The rhetoric and rationality of accounting research

Abstract

This essay suggests the value of a rhetorical understanding of accounting research practice. Rhetoric reminds us that despite the methodological differences across various accounting research communities, there is a ubiquity to argument in scholarly practice. No matter what kinds of questions accounting researchers address, no matter what methods they apply to those questions, no matter what languages they evoke, and no matter what purposes and values they attach to the research enterprise, nothing counts as accounting knowledge until it is argued before one's peers. Thus, while rhetoric is not going to substitute for the many and different substantive ways in which accounting researchers produce accounting knowledge, neither can those substantive methods substitute for rhetoric. An understanding of rhetoric's role within research is thereby necessary to understand the practice of accounting research and, in turn, the knowledge such practice produces.