationships, meanings, understandings and interpretations that are complex, multidimensional and cannot exist independently of actors and researchers.

Quantitative researchers are trained to believe that they are neutral value free agents, independent of their research subjects and research data. Hence they critique QR as relying so heavily upon researcher engagement with or involvement in research sites, that they cannot produce valid, reliable findings that are value free. The qualitative researcher response is to assert that no researcher is value free. All researchers bring to their research objectives, research question framing, project scope definition, survey questionnaire design and interpretation of results a whole raft of values: their prior education, their disciplinary focus, their understanding of the literature relating to the topic, and the paradigm within which they have located themselves. Recognising these inevitable researcher involvements, the qualitative researcher deliberately pursues direct reflexive engagement with actors, field sites and data as a means for penetrating latent meanings and agendas that underlie manifest observed practices and behaviours.

The criticism that QR cannot produce verifiable truth statements and statistically generalisable findings misses the point of QR entirely. QR aims at theoretical generalisability in the sense that the researcher seeks to identify and penetrate, understand and articulate narratives, concepts and relationships in their oftentimes unique contextualised settings. Theoretical depth, richness and uniqueness are objectives sought and valued. Difference is valued as highly as similarity. The meaning of the experience being studied and its potential theorisation is at the heart of the qualitative researcher’s concern. Researchers and readers to compare these new insights with meanings they have previously encountered on a case by case basis and thereby incrementally modify or add to their prior stock of meanings.

The critique of lack of rigour reflects critics’ lack of acquaintance with the fundamental methods employed within the various methodological traditions of QR. The more structured qualitative methodologies have their own equivalents to positivist method concerns such as validity, reliability, triangulation. The less structured qualitative methodologies reject many of the positivist’s constructions of what constitutes rigour, favouring instead the flexibility, creativity and otherwise inaccessible insights afforded by alternative routes of inquiry that embrace storytelling, recollection, and dialogue.

So a legacy of the modernist era when A&M academics sought to emulate the methods and status of the natural sciences, is an uninformed critique or simple ignorance of the objectives, traditions and rationales for QR. This is reflected in the dominance of research literature by studies constructed in a positivist paradigm, the minority of research journals treating QR as part of their mainstream publishing output, and the lack of dedicated QR methods courses available to postgraduate research students in the A&M disciplines. This scenario is fortunately, slowly changing.

Naturalism or Positivism?

A brief reflection on the fundamental differences between naturalistic QR and positivist quantitative research highlights the particular claims to a place in the sun for qualitative researchers. Quantitative research focuses upon the measurement of causal relationships between variables with a view to building models that can predict outcomes. It is concerned with measuring and establishing quantity, amount, frequency, and intensity. QR focuses upon processes of social experience, seeking to understand how people experience and create meaning within processes. This is often induced from relationships developed between the researcher and the researched within specific situational contexts (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000).

Positivists aim to test deductively derived theories through the selection and control of relevant variables, comparing what ‘should’ occur with what does occur in terms of theory–neutral ‘facts’, thereby producing conclusively valid knowledge. They seek to establish laws of behaviour. Naturalistic qualitative researchers aim to study the social world as nearly as possible to its natural state and being in close personal contact with the natural setting so that they can observe, describe and interpret what happens in that setting, how it happens, in what contexts and what meanings are imputed by participants. To the qualitative researcher, the dominant concern is the inductive investigation of the phenomenon under study rather than testing a set of prior hypotheses. Laws of behaviour are rejected on the grounds that actors’ behaviour is continually constructed and reconstructed through their changing interpretations of the situations in which they find themselves. Thus the primary concern must be to study and learn their culture or subculture in order to penetrate the conscious and subconscious assumptions and understandings that shape their view of the world and their actions (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000; Flick, 2002; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995).

Qualitative researchers contend that the certainty, independence, neutrality and objectivity prized by positivist researchers, is a mirage. Instead so-called scientific research is permeated and infused with culture, language, stories, symbols, selective perception, cognition, social conventions politics, ideology, and power. This renders complex and uncertain, the relationship between reality (which is socially constructed) and text (the researcher’s attempt at representing that reality) (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000) .

Qualitative researchers claim unique advantages in their research tradition in comparison to the positivist tradition. They assert their ability to more closely access the actor’s individual and small group perceptions, environment and attitudes through direct observation and personal encounter in interview. The quantitative counterparts are restricted to more distant, inferential methods (such as the survey questionnaire). Qualitative researchers also pride themselves in their direct engagement of everyday social life, in turn criticising the quantitative researcher’s propensity to abstract from, model and only study indirectly this natural setting (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000).

Contemporary Relevance

Shank (2002, p.11) argues that the goals of QR are insight, enlightenment and illumination:

 

We are searchers and discoverers and reconcilers of meaning where no meaning has been clearly understood before, and we do not feel that our understanding of meaning is complete until we discover and understand its role in practice and experience.

 

The focus which QR uniquely offers is the investigation of people’s lived experience in naturally occurring events and situations. Its subject areas are studied through data collected directly from the scene of the action. It draws out the detail, richness and texture of  organisational and individual processes, events and relationships over sustained periods of time. QR can go beyond the often simplistic causal models of the quantitative study, to draw out understandings of how and why things happen as they do (Miles and Huberman, 1994).

In stark contrast to the positivist commitment to the neutral, independent, disengaged researcher, QR offers reflexivity as a potentially revealing path to new understandings. The researcher’s own historical and geographical background, and personal commitment to the research project provide rhetorical vigour to the researcher’s account and explicates the particular perspectives and orientations which they have brought to bear in their analysis and conclusions (Gergen and Gergen, 2000).  In addition reflexivity embraces the researcher’s direct communication and interaction with the field and its members as an explicit and valuable part of the process of producing new knowledge: the researcher articulating via field notes, memos and research report their feelings, perceptions, impressions as data alongside all other data collected from the field (Flick, 2002). Thus qualitative researchers to varying degrees surrender themselves to the cultures they study and reflect upon that experience. In addition the researcher recognises and values the consequences of any research, namely that it has the capacity, even by the questions it poses and certainly by its published results, to shape the environment in which, political, professional, organisational and managerial decisions are made (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995).

QR allows researchers to study subject areas in their entirety and to represent their complexity, ambiguity and variability: aspects of professional and organisational life that are often ignored. The qualitative researcher offers the study of the routine everyday process, as well as of the exceptional, unusual event, group, situation, or practice. In this way diversity is recognised and valued. Multiple perspectives and stories are embraced as accumulating understandings of the complex world in which we live, reflecting many differing and changing social and organisational cultures, histories and contexts (Flick, 2002).

We now turn to consider five selected qualitative methodologies, each of which shares some characteristics and concerns in common, but which also offers unique perspectives and approaches to the study of A&M issues. Their respective characteristics, research aims, knowledge generating potential and A&M relevance will be examined.

Rediscovering History

In accounting particularly, historical research has proliferated over recent decades, as researchers discover hitherto unknown roots of contemporary practice, revisit and challenge conventional wisdom concerning beliefs about rationales for accounting principles and measures, investigate issues previously ignored by the accounting profession, and develop foundations for informing future accounting policy choices. So accounting histories are serving utilitarian, intellectual and critical roles for accounting academia and the profession. Contemporary perspectives are set into the perspective of a longer time frame, past-present-future linkages are highlighted, the progressive, regressive and discontinuous features of accounting change are revealed, policy precedents and choices are unearthed, and previously unquestioned assumptions and beliefs are challenged (Carnegie and Napier, 1996; Napier 1989; Parker, 1997, 1999; Previts et al, 1990ab; Tosh 1991).

A&M history can help us to explain the past, and its contribution to our present. It can enhance our understanding of how contemporary attitudes, practices and theories have developed and can illuminate the impacts of events, practices and policies upon organisations, groups and individuals. Instead of simply offering a unitary perspective on policy and practice, it can also offer multiple and at times competing interpretations of that past. In this way, our preconceptions about accounting principles, practice and our profession can be problematised, and new approaches to what has previously been considered settled, can be found (Carnegie and Napier, 1996; Carr, 1961; Hammond and Sikka, 1996; Merino, 1998; Miller et al, 1991; Oldroyd, 1999; Previts et al, 1990a; Southgate, 1996; Young and Mouck, 1996).

Historical A&M researchers have a rich tapestry of available informing methodological traditions from which they can and do draw. These include Rankean historicism, the interdisciplinary Annales school, Marxian historical materialism, the Foucaultian disciplinary perspective, and the postmodern school with its sponsorship of minority group and oral histories. These present opportunities for original archival research and revisiting previous conclusions through new lenses that focus on issues and dimensions previously ignored. Such studies are generating a considerable array of new insights into both accounting’s past and present. A collection of these alternative perspective A&M histories can be found for example in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal’s (Napier and Carnegie, 1996) special issue on “Accounting History into the Twenty-First Century”. Further development opportunities for interdisciplinary A&M history research lie in the application of social, oral and visual history perspectives to contemporary and historical research questions (Collins and Bloom, 1991; Hammond and Sikka, 1996; Harper, 1994; Parker, 1997, 1999; Sharpe, 1991; Tyson, 1996). An exemplar of a recent collection of A&M history in the social history tradition can be found in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal’s (Llewellyn and Walker, 2000) special issue on “Accounting at Home”.

While management historians suffer a relative dearth of forums and outlets for their research, accounting historians can access more than five specialist accounting history conferences and at least one interdisciplinary accounting conference internationally per year, and an array of specialist accounting history and interdisciplinary journals publishing accounting history research. This contemporary research community profile is one of strong networks, vigorous research, and growing scholarly impact.

Field Based Case Study

Field research has been defined by Ferreira and Merchant (1992) as research in which the researcher gathers primary evidence directly through in-depth contact with organisational members (actors) over a longitudinal period of time, focussing on actual tasks and processes in their natural settings, employing an evolving set of multiple methods as field observations proceed, and producing publications that incorporate both analysis and rich descriptions of organisational contexts and practices. Thus phenomena are studied in their actual, on-site context (Adler and Adler, 1994). Events, activities, processes, people, and relationships are all subject to observation and analysis (Neumann, 2003; Silverman, 2000). Such research is often framed as descriptive, exploratory, explanatory, single, collective, comparative, and layered case studies (Stake, 2000; Yin, 1989). The objectives served by such studies may variously include offering hitherto unavailable detailed accounts of organisational practices, generating theory inductively from field data, interpreting and understanding A&M in their socio-economic, institutional and organisational contexts, penetrating the cultural perceptions and understandings of organisational actors and groups, and clarifying prior research contradictions and superficiality (Silverman, 1985; Walker, 1985; Werner and Schoepfle, 1987). Essentially field research offers the prospect of reconstituting and better understanding what we thought we already knew (Parker, 1994).

This form of intensive, close engagement with research sites represents the ‘involved’ tradition whereby researchers personally insert themselves into the world of those who are being studied. Unlike their quantitative, positivist counterparts, the researchers themselves become the data collection and analysis instruments. Major concerns are to distinguish between manifest and latent occurrences, influences and outcomes, to understand situations holistically (as a whole) rather than via simplified abstract models, and to draw closer to experiencing the organisational actors’ world (Lofland and Lofland, 1995). Research methods employed include observation of activities, processes and meetings; unstructured and semi-structured interviews; and documentary and archival research. Researcher site visitation spreads over a lengthy period (minimum 6-12 months). Data analysis is primarily qualitative, most often through narrative analysis or through more formally coding field data for concepts, interrelationships and themes, supported by intensive explanatory/interpretive memo writing and analysis. These approaches thus range from the semi-structured to quite highly structured (Creswell, 1998; Miles and Huberman, 1994).

So field research offers researchers opportunities for richly drawn accounts of organisational practices, deep understanding of actors and their worlds, contextual theorising from field derived research data, mapping of patterns of change over time, and studying issues that are complex and context dependent (Ahrens and Dent, 1998; Dawson, 1997; Ferreira and Merchant, 1992). Instead of statistical generalisation, field based case study aims at theoretical generalisation, developing theories that explain actual observations made and instead of developing simplistic models that provide general predictions of aggregate behaviour, produce theories that explain specific observations in specific contexts (Scapens, 1990).

This generic qualitative methodology embraces an array of research methods. Whether labelled as field research or as case study, these empirical qualitative studies can be found in considerable numbers in the A&M research literatures over the past 20 years. They have been particularly prominent in journals such as Management Accounting Research, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ), and Accounting, Organizations and Society. Much cited methodological papers on the field research method in AAAJ have included McKinnon’s (1998) paper on validity and reliability in field research, and Ferreira and Merchant’s seminal (1992) paper already referred to above. These have been accompanied in AAAJ by a large number of empirical field based case studies covering subject areas such as public sector accountability, social and environmental accounting, management accounting, intellectual capital valuation, accounting standard setting, management control, non-profit organisation and health system financial management.

Ethnography and Participant Observation

Ethnography and its accompanying participant observation method represent the longest standing foundation methodology in the field research tradition. It involves long-term fieldwork whereby the researcher personally observes a group of people and their activities in their natural setting over a lengthy period of time. The primary aim of this type of research is to describe and interpret a cultural group and their cultural system. Ethnography therefore is a form of social phenomenology in which the researcher takes a major interest in penetrating and elucidating the characteristics of a phenomenon (rather than testing hypotheses or formulating formal theory). The roots of this qualitative methodology lie in cultural anthropology studies of primitive cultures by such renowned early 20^th century anthropologists as Malinowski and Mead and University of Chicago sociologists’ adaptation of this approach to studies of cultural groups in the USA (Creswell, 1998; Glesne, 1999; Silverman, 2000).

Ethnographers set out to explore a particular social phenomenon, examining groups of actors’ customs and behaviour patterns. The methodology is typically unstructured, the primary data collection approach being that of participant observation (sometimes supplemented by interviews) by the researcher who becomes immersed in the daily lives and activities of the group being observed. The researcher focusses upon actors’ behaviour, language and interactions, with a view to understanding the meanings that they induce from these. Often this research involves the researcher in examining only a small number of cases, or indeed, only one. Data analysis takes more hermeneutical, discursive, narrative and literary forms than the more formal categorisation and model building approaches characteristic of grounded theory, for instance. Specification of data collection and analysis methods are considered secondary in importance to the researcher’s experience of the research site(s) (Creswell, 1998; Flick, 2002). The most cited and comprehensive guide to ethnographic methodology has been presented from the early 1980s onwards by Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) and Rosen’s (1991) discourse on organisational ethnography has been a major influence in the management field.

Participant observation of organisational groups can take one of three fundamental forms:

 

1. Peripheral member – where the researcher interacts sufficiently with actors to be regarded as an insider but not participating in activities central to group membership.

Active member – where the researcher takes on a more central role in the group and participates in some of its core activities.

Complete member – where the researcher goes native and completely immerses themselves in the group’s activities, goals and experiences.

 

These levels of participant observation allow the ethnographer varying levels of access to actors’ perceptions, decision-making and behaviour, an experience of their context, and an understanding of their weltanschaung, or worldview (Adler and Adler, 1987; Denzin, 1978).

The ethnographer often argues that positivist survey researchers take for granted the very phenomena they should be studying – the organisational processes (rather than simply focussing upon processual outcomes). Positivist A&M researchers often focus upon measuring outcomes without investigating how those outcomes are produced, by what processes, and what meanings are imputed to those processes by organisational actors involved.

Empirical and methodological ethnographic and participant observer studies have been in increasing evidence in recent accounting literature particularly. Methodological debates and discussions have been led by Jönsson and Macintosh (1997) and Dey (2002), while empirical study examples can be found in Dent (1991), Dey (2000), Jacobs and Kemp (2002) and Parker (2003).

Grounded Theory

Grounded theory is a qualitative methodology originally developed for the inductive generation and discovery of theory from collected and analysed field data. It attempts to produce an analytical representation and interpretation of a phenomenon in its contextual surroundings. The methodology was developed by two sociologists, Barney Glaser (1978) and Anselm Strauss (Glaser and Strauss, 1965, 1967, 1968; Strauss, 1987), and added to by Strauss and Corbin (1990, 1998). The aim of the grounded theory researcher is to investigate a phenomenon in the field through systematic analysis of collected field observation notes, interview transcripts, and documents to produce a theoretical representation of the phenomenon, its conditioning influences, its constitution and its outcomes. Rather than commencing with a deductively predetermined theory about a phenomenon and then collecting field data in order to test that theory, the researcher enters the field with a central question regarding a phenomenon or area of study and allows relevant theoretical constructs to inductively emerge from the process of data collection and concurrent iterative data analysis. Ultimately the researcher aims to generate a theory concerning the phenomenon that will have meaning and significance for actors, researchers and readers (Parker and Roffey, 1997).

There have developed divergent approaches to then generation of grounded theory as advanced by Glaser (1978, 1992), later modified by Strauss and Corbin (1990. 1998), and then modified in application by other such as Charmaz (2000). Both the original Glaser and Glaser and Strauss approaches, and the Strauss and Corbin approach share a ‘post-positivist’ leaning in their concern to articulate defensible data analysis processes that pay attention to seeking validity and reliability in positivist terms. Their approaches privilege the data collected, expound technical steps for its analysis and seek verification of induced theoretical concepts and dimensions. Under this regime, incidents or activities are selected for observation and study, and interviewees selected on a theoretical (rather than random) sampling basis, the researcher seeking the data most potentially relevant to developing theory about the phenomenon under study. Data is analysed through a process of  categorising or coding field notes and interview transcripts and writing memos concerning the observed or induced dimensions or characteristics of the “open codes” allocated. These open codes are then re-analysed, aggregated and sorted to produce overarching codes that represent a central phenomenon, its causal conditions, its resulting strategies and outcomes, and any intervening conditions or strategies. The relationships between these axial codes are then portrayed as either a formal theoretical framework or in terms of a theoretical storyline that represents a substantive level theory (Cresswell, 1998; Parker and Roffey, 1997).

Charmaz (2000) points to a more post-modern approach to grounded theory generation in the form of constructivist grounded theory. This recognises the interpretive process of creating social realities that involves both the researcher and the actors being studied. This approach opts for a less objectivist orientation (disavowing a unidimensional external reality) and  less formally structured and more flexible approaches to data analysis that focus more upon experiences and interpreted meanings of researchers and actors. Researcher independence is replaced by active engagement between researcher and actors in a dialectical process of creating meaning.  Thus ‘reality’ is socially constructed through this engagement, causality is only regarded as incomplete and open to revisitation and revision, and findings are presented as concepts and arguments for further exploration and debate, rather than objectively testable models.

Over the past decade in particular, grounded theory informed field studies have begun to emerge in the areas of management accounting and management planning and control in both business and non-profit sectors. Examples include Lightbody’s (2000) study of financial management behaviour in a religious organisation’s administration, Norris’s (2002) study of activity based information usage in the banking sector, Nixon’s (1998) study of research and development performance measurement, and Parker’s (2001, 2002) study of planning and control in a Christian organisation. These provide examples of the variant approaches to analysis and write-up that characterise empirical studies in the grounded theory tradition.

Action Research

Action research or participatory action research involves the conduct of collaborative research by the researcher in co-operation with organisational actors who co-operate on specific projects, diagnosing, designing, implementing and evaluating planned changes in iterative cycles, with a view to improving actors’ and organisations’ processes, equity, and self-determination (Greenwood and Levin, 2000). The origins of action research can be traced to J.L. Moreno, who coined the term and co-research with groups in Vienna in 1913, the educational philosopher John Dewey who advocated practice-based and –tested scientific inquiry in 1929, John Collier who researched the ethnic group relations in 1945. However the acknowledged father of AR, who exercised most influence over subsequent researchers,  was the social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the mid-1940s (Abraham, 1994; Glesne, 1999; Ottosson, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2001).

Lewin called on social scientists to combine theory building with research into practical problems and  conceived action research as requiring researcher and actor group decision-making and commitment to improvement. This involved them in cycling back and forth between ever deepening investigation of the selected problem. In summary, Lewin’s concept of AR involved:

 

1. change experiments on real problems in social systems

iterative cycles of problem identification, planning, acting and evaluating

re-education through changing patterns of thinking and action.

challenging the status quo through group participation.

contributing to basic knowledge in social science and to everyday social action.

 

Lewin advocated that, after the first step, researchers undertake a ‘reconnaissance or fact-finding’ investigation, including evaluating the action that has occurred, learning from this, planning the next action step,  and modifying the overall plan. The next cycle again consists of planning, action and reconnaissance, and evaluation leading to further modification of the overall plan. Thus a spiral of repeated cycles of fact-finding, planning, action and evaluation are set in motion, with each successive cycle bringing the group closer to its goal. In this process, the researcher facilitates actor group deliberations, helps formulate planned change and may collaborate in  implementing organisational change (Abraham, 1994; Argyris, 1997).

So action research aims to forge a more direct link between theory and action, to improve practice, practitioners’ understanding, and the context in which practice occurs, and to involve practitioners in developing problem definitions and implementation success. This methodology can be applied to a wide range of situations and settings including systems improvement, organisational change management, innovation generation, problem solving or theory generation. It often adds to the body of empirical knowledge by gaining access to information often denied to the positivist researcher. However, action research represents a general methodology of involved, co-operative  research rather than a single unified approach to research with an agreed set of specific method steps. Instead it takes a variety of forms and descriptors (eg. ‘participatory action research’, ‘collaborative action research’, ‘co-operative inquiry’). Thus action research may be variously conceived as:

 

1. a continuous process of research and learning through a focus on research, planning, theorising, learning and development.

a process of analysis, fact-finding, conceptualisation, planning, execution, more fact-finding or evaluation and then this same pattern repeated.

identifying questions/problems from practitioners’ perceptions in local practice contexts, building descriptions and theories within the practice context and testing them through intervention experiments. (Coghlan, 2001; Dickens and Watkins, 1999; Heron and Reason, 2001; Kemmis and McTaggart, 2000; Shank, 2002).

 

Examples of action research in the management and accounting domains can be found in Chisholm’s (2001) study of the development of a network organisation from rural local business incubators, Rayman et al’s (1999) project on integrating work and family, Edem and Huxham’s (1996) advocacy of action research in management, Kaplan’s (1998) explanation of innovation action research in management and accounting, and in Seal et al’s (1999) study of management accounting’s role in supply chain management.

Opening up New Frontiers

Contemporary A&M research has been dominated by a positivist research philosophy that has sought testing of inductively derived theory, modelling for predictive power, statistically verifiable and generaliseable findings, and universal laws of behaviour. In various subject areas, this has led to increasingly detailed and sophisticated models of behaviour that have been developed through cycles of deductive theorising, testing of associated literature derived hypotheses through structured questionnaires, the resulting refinement of theoretical models and their further empirical testing and refinement. The risks of this A&M research focus are multiple:

 

1. the cumulative development of statistically tested models of behaviour that to an ever increasing degree fail to reflect the multiple realities of organisational activity.

an obsession with attempting to predict outputs on the basis of artificial models of selected input factors.

descriptions of some generaliseable features of A&M practice outcomes that fail to provide guidance to practitioners concerned with managing the unique aspects of specific cases.

a failure to address issues of understanding organisational processes and their particular contexts

5.  inadequate attention to uniqueness, difference and change in organisational life.

 

In contrast, the emerging QR tradition offers the possibility of redressing these risks and opening up new horizons of A&M knowledge. The qualitative methodologies, of which but a few have been alluded to in this paper, offer:

 

1. pathways to accounting for the socially constructed nature of organisations, management and accounting.

an ability to recognise and incorporate the unique dimensions of national, social, institutional and political culture and context affecting A&M.

opportunities to bridge the gap between deductively derived theories of behaviour and actors’ experienced behaviour in the field.

a penetration of the processual ‘black box’ and an understanding of how and why things happen as they do.

a rediscovery of knowledge concerning change processes and their management.

 

Expanding the QR agenda offers not only new methodological and subject focus possibilities, but affords researchers exciting new opportunities to come out from behind their research desks and to directly and personally engage with organisations, organisational actors, and institutions. In taking on this challenge, A&M researchers are being called to shed the cloak of the neutral, independent, disinterested, remote observer, and to become involved, engaged, activist researchers working at the very ‘coal-face’ of organisational and institutional activity, more directly contributing to the social, business, professional, organisational, and governmental responsibilities for developing practice and policy.

The QR tradition presents itself to A&M neither as a mere adjunct to nor entire replacement for the positivist quantitative tradition. QR methodologies offer the prospect of a more grounded approach to building inductive theories from field investigations of organisations’ and actors’ lived experiences and processes, thereby offering foundations for subsequent potentially generaliseable positivist investigations, or offering avenues of investigating how and why statistically significant associations found in positivist studies actually come about. Such secondary status derived from association with the quantitative tradition is not to be the sole defining role and purpose of the emerging QR tradition in A&M. It offers a major research schema in its own right: the ability to ask and pursue answers to major research questions for which the qualitative approach is uniquely fitted, and the capacity for presenting rich description, deep understanding and theorisation of organisational context, A&M processes, and organisational actors’ world views and constructed meanings. Thus QR offers a distinctive window into A&M’s enactment as social practices in situ (field or historical). Engagement, interpretation, critique and change are roles and initiatives that variously can spring from qualitative researchers’ involvement in research subjects and their reported findings.

What the emergence of QR in the A&M fields offers is a rediscovery of the value and insights that can be derived from oral sources, archival sources, narratives of experience and perception, and studies of the particular, the temporal and the situational. It also heralds the application of multiple alternative theoretical lenses, and multiple methodologies to A&M issues and questions that hitherto have only been examined from a single rational, scientific, existentialist, objectivist perspective. These multiple theoretical lenses through which qualitative researchers examine evidence, text and discourse, and the variety of methodologies and methods upon which they draw for their investigations, offer us the prospect of rediscovering what we thought we already knew, and of incrementally developing our knowledge and understandings from these differing standpoints. In this sense, the qualitative surge represents a recognition of and a response to the multidisciplinary nature of our A&M crafts, and a desire to understand the different ways in which the same practice or policy may be experienced and perceived by different organisational groups and actors, and at different points in time.

From published A&M research studies already cited in this paper, it is self-evident that the era of the qualitative researcher has well and truly arrived. While there still remain large pockets of ignorance and resistance in the hitherto positivist dominated academy, the tide of researcher and publisher interest in the new perspectives and experiences afforded by the qualitative tradition, signals new vistas of investigation, engagement, reflection and discourse amongst the research, practice and policy communities.

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