Accouting Research And Accounting Practice: An Uneasy Relationship

There is anecdotal ovidence o support the assertion that accounting research, or what is alleged to be research, is of litle or no value to the practice of accounting, nor to the development of sccounting as an academic discipline.The problem is not that efforts bave not been made to conduct research, but rather there is a fundamental flaw in the accountingg research process itself. Tricker suggest that suggest that the research process can be understood using two models.One is a set of relationships which forward".That is, a known theory suggest a hypothesis, which is tested trough a accumulation of data.If the hypothesis is provcn to be ruc, it is added to the body of knowledge, enhancing the legitimacy of the underlyingg theory.The second model is intended to provide "feedback That is, thbe real world is observed and a model of it is proposed, based on known thecory.Data is collected and processed, and a model is refined. When the model is consistent with the real world and known theory, it is added to the body of knowledge.These research models depend on the existence of known theory for their usefulness. The central problenm of accounting research is that there is no known theory to use as a reference for creating hypotheses or models to be empirically research.The absence of theory can be seen in education, practices, and the research literature itself.Practitioners, for example, because of their raining and lack of experience with and interest in research tend not o look to research findings to meet their professional needs.Accounting researchers, on the other hand, have created what appears to be a highly advanced research context, which, in effect, in an environnmcnt, dominated by sophisticatcd methodology, rather than theory.he rescarch basicaliy emulates the hard sciences, which makes its pursuit academicalily acceptable, but it lacks substance.This explains the uneasy relatonship between accounting research and accounting practice