Accounting Research And The Public Interest

“The public interest” is a phrase that we, as accounting researchers, associate with accounting almost by reflex. When we talk about accounting and society, the normative imperative creeps in, and we find it quite natural to insist that accounting ought to serve the public interest. This predisposition is reinforced by the traditional claims of the accounting profession to protect the public interest, and by the neoclassical microeconomic theories that underpin so much accounting research, which deem accounting to aid in social welfare maximization by providing transparent, reliable information to investors. Accounting research that problematizes the notion of the public interest is rare, however. Researchers seldom directly address what is meant by “public interest”, or question how accounting is connected to it. Mainstream researchers, by virtue of their microeconomic models, tend to assume a unidirectional relationship between accounting and the public interest, wherein “better” accounting (i.e. more representationally faithful, more reliable, more timely, more comparable, and so forth) makes for greater social welfare. Even critical researchers frequently accept this one-way relationship, albeit they usually contend that the relationship is impaired. To move beyond this consensus, and open up “public interest” research, it is helpful to consider accounting and the public interest as being mutually constitutive (cf. Neu, forthcoming). Accounting does not serve the public interest so much as generate a peculiar and hyperreal version of it. And this peculiar “public interest” in turn demands and generates the accounting that it requires. How this happens is an empirical question. It is to stimulate research into this empirical realm, to open up lines of enquiry into the mechanisms and sustaining myths that connect accounting and the public interest, that this special issue has been assembled. The recent recurrence of accounting crises has fanned the flames of interest in the public interest, leading to a popular concern for the role of the profession and calls for better regulation. This has created an interesting puzzle. While the public outcry regarding Enron and WorldCom can scarcely be overstated, and while many accounting researchers have at least toyed with the idea of producing something apropos, the market for accounting research has not been as conducive to public interest research as one might expect. The number of articles using the phrase “public interest” in leading accounting journals, this one included, has not increased significantly since Enron[1]. The reasons for this have to do, we suggest, primarily with the institutionalized nature of the market for accounting research. On the “supply” side, academic careers are built around particular research approaches and painstakingly acquired expertise/habitus, wedded to mid- and long-range research programs.