Cross-paradigm collaboration and the advancement of management accounting knowledge

An important purpose of an applied research field, such as management accounting is to be of relevance to organizations and society not only to academic journals. This objective is achieved through the creation and advancement of knowledge regardless of the assumptions about the ontology of the social world, epistemology, methodologies, and human nature. Leveraging diversity can only bring richer knowledge. However, as management accounting researchers, we can be criticized as working too much within our silos attempting to leverage the benefit of specialization in search of an incremental contribution to our particular research school. But conversation across different research schools exists and is growing, which envisages a promising future for our field coming into the 21st century. Inspired in the comments that lead to this paper, we argue that serving society starts with grabbing the attention of the people we are supposed to serve. This may happen through research journal articles, but it is more likely to happen through teaching and knowledge diffusion that will force journals to open their pages to diverse research traditions.