Ethnography, ethnomethodology and anthropology studies in accounting

The emergence and evolution of what is widely referred to as interpretive accounting research (IAR hereafter) in the late 1970s and early 1980s located academic accounting research within a set of paradigmatic assumptions that rejected dominant notions of accounting as a neutral, technical profession. Instead, IAR conceived of accounting as essentially subjective and socially-constructed. In doing so, it focused attention on the behavioural and cultural dimensions of accounting, and the local, contextual nature of accounting within organizations. It also highlighted the powerful, constitutive role of the organizational practices of accounting, which, as a manifestation of meaning, might also construct reality (Burchell et al., 1980; Hines, 1988; Chua, 1988; Llewellyn, 1993).