Struggling Against Like-Minded Conformity in Order to Enliven SEAR: A Call for Passion

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the behavioural and attitudinal issues of scholars within the community of social and environmental accounting research (SEAR) and seeks to stimulate debate by discussing our views on how this scientific community operates. The paper calls for passion and appeals to the emotions of SEAR individuals through a discussion on how to challenge current structures. More specifically, we address like-minded conformity as a threat to the future cohesion and health of SEAR. Thus, instead of blaming solely the Blue Meanies (Gray and Laughlin [2012] use ‘Blue Meanies’ as a metaphor for those factors which invade the world of scholarship, reflection, collegiality and enquiry. These Blue Meanies, which destroy the very essence of scholarship, include numerous modern phenomena, such as performance measurement, career mindedness, journal rankings and citation indexes. [Gray, R., and R. Laughlin. 2012. “It Was 20 Years Ago Today: Sgt. Pepper, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Green Accounting and the Blue Meanies.” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 25 (2): 228–255]), we call for passion and appeal to individual responsibility. Overall, we argue for greater emphasis on the human and passionate elements of research as a way to curb the effects produced by catalysts of conformity. We maintain that this will enhance not only mutual respect and good scientific conversation but also the relevance and innovativeness of SEAR.

Acknowledgements

With passion and respect, we would like to thank the CSEAR community for the enjoyable and lively experience we continue to have with the Social and Environmental Accounting Research, as well as for their contributions, contradictions and the inspiring discussions. In particular, we would like to take this opportunity to thank and pay a modest homage to Professor Rob Gray for his enormous legacy in the field and for showing us the importance of the human and passionate elements of research. Furthermore, we are grateful for the way the editors and the reviewers have received the challenge we have sought to pose in this paper and how they have sought to open up and engage in a broader discussion. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the financial support provided by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (ECO-2009-09937), Junta de Andalucía (SEJ-111) and the Academy of Finland (project 250478).

Notes

¹ We are not suggesting any attempt to articulate the field (Hambrick and Chen2008). Agreeing with Gray, Dillard and Spence (2009), we consider it counterproductive and restrictive for the community's research potentiality.

² Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) argue that gap-spotting is the dominant way of constructing research questions and point to problematisation – challenging of assumptions – as an obvious, although rarely used, alternative for producing critical insights. However, they also maintain that researchers are far more calculative than how they appear in their publications: ‘They may be wolves in sheeps’ clothing in the sense of using gap-spotting as a rhetorical clothing to increase their chances of getting their research published’ (12). Sandberg and Alvesson maintain that sometimes gap-spotting can be used as a way to make the research more acceptable within the social structures.

³ A casual story might illustrate this point. During a recent conference one of the authors was involved in a conversation with another SEA colleague on these underlying assumptions in SEAR. The discussion, however, came pretty quickly to a standstill, as the colleague expressed his/her discomfort and swiftly asked this author: ‘why do you ask such difficult questions?’.

⁴ Smith (2005) underscores that in the academic sphere career-oriented individuals compete against each other for intellectual capital. Papers are first delivered, verbally or in print, as monologues and subsequently defended in an adversarial atmosphere against all criticisms. This format frequently leads us to talk past one another rather than to each other. Smith continues by arguing (51) that even the interdisciplinary conferences are, to a certain degree, microcosms of a hierarchical and managerial society moulded by the same temporal and structural forces which are destroying the environment.