Positivism and “alternative” accounting research

POSITIVISM OR NON-POSITIVISM - TERTIUM NON DATUR A Critique of Ontological Syncretism in IS Research

This paper revisits the debate between positivism and its alternatives in the field of information systems from a philosophical point of view. It will argue that the heart of the debate is the ontological difference between the views of reality as observer-independent versus observer-dependent. The logical axiom of the excluded third (tertium non datur) informs us that two contradictory options...

Positivism and realism pdf

Accounting, Organizing, and Economizing: Connecting Accounting Research and Organization Theory

This paper encourages scholars of management to pay attention to the mutually constitutive nature of accounting, organizing, and economizing. This means viewing accounting as much more than an instrumental and purely technical activity. We identify four key roles of accounting: first, territorializing, the recursive construction of the calculable spaces that actors inhabit within organizations ...

Large shareholders and accounting research

Large shareholders are a potentially very important element of firms’ corporate governance system. Whereas analytical research is typically vague on who these large shareholders are, in practice there are important variations in the types of large owners (and the different types of large owners could play very different governance roles). After briefly reviewing the standard agency cost argumen...

Classicism, Positivism and Social Defense