Ethnographic Accounting Research: Field Notes from the Frontier

Accounting

Speaker:	Pavlo Kalyta, Smith School of Business, Queen's University
Date:	Friday 13 April 2018
Time:	14:30 - 16:00
Location:	Marchant Syndicate Room A, Building One

Further details

Abstract Ethnographic fieldwork in accounting is scarce and remains a “frontier” methodology, unfamiliar to most accounting researchers. Building on our field research project on corporate accountability and stakeholder engagement, set in the Canadian Arctic, we illustrate in this paper the use and explanatory power of ethnographic methods for studying social groups and individual actors in the broader accounting universe. We share our fieldwork strategies and provide a few practical tips for conducting ethnographic research in both corporate and community environments. We then argue that ethnographies provide accounting researchers with untapped opportunities to discover vast reservoirs of knowledge inaccessible to other research methods, and offer a path to humanize accounting research.