Firm or Faculty? Evidence on Characteristics of German-speaking Accounting PhD Students and their Career Preferences

Abstract

In this paper we focus on the choice that accounting doctoral students from the German-speaking area make, between a future career either in academia or business practice. Based on the results of an online survey, we show that prospective scholars exhibit certain characteristics of passionate researchers more pronouncedly than do future practitioners. The latter group, however, shows more interest in considering practical concerns in their research for the PhD. Furthermore, we show that the impact of institutional incentives is more widespread among future academics. Some implications are drawn for the relationship between research and practice and the future of the accounting academy.

Keywords:

• Accounting research
• accounting careers
• incentive mechanisms
• PhD students

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Michael Lorenz for his valuable assistance in constructing the survey and Christian Drefahl and Johanna Riedner for their help in collecting the contact details of doctoral students. Furthermore, we are grateful to all participants in the pre-tests and the final survey. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for helpful comments and suggestions. Christoph Pelger gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the German National Academic Foundation.

Notes

This paper was edited and accepted by Richard M. S. Wilson.

An example for analytical research would be that different concepts of value-based management (VBM) are compared by looking at the fulfilment of different criteria (e.g. objectivity, incentive compatibility). This analysis can either be conducted by using an analytical model or by using conceptual arguments. In contrast, empirical research would, for example, look at how many companies use each of the different VBM concepts and try to reveal factors that might explain the respective use (e.g. by conducting interviews or using a survey).

The JOURQUAL2 ranking is the second version (2008) of a ranking which was established by the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB) in 2004 (Eisend, 2011). The ranking is based on a survey of German-speaking business professors and assistant professors who are members of the Association, while several adjustments based on the researchers' specific publication activities were carried out. For details on the development of JOURQUAL2 see Schrader and Hennig-Thurau (2009). A point worth stressing is that JOURQUAL has a quasi-authoritative status due to its publication by the German association of business professors (Kieser, 2010; for similar concerns regarding the UK Association of Business Schools' (ABS) list, see Hussain, 2011; Willmott, 2011).

It is important to note that there are German-speaking general management journals that regularly publish accounting papers. In times of diverse publication channels, including monographs or contributions to a Festschrift, the limited space offered by these journals for each business subdiscipline was sufficient. However, in the new era with an explicit focus on journal publications, there is little room for each discipline in the journals: for example, Lohmann (2012) shows for the Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft that about 10% of the papers published there in 2010 were concerned with financial accounting and 5% with management accounting topics.

The following German keywords were used to identify the departments: ‘Rechnungswesen’, ‘Rechnungslegung’, ‘Wirtschaftsprüfung’, ‘Unternehmensrechnung’, ‘Corporate Governance’, and ‘Controlling’.

The questionnaire included about 60 questions concerned with a wide range of topics, for example related to working conditions, PhD supervision, familiarity with and perceptions of a range of accounting journals, research attitudes and interests as well as methods, conditions and outcomes of the respondents' research. A summary of the instruments used for the subsequent analysis of this paper can be found in the Appendix.

While we call it the German variant, it is clear that this double role of the PhD for academia or practice is also present in other Continental European countries (Djelic, 2008). However, it is clearly opposed to the US approach, where doctoral students in almost every case subscribe to an academic career (Beyer et al., 2010).

In contrast, normative research in the international settings, in particular in the USA (Oler, Oler and Skousen, 2010) and the UK (Rutherford, 2010) is non-existent, which is indicative of a different lack of research diversity than the one observable in German-speaking countries.