Purposeful publishing: concern as methodological responsibility in accounting research

Abstract

Purpose This article addresses how purposeful research can be sustained in academic systems where what matters is increasingly defined through citation counts and journal rankings. It proposes the recovery of purpose through concern. A study's concern is the normative orientation of its contribution. The article shows how authors, reviewers, editors and academic leaders can use concern to examine the purpose of what they publish, evaluate and curate, treating it as a form of methodological responsibility. Design/methodology/approach The argument proceeds through conceptual analysis. Drawing on the work of Adorno, Honneth and Weber, it develops a framework that contrasts three orientations of concern: transformative, emancipatory and disciplinary. Each orientation names a distinct intellectual ambition and a corresponding kind of work a study can perform upon its field. Our concern framework is illustrated through accounting studies that exemplify these orientations in practice. Findings Read through the three orientations, accounting studies can be composed to (1) open new constellations of meaning, (2) widen recognition through emancipatory engagement or (3) contribute to cumulative inquiry by addressing the questions the field treats as worth pursuing or by strengthening the methodologies through which it pursues them. Because social science participates in shaping the realities it studies rather than merely explaining them, what a study is composed to do matters. Its composition allows it to carry a normative orientation into the field. Some studies manage to combine more than one orientation. Studies composed instrumentally, by contrast, satisfy the formal criteria of publication without carrying any clear concern. Originality/value This article offers a methodological response to the rise of instrumentalism in accounting research. Rather than treating instrumentalism only as a consequence of universities' performance management systems, it identifies resources within scholarly practice itself, three orientations of concern, through which researchers can compose work that has direction beyond its publication. The concern framework is available to any accounting scholar regardless of methodological paradigm.