Episode 019: Marcia Annisette

Prof. Marcia Annisette studies the accounting profession from an interdisciplinary perspective. She talks about her experiences conducting interviews, the role of the big accounting firms in the profession, and the importance of having a PhD supervisor who is excited by the same questions that you are.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Professor Marcia Annisette, Professor of Accounting, at the Schulich School of Business at York University, just like me. She is, however, the Associate Dean of Students, which I'm not, and she is the Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society, one of our most prestigious accounting journals. She does research in critical accounting, and touches on topics such as race and imperialism in the accounting profession, and has also examined transnational institutions like the World Bank. Marcia, welcome to the podcast.

Marcia Annisette: Thank you, Cameron, and thank you for including me in this auspicious population of people that you have been interviewing. I am a bit intimidated, and a bit worried that I may not live up, but I will try.

Cameron: We have had a really good collection of guests on the podcast. I'm very pleased with the people who've wanted to be on it, and I'm delighted that you're on the podcast. You're one of my closest friends in the accounting academy -- in the academic world! -- and it's a pleasure to have you here to talk with. I just wish we had a glass of wine that we could be sipping on as we were talking. That would make it a little more convivial.

Marcia: Yes.

Cameron: I'm interested, for the sake of listeners who are younger academics, in helping them understand the kinds of career paths that are possible for people. So, you've started out your research, actually in the UK. You're from Trinidad and Tobago.

Marcia: Yes.

Cameron: You went to the UK to do your PhD at Manchester, right?

Marcia: Yes.

Cameron: Who was your supervisor there?

Marcia: I ended up with Linda Kirkham as my supervisor. I had sort of a bumpy journey.

Cameron: Is that unusual for PhD students to have a bumpy journey?

Marcia: I think so. I mean, I think it's like coal. I mean, the pressure, really, out of the pressure, I think, you end up with something that is valuable. PhD research, by definition, is uncertain. By definition, you are always questioning yourself and asking, "Am I seeing something sensible? Is my pursuit something worthy? Is this thing that is bothering me?" Because I think research is very personal, and what excites people, it's very idiosyncratic. So that there is always this questioning of whether what you're doing is worthy of study, and to be able, now, to match that with a supervisor, with someone who works with you, both in terms of appreciating or giving you that sense that, "Yes, what you are thinking is worthy of pursuit."

Cameron: Because that's what you were getting from Linda.

Marcia: That's what I was getting from Linda. And Linda, in a short space of time, just changed the trajectory of my thinking simply because when I would say something, she would be my biggest champion and say, "Yes!" Sometimes, that's all you need. All you need is for someone whom you respect and admire to say, "Yes, that makes a lot of sense," or, "How interesting."

Cameron: I'm interested in the question of support networks for doing this kind of research, because as a PhD student, you sometimes feel like you're a very, very tiny fish in a big pond, and you're trying to find your way around. When I was doing my PhD, my spouse, Anne, was an immense support to me both financially and emotionally. So, that was, for me, fairly easy going, because I had such strong support from her. Did you leave a lot of your support networks behind when you went to Manchester, or did you have people there that you knew?

Marcia: Absolutely everything was left behind. And what made it worse, I had a child when I was-

Cameron: I know him well.

Marcia: And you know him well. So, it was not just not having support networks as a person, as an individual. Going through a process that in itself is highly uncertain, it was also not having that support network in raising a child, because I was a single mom. But when I reflect on it -- and it's one of the most, how should I say it?, perplexing things, for me -- because when I reflect on that time, intellectually I'm saying, "It must have been hard," but I don't remember one day going through my PhD and saying, "Oh, my goodness. Life is hard." So, I really cannot speak to having hardship and saying, "Yes, these people were there to support me." I think things were different, too. I was on a Commonwealth Scholarship. So, to that extent, I really did not have financial concerns. I did not have a house. I didn't have a mortgage. I was still fairly footloose and fancy free. I guess, because I had a young child, and did not have a spouse, that I needed to be committed to, even if it was, "Let's have an 'us' date once a week." I guess, to that extent, it was easy.

Cameron: Yet, you've found that when you managed to connect with Linda, the support that she was able to give you, intellectually for your ideas, was really important.

Marcia: It was really important. It was really important to have someone -- and I think this is what is really key, I mean, we do it now -- is really to have someone who shares your same ontology.

Cameron: What do you mean by that?

Marcia: They see the world the way that you see the world. In simplest terms, the kinds of questions that excite you, are the same kinds of questions that excite them, even though they may be looking at something different. So, Linda and I, inequality, let's say is something that we share, and you too, but Linda's focus was on gender issues. Mine were larger, really, global inequality, forged within a Caribbean political economy paradigm, way of seeing the world. My issue really was global inequality. So, that's what connected us.

Cameron: This is what you're referring to when you said that it's not just about the ideas that excite you, but also the things that bother you.

Marcia: Absolutely.

Cameron: So, tell me about the importance of emotion in academic research, because we tend to picture this as abstract thinking. Yet, I don't know very many academics who are motivated by abstract concerns. They tend to be quite engaged, emotionally, in what they're doing.

Marcia: Absolutely. I always tell PhD students, "It's about passion." One of the things that I tell them too, and I often instruct them, I say, "Go to a bookstore or a library without any objective other than 'I just want to pick up things that I find exciting, for me.' That tells you who you are. That tells you the kinds of topics that you should be pursuing. You've got to be driven by who you are inside." I often say that's the benefit of being an academic, because you get to read things that you would read for free. [laughter] You get reimbursed for books that you would buy out of your own pocket. So, it's about really reading and pursuing topics that you would do anyway. You just now get paid to do it. Therefore, if I think younger people approach academia that way, and publications and research, as opposed to in a very instrumental way: "This topic will get me published," or, "If I pursue this line of research, it will get me a job in this kind of institution." I think that is the wrong way of approaching it. If it is you pursue something that really bothers you in your heart and soul, and really piques your intellectual inquiry, you will research it to the nth, because you want to understand it to the nth, and that's what good research is.

Cameron: So, tell me more about the problem that bothered you. You were a professional accountant. You trained as an accountant in Trinidad and Tobago.

Marcia: I was.

Cameron: And your topic of research was the county profession in that country. What about it bothered you?

Marcia: It bothered me. I graduated from the University of the West Indies. I won't say what year. I might go back a bit, so if I get off topic, steer me back, because I think this is really important, in terms of situating my own critical awareness as a graduate of Management Studies at the University of the West Indies, because the last thing one would think of is that a management scholar would have their critical awareness piqued during their management studies. But I was fortunate, and I still think this is the case: Management Studies at the University of the West Indies is located in the Faculty of Social Sciences. The first year of your management studies degree is actually a social sciences degree. At that time, when I studied, the social sciences of the University of the West Indies was really populated by a group of scholars called dependency scholars. I can talk about them later, but the important thing about being taught sociology, politics, even economics, by individuals who were part of the dependency school, what ran through all of that education was political economy: a concern about asymmetries of power in all its forms, be it economic, political, cultural, social, epistemic. Therefore, that kind of critical awareness was really my first engagement within my management studies.

Cameron: And this provides you with a whole vocabulary, and a theoretical framework, for the kind of work that you want to do.

Marcia: Exactly. I mean, I did not know then that is what was happening. It's when you look at it in retrospect. But certainly, when I graduated, I was always good in accounting. I had not known anything about accounting until I entered my second year, sorry, my first year when we did Intro [Accounting]. Second year I got better, and every year I got better, and I graduated top in the class in accounting. So, I ended up pursuing professional studies, only because I was good at it. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I became a professional accountant simply because I did not want to stand still while I was trying to figure out. But entering into the profession, there were a couple of things that really stood out to me. This was in the 80s. My country had been independent for over 20 years. When I walked into that professional firm, I could not believe how culturally English it was. It was like a piece of England just inserted into the middle of Trinidad. Few people entered, and knew that there was this little piece of England just operating inside of Trinidad and Tobago.

Cameron: And the people in the office are born and bred Trinidadians?

Marcia: No, the senior level partners were English. They had come to Trinidad many, many years before, but they were English. They still had their English accents. So, the senior partner was English, and the one who was next in line was English. The next tier of partners were Trinidadian, but they were all Chinese, Sino-Trinidadian. I was an experiment, the group of five of us who had been [educated] by the University of the West Indies. For first time this firm had actually hired individuals from the University of the West Indies, and two of us were black, but the rest of the firm were either English or, certainly, the professional cohort were either British, or Sino- (Chinese) Trinidadians. I was first struck by the concentration within the firm. So, that was one. But Trinidadians, we all lived together as one. So, it wasn't like, "Oh, my goodness." It was like, "This is," we would laugh about it. We'd say, "I mean, every permutation of Chinese is here." This is how we live as Trinidadians. But what really struck me, was the path to what's becoming a professional accountant, that I thought was quite bizarre, because we had to do these English exams, and study English institutional environment that was so alien to me. I remember one night, meeting my fellow colleagues, and we came into ... I shouldn't call the firm ... we came into the firm, I think it might've been like about two o'clock the morning, because the British Chancellor of the Exchequer was giving the budget speech. We needed to hear what was being said, because it may have implications for our tax exam. I just thought this was kind of perverse, that here we are almost 25 years after independence, and I am being trained as an accountant, and I am more concerned about what the British Chancellor of the Exchequer is saying 6,000 miles away than what my own Minister of Finance might have to say about taxation in Trinidad.

Cameron: So, this particular announcement about possible taxation changes would actually have no affect on Trinidad-

Marcia: No.

Cameron: It's just you were expected to know it, because you're an accountant.

Marcia: No, because I'm writing an English exam.

Cameron: Oh. [laughter]

Marcia: So, we were always outwardly forecast. Once you qualified, then you had to unlearn what you learned. So, I learned, at that time, they were called Statement of Standard Accounting Practice, SAPS. Those were the British standards for accounting practice. So, I had to learn SAPS. I had to learn about British taxation. I learned about "building societies" and all sorts of things: trusts, and so on. And then had to unlearn once I had qualified. And then, try to understand, well what are the accounting standards that pertained in Trinidad, and what is the company law that obtained in Trinidad? We operated under the English 1948 Companies Acts. Whereas England, by then, was operating on an '81 Act. So, you had to roll back to function as a practicing accountant. I thought that was quite perverse.

Cameron: You have a number of options at that point. You could lead a revolt.

Marcia: Absolutely.

Cameron: But you chose to go study it academically. Not only that, to go study it in England. Was that ironic or was that deliberate?

Marcia: It was ... again, it's easy to talk in retrospect as though these were all seamless things. I found it perverse, but I did it. I was very young. I graduated from university very young, so that I still was not equipped to challenge this in any way. This was just something I thought was strange, simply because my sister [former Attorney General of Trinidad & Tobago Bridgid Annisette-George] was studying law at the same time. All of her law was very local. So, I was like, "accounting is different." At the end of the day, as someone who is brought up in Trinidad, post-colonial Trinidad, regardless of what anybody says, we all consume the same symbols and representations that tell you that England is the place to go, or the US is the place to go, when you come from an island. It's only as you get older, you become wiser, and you begin to critique some of these things, and value some of the indigenous knowledge that you have. But at 18, 19, the orientation is always looking towards England, because everything in the country is oriented that way. That is the post-colonial condition, and that is one of the conditions that dependency theorists were arguing against, this epistemic colonization that we never broke from, even though we were politically decolonized. So, it is what it is. It is ironic, but it was also important, because it's not that there aren't places and sights in the UK, as in Manchester, that are the source of that self-critique in any case.

Cameron: So, you went to Manchester, and you had this particular problem in mind that you wanted to study. Then, you've got this issue, I think, just from point of view of the data collection, that what you want to study is back in Trinidad, and you're in Manchester. So, tell me a little about how you actually go about doing the research that you want to do.

Marcia: I think research is not as seamless as we make it out to be once the paper or the PhD is done. Serendipity often comes into play. Roadblocks send you in a different direction. So, I did not go to Manchester with this problem in my mind, first and foremost. I did not start off my PhD with this problem in my mind. I knew that I wanted to do something that was focused on Trinidad. So, that was a given. I had, as I said, inside of me, this passion that anything that I did had to address what I thought was consistent with the concerns of Caribbean political economy. Why is it even though we are politically decolonized, we are still in economic relations of dependence? So, those were big markers. What you did in between, could be a range of topics. I think it's when Linda came into my life, that it really helped me, one, focus on the profession. In fact, to be honest, Linda came into my life after I went out to do the field work, but it certainly helped me harness some of the field work that I had. So, I went back to Trinidad, and to get back to your point, I knew I wanted to do something on the history of the profession in Trinidad. I was fortunate, one, because the various institutions that were involved in the history of the profession, I had access to. I had been once a lecturer at the University of the West Indies. There's that university component. I had worked in a professional firm. I had left on good terms. I was well-liked. I liked everybody there. So, I had access to senior voices in the professions. I had access to the senior partners of the firm that I had worked in, and they gave me access to senior partners in other firms. So, having had a professional designation, having had the pedigree of having worked in one of the Big Four, I had legitimacy there. My father had been a civil servant. He was the Director of Pensions. So, he was an accountant, not a qualified accountant, but he had been a practicing accountant, a government accountant. He, therefore, through his years of service in the public bureaucracy, knew many of the senior government accountants. We have a very unique name, Annisette, in Trinidad. So, once you say, "Annisette," "Oh, it's Andrew's child." So, I was lucky. This is why I say sometimes, serendipity comes into play, that I was lucky. Access makes all of the difference. Even though I went to Trinidad with a survey, a well planned out survey that I had worked on with another supervisor, who was not Linda, who had a very different ontology -- and it was to conduct these surveys -- I did conduct the survey, and to date, I have never used the survey. In retrospect, I should have, because it was an amazingly done survey, because I was able to get all of these interesting interviews and insights into the profession. I came back and said, "Oh, my gosh. This is more interesting." That is what shaped it.

Cameron: So, just to clarify, a survey is a preplanned set of questions that you can distribute to a whole bunch of people, and they can all respond to the survey. At that time, it would have been on paper, but now we can do it online. And you gain ... Why don't I ask you. What do you gain and lose in the difference between a survey and an interview?

Marcia: That intimacy, that context. A survey can only be surface.

Cameron: And yet, it does have breadth.

Marcia: It does have breadth. Therefore, they do different things. I could have used the results of the survey to give broad descriptions of the state of the profession at a particular point in time, but when you want to hear people's stories, when the stories matter, that's when interviews come in. Where people's struggles with the barriers to entry into the profession matter, that's when interviews come into play. It is was really going back home, and one interview after the other. Then, you get sucked in and you realize, "This is really interesting me."

Cameron: Are there any particular incidents in those interviews that you can remember that hooked you?

Marcia: I think the first was interviewing a man who was my dad's boss. He was ... well, a bit of Trinidad: Trinidad is really a melting pot. Trinidad, as I've written in the 2003 paper, back then was really a country where race and work were tightly fused. So, it is very important, for me as a Trinidadian, to say, "This is my dad's boss, and he was Indian, and I'm Afro-Trinidadian," because it has meaning in the context of Trinidad. He was Indo-Trinidadian. So, he was my dad's boss. He was a qualified accountant. He was so happy to be interviewed by me. I'd known him growing up, going to visit Daddy in pensions. Mr. Dean-Maharaj spoke with me for about four hours in the first instance, and four hours in the second instance. Why it moved me, and I'm thinking about it, and I still feel very moved, because I realized it was the first time in his life he was able to voice the struggles he went through. This was a man who was a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance of Trinidad and Tobago. But to hear him talk about his struggles, and to realize this was the first time that he felt that anybody felt this was worthy of research. The struggles themselves were important, but what struck me was his response to my saying, "I want to talk to you, and I want to listen, and do research that's focused on your struggles." I thought that was really amazing. Because remember, I grew up knowing this guy was my dad's boss, right? So, think of all of the distances there, and to see him feeling so grateful to me that I thought that what he went through was important, was just what sucked me in and said, "I have to meet with as many of these individuals as possible, because their stories are important."

Cameron: Yeah, and I can imagine that it fills you with a sense of responsibility.

Marcia: Absolutely.

Cameron: You can't let these people down. You have to take their story and tell it.

Marcia: Yeah. He called back and he said, "I have more to say!"

Cameron: [laughter] So you went back!

Marcia: After the first four hours, he got right in touch and he said, "There is more," and he says, "Talk to Sookh Supersad. Talk to this one." It was like an entire generation. That interview sort of brought them back to life, because they were already retired by then, but it brought them back to life, and it was like I raised a certain ... I ignited certain passions in them that had died. They saw that, "Okay, here is someone who has come almost from another century, bringing us back to life, bringing us back to where we were in the 1950s as these young guys that were part of the post-independence or the independence movement of Trinidad and Tobago, and wanted to do something different, and forward something different, and it died. But here is someone who has come back." So, it was about that.

Cameron: I imagine you interviewed people who were currently accountants as well as some retired. So, did you find differences? I'm interested in this idea that when we are doing this kind of rich research, and getting to these really nuanced details, that one of the things we find is that there's often tensions in the data that are hard to resolve or hard to explain. What differences did you find when you talked to a bunch of different people?

Marcia: Again, it's really differences in ontology. I'll give you an example, and I wrote about this in a paper on interviews. So, I'll give you an example of two interviews that I'd had. One was with one of the public sector accountants who were part of the independence movement, that movement to de-link accountancy from England. So, I'll call them the indigenous group. He was saying that one of the ideas behind forming the ICATT, which was the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Trinidad and Tobago, was really to indigenize accounting, and really to create a knowledge base that was more relevant to the economics of the island.

Cameron: Not so much on building societies.

Marcia: Exactly. After having interviewed a number of them, and also reading about the politics of the time, that seemed authentic or that, for me, was an authentic view. Even when I read the discussions that took place in parliament, in Hansard, that view, again, was articulated. At the same time, I had an interview with the senior partner of one of the public accounting firms then, not the one that I worked at, but another one. He was a senior partner of a firm called Pannell Fitzpatrick, which was the biggest accounting firm then. Richard Hobday, and I can say it, because it's published. When I asked him, I said, "Well what about the formation of ICATT?" He said, "Well, that was only to ..." -- I can't remember the exact words, it's in the paper, but something [like] -- ".. that was only to hoodwink the politicians." So, he had a completely different perspective on what ICATT was about. So that even though they were of the same generation, he was English. He came from a different mindset in terms of what a local body should be doing. In his view, a local body was just there to convince the politicians that we are localizing, but to continue with business as usual. Whereas the public group that I've spoken to really saw this as something that they felt involved a substantive change in our orientation. In terms of the younger generation, I did not interview that many simply because it was an historical study.Therefore, I was more concerned to interview individuals who were major actors in those processes.

Cameron: When we've got this very focused sort of study, one of the issues is how do we learn from that study? There's the possibility that you could look at something and say, "Well, this should hold for everybody else. There's a general truthiness about it, and it should apply everywhere," but that's not the kind of thing you get, usually, out of a very intense study like this. So, do you abstract something? How do you get insights out of that very local study that might be useful for you in studying other things, or understanding other phenomena in society?

Marcia: That's a big question. I think there are a couple of things. One, I think a huge part of research is also about your intellectual journey. I really do. So, that might be a selfish part of research. Where something bothers you, you want to understand how it came to be. You want to be able to unpack it and open it up. This is your own personal journey. It may also help you intellectually in a sense, in terms of you're trying to wrestle this with some sort of theoretical. So, you may put a Bourdieusian lens on it. So, you're really trying to understand Bourdieu too, and this context. So, I think that's one part of it. It's really about your intellectual journey. In terms of whether that intellectual journey has impact, I always worry. Impact in terms of giving insights to somebody else or being generalizable, or having some sort of measurable impact, I am more worried about those. I always feel good research is of value in its own right. I feel. Because if we are to put impact, or what kind of insights that I can give to someone up in front, we lose sight of what this is about. We may start pursuing topics simply because we think they will give insight and impact. So, to backtrack, when Ronald Coase wondered, "Well, why do firms come about?", he wasn't thinking about impact. This was just-

Cameron: His own curiosity.

Marcia: It was like, "Why?" It was how many years, I can't remember, but it certainly was about 50 years after that he got the Nobel Prize for it, and we see the impact of that. So, I think that's one part of it. But to your point, and I think I will probably try to make it very specific to me as someone who started off my career studying phenomenon in a little island called Trinidad, because this is ultimately relevant to your question. Well, why should studying Trinidad matter? Or what could any very localized study about the profession in Trinidad -- what's the "so what" there? I have always felt, and I see it over and over again, the Caribbean is almost like a Petri dish for metropolitan actors who want to try out big things. Certainly, a country like Trinidad and Tobago, because we are very advanced so that if you want to try out something, you go there. If you see the recent, and this is a bit of a digression, the recent documentary on Cambridge Analytica, they did first try out their work in Trinidad politics. So, if you roll it back, many Canadian banks we don't even know first started off local, like the Bank of Nova Scotia. Their first move, before they went all Canada, came to the Caribbean. So, that was not the big story that I was trying to say, but in retrospect, you realize that something that could be very local, and that you may think is very much confined to the conditions that are local, sometimes is really global. One of the things I have realized, and not when I was writing that but certainly, over the course of my career, is that many templates that we find within the global environment originated in the Caribbean. We are just in the backdoor of the US. We speak English. We have the right infrastructure to test certain things out. So, that is a long answer to your question. I think, one, it is, researchers, about your personal journey. I think once done well, there will always be insights that can be drawn by somebody, because research always exists within an ecology. It's never a standalone story. There is an ecology. You're relating to different conversations. Therefore, by definition, it brings something to that conversation. For me, it starts here inside of you. Then, you can work out what it brings to that conversation.

Cameron: Yeah. So, I mean, you say that's a bit of a roundabout explanation for an answer to the question, but I find it very profound, because when I ask you about what you could learn, what you can generalize from a very focused, intimate, interview based research study, you go naturally to talk about your community in Trinidad. Now, just before that, you mentioned that part of what you're struggling with is not simply to understand the accounting profession, in your case, but also the theorists with which you're working, right? So, Bourdieu, as you mentioned. That understanding of Bourdieu that you developed, pushes against my understanding, and I learn from what you're doing, right? So, your research is taking place not just in the community in Trinidad, but it's also taking place in a community of scholars, right? So in so far as it's a thing worth doing in itself, a research paper is like a poem. It's good to have it, right? It's got intrinsic value, but it's also got that impact on the community. And I wonder if you could talk briefly about this idea of the critical accounting community, because it's a very special place for me. I feel at home within that, and yet I'm not sure I could define it.

Marcia: And that's good. I mean, I think one of the signal definitions is that we want to be inclusive. I mean, we definitely know that there are certain ontologies that don't sit with the critical ontologies. So, I think those individuals themselves would exclude. But beyond that, I much prefer to call us interdisciplinary as opposed to critical. I think "critical" can be fairly narrow. Critical suggests that you subscribe to particular theorists: Marx. There have been these debates between the Marxists and the post-modernists, and I don't think that's helpful. So, I would call us the interdisciplinary accounting community. I would say you belong to it and I belong to it, rather than the critical accounting community. Of course, the critical scholars who define themselves as critical fall within the interdisciplinary.

Cameron: I often use the word critical, because to me, perhaps counterintuitively, I find people who are critical of the way the world is to be profoundly optimistic, because they're motivated by this sense, this imagination, that things could be better.

Marcia: Right.

Cameron: Right? So, that's partly why I often use that word. But I understand what you mean when you say interdisciplinary is that there's this idea that in order to do research well, you have to be open to other ways of approaching it, other ways of thinking about it, and also open to things that other people have written. You're in conversation with what people have done in other disciplines.

Marcia: Absolutely.

Cameron: I do find though that sometimes we say interdisciplinary when we mean that we're going into their a to do some work, but if they come into our area we're a little bit, sometimes, resistant.

Marcia: [laughs] No. If we roll back into some of the seminal papers within the movement, I mean, they were written by people who came from ... you think of Keith Hoskin who'd come from education, and Keith's work stands up as one of the seminal pieces within the interdisciplinary movement. Trevor Hopper, I mean, these were individuals who were trained outside of accounting.

Cameron: Hendrik Vollmer.

Marcia: Exactly. So, I mean, that for me, brings so much richness to the field. To a large extent, I find that some of the work that comes out of AOS is even of a higher quality than work that comes out of some of the top sociology journals and so on. And you will find, also, that some top sociologists we may invite to our conferences, they don't even grasp how advanced accountants are in their domain, and underestimate what is expected of them, because they think it's just a bunch of accountants. I mean, you and I have been at sessions with some top people that work that we have cited and read. I guess, from their standpoint, they're coming to a bunch of accountants, and don't realize that we are really up there in terms of our theoretical sophistication. Even with the conference that we were planning, I remember writing to a particular theorist, and he says, "Well, I have nothing to say to an accounting community." And this man didn't realize that so much of his work has been cited by people within the community. So, certainly, I think that my view is that these non-accounting scholars do bring energy into the field, and it's great if we could work ... I think Hoskin & Macve (1986) was one of those. Macve was an accounting scholar. Keith was an educationalist. They came together and wrote one of the seminal pieces within the interdisciplinary accounting literature.

Cameron: Speaking of that research on education, there is another way in which academic research matters quite profoundly, and that's the way that it spreads out into the classroom. Sometimes, in the academic world there's a bit of a tension between research and teaching. Some people feel that it's a distraction to have to teach, and they're dedicated researchers. Oftentimes, deans of schools will reward good researchers with teaching releases, so that they do less teaching, and more research. I understand why that's done, but it, I think, sometimes sets up a false dichotomy between research and teaching. You are a person who is quite a wonderful teacher, but you're also very involved in the actual development of programs at the school, and you've spent a lot of energy in developing the Master of Accounting program at our school. Can you tell me how you would think about the relationship between your research and your teaching, and everything that is involved in education?

Marcia: I think accounting is really unique and somewhat perverse in that respect. I mean, Linda Kirkham and I actually wrote a paper and said, "The profession and academia are two different professions." It's not like medicine and other professions where the insights of research are infused into practice, and you have this nice circular relationship. I mean, there is a real dichotomy, a real dichotomy, between research and practice.

Cameron: Why doesn't the university setting of accounting education help overcome that? Is that a failure or ...?

Marcia: I don't think it's a failure. I think it is -- and this something that's always on my mind because that is a really good research question -- but where you look at the site of knowledge production for accounting practice, it's in the big firms. They have always been the site of practical knowledge production. So, almost by definition, you've got two actors in this space of the production of accounting knowledge. Okay, and the firms ... because no other discipline has an infrastructure in which you have these mega firms with mega research departments that fund their research, that are right there on the front lines to know what the problems of practice are, that therefore, don't need, really, in that sense, the structures, the resources, the research capacity that a university provides for them to solve their problems.

Cameron: So, why does the accounting profession send its young to us to be raised?

Marcia: That's a question that is very North America-specific. That is not a question that is asked in the UK. They never send their students to the university to be raised. Historically, the profession sourced students from Oxford and Cambridge. You get a nice, broad liberal arts education that will teach you to be a gentleman.

Cameron: So, it's partly class-based.

Marcia: Yes. Then, the firms will train you to be an accountant. That's really the British model. The North American model is different, because the whole notion of how professional schools develop in North America is different. The history of universities was somewhat different in North America. There's been this sort of pact between professions and the universities. At the end of the day, and if you think about it, even up until five years ago, pretty much the profession framed accountants in Canada. When I say the professions, the elite, the CAs. Yes, you come to Schulich, you go to university, you do a BBA or BCom. Very nice. That just, to them, proves that you have the capacity to learn, but everything in terms of professional-relevant knowledge, they felt, would come through the CA training program. So, there's always been this fracture. I think things are changing again. I don't know how it will pan out, but I feel the pangs of change, because technology is disrupting the clusters of disciplines that constitute accountancy so much.

Cameron: Can you tell me about that? What are you observing?

Marcia: Well, audit. I mean, I remember when I studied audit there was ... oh, what were the terms? There was this substantive testing, and compliance testing, and audit sampling was really important. Now, with AI, you can do 100% testing in a nanosecond. Well, why bother to do a systems audit? So, the entire practice of auditing is definitely being reshaped by AI. Tax has become specialized. One of the things about accountancy is that it has always been made up of a cluster of fields that need not necessarily be clustered together. It was just a social process, certainly, in certain countries, Anglo-American countries, that you melded together audit, which required a certain sort of competencies, with tax, which required another set of competencies, with financial reporting, with management accounting. In continental Europe, like Germany, the practitioners of management accounting were engineers. So, it's a little late in the history that accountants grab that, which was called "costing,"and said, "You know, this is now going to be a high profile field," and grabbed it and put it under the umbrella of accountancy. What is happening, I find, I think, is that a lot of these fields are being decoupled. Tax is almost hiving off into its own profession now. So, what will be put in its place? Accountants have always been, as I've said, the most aggressive. Accountancy has always been the most aggressive progression in terms of capturing jurisdictions that belong to it. Again, I think it's because its been driven by the firms who very early can see a new jurisdiction emerging, capture it, and it benefits them to have control of the curriculum, because once you import these new emerging fields into the curriculum, then it becomes easy to say, "This is what is accountancy." That also is one of the sources of fracture between the university and the profession, because universities take too long to move on new jurisdictions. So, I've come back to that question.

Cameron: Well, let me come back to one last thing then, which is you've fairly recently moved into your role at AOS, Accounting Organizations and Society. From that perspective, what kinds of developments do you expect to see, in terms of the kinds of research that accounting academics are submitting to be published? Where do you think the hot spots are going to be, or what are the skills that we might require to tackle these kinds of transformation that you're seeing in the accounting profession?

Marcia: Well, first, I think there is a younger generation that is so ... So, I'm going to go with topics.

Cameron: Okay.

Marcia: Climate change. The younger generation are really passionate about climate change, more than we are, because it's their lives, it's their future, it's their planet. While we are, I'm not saying we are not, I see a passion that it may become the topic that consumes every other discipline, and rightly so, because in their mind, our very existence is being threatened. If all of our research energies can't address our very existence, we have a problem. So, I see it as almost all-encompassing in terms of the disciplines.

Cameron: Where does that leave us as people who are trying to train PhD students?

Marcia: I think it doesn't change anything, because if you start off with the premise that research has to be driven by passion, you're passionate about it if there's an existential effect. You're going to be passionate about that. So, I don't think it changes anything if you come of the view, which is the view I come from, that research has to be driven by something that is very deep inside, a very deep passion to fix things, to change things, to understand things, but there are certain skills that I think are time-tested: authenticity, robustness. There are new techniques, I think, because there are new data sets. There's Twitter, there's all of the social media. How do we go about combing social media now? We have now, with technology, more insights into people's hearts and minds than we had before. Is the interview as authentic as someone who is writing a post? Particularly when it's anonymous, right? An interview, you have to behave. Many times, we all know, that people reconstruct the past and give you their good selves. But when it's an anonymous post, they could really bare it all. So, all I'm saying is social media now gives us a brand new set of sources, and we have to find new tools to capture them. But those tools must stand up to the same tests as any other research tool. So, I guess, I see it's just moving with the times in terms of the new data sets, and the new kinds of tools, but adhering to these time-worn traditions of believability, robustness, verifiability, and so on, and so forth.

Cameron: It is interesting that you turned to social media as an example, because again, that's this place where so many people build community now. And this notion of community resonates through all your work, and through your professional life, through your sense of being as an academic. That's one of the things that I appreciate about you so much as a colleague is your commitment to people. So, I want to thank you for sharing a bit of that, a bit of your own passion, and a bit of your own commitment to people on the program today. Thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Marcia: Oh, thank you, Cam. This has been really lovely and cathartic.

Cameron: I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Marcia: Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

Cameron: All right, thank you.

Marcia: You're welcome.

Links

Marcia Annissette’s article on Wikipedia

Her article in Accounting, Organizations and Society on the accounting profession in Trinidad and Tobago

Credits

Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: Schulich School of Business
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: November 13, 2019
Location: York University